The Negation of the Diaspora

Ahad Ha-Am (“One of the Nation”) was born Asher Zvi Ginzberg in Skvira, Russian Empire (now Ukraine), to an affluent Hasidic family. He received private lessons in secular languages in addition to his heder studies, easing his transition from Hasidism toward the Haskalah and Zionism. In 1886, he moved to Odessa and began working in his father’s mercantile business. Ginzberg lived in Odessa for more than twenty years, becoming an active member of the “Odessa Circle,” a cadre of nationalist-minded maskilim. Yet even as he brought his talents to the service of the Ḥibat Tsiyon movement, he sharply criticized what he deemed its unrealistic and provocative vision of mass Jewish settlement in Palestine in a famous and immediately controversial essay, “Truth from the Land of Israel.” In 1896 he became the editor of Ha-Shiloaḥ and took on the pen-name for which he is known, Ahad Ha-Am. From this platform he published influential essays, many of which elaborated his ideas of “spiritual” or “cultural” Zionism while also criticizing Herzl’s political Zionism. At the heart of his vision was a deep commitment to secular Jewish nationhood, the Hebrew language and what he deemed the unique tradition of Jewish ethics, coupled with a sense that Jewish nationhood had to be reconstructed in an age when Jewish religious tradition was fading and assimilationism was rampant. His goal was thus not mass Jewish settlement in Palestine per se but rather the establishment of a modern Hebrew cultural center there that would in turn revitalize the diaspora. He lived in London from 1907 to 1921, principally as an agent of the Wissotzky Tea Company but also as a Zionist activist; after 1921, he moved to Tel Aviv. He strongly influenced the thinking of the preeminent Hebrew poet Chaim Nahman Bialik and Israel’s first president Chaim Weizmann.