Stepping down in , he was hired by the Wissotzky tea company, first in Russia and then in in London, where he remained until his move to Tel Aviv in Ahad Ha-Am led a mostly sedentary existence. In appearance Ahad Ha-Am was slight, with reddish hair and a large head.
He spoke softly in a calm, often sardonic voice. Often giving the impression of being shy, he was easily offended and avoided most opportunities to speak in public. On the whole, his public presence as a speaker was not mesmerizing, but he had the ability to persuade listeners—as well as many readers over the course of several decades—of his rare, even singular, Jewish authenticity, akin in the minds of his most devoted followers to that of an ancient prophet.
He drew on them in ways that were not systematic from a philosophical standpoint but were nevertheless deeply compelling to an eager, generally unschooled yet intellectually voracious constituency.
Inspired by the Jewish Enlightenment and the social optimism of European liberalism, it promised Jewish authenticity shorn of theology, yet animated, as he saw it, by features even more enduring. Termed cultural or spiritual Zionism, Ahad Ha-Am made the case that it was culture as first embodied in statecraft in ancient Israel and later in rabbinic law or Jewish philosophy that had held the Jewish people together throughout a complex, peripatetic history. Certain features remained paramount: a firm belief in leadership based on intellect, uncompromising honesty, and a commitment to justice.
Central was an abiding preoccupation with the land of Israel as the focal point of Jewish life. Jewish history reflected a dexterous, principled series of accommodations, a successful exercise in creative integration, in which Jews absorbed the best from other cultures while emphatically making one of their own. As was true of Zionism as a whole, cultural Zionism was motivated by crisis, with assimilation , not antisemitism , looming largest.
In he died and was buried in Tel Aviv. Ahad Haam was an original and penetrating thinker. He was one of the first opponents of Theodor Herzl's political Zionism, and he proposed instead national redemption through a spiritual Zionism. Such a goal, he thought, could be reached only through a center of learning, ethics, philosophy, and science in Palestine.
This center would safeguard the Jewish nation against cultural assimilation and would strengthen feelings of national solidarity among Diaspora Jewry. He argued that solutions to the economic and political problems of millions of Jews were unattainable, since "an ingathering of the exiles would be nothing short of miraculous. The National Library preserves photographs from his visits, photographs documenting different periods in his life, as well as postcards with his image that were published in different countries as a sign of appreciation for his work.
Many of the posters included invitations to lectures about him while others promoted the use of the Hebrew language in the spirit of his vision.
His writings were even studied in the Israeli education system in the decades following the establishment of the state. The funeral procession, attended by thousands, left from his home and passed by the Hebrew Gymnasium and the city's Great Synagogue. Schoolchildren and members of youth movements accompanied his coffin or stood by at attention as the procession passed. He was eulogized by his friend H. His death was heavily mourned by the Jewish community in the Land of Israel, and has been commemorated in many ways over the years.
Thus he represented in his life and work the impact of both these forces. From Hasidism he inherited intensity of feeling, a burning though quiet faith. His life, like that of Mazzini, was entirely dedicated to his nationalist ideal; he became the apostle of one idea, devoting little time or active interest to broader, or aesthetic, concerns.
On the other hand, through the Haskalah he entered into the best heritage of the modern West. His intellectual honesty and self-discipline, his sober and responsible realism, his meticulous attention to fact and form alike, and his contempt for rhetoric and demagogy associated him more closely with Mill or Masaryk than with Mazzini. With Masaryk he shared also a religious ethicism outside any orthodox faith.
Yet in his feelings he was profoundly in tune with the Jewish masses and their millenary nationalist hopes; though he was able to view them critically and with a dispassionate objectivity guided by universal values, his emotions often shaped his ultimate outlook. The conditions of his upbringing made him a Jewish nationalist. In the middle of the 19th century the Russian Jewish masses were subjects of the Czar, but they were not of Russia and hardly in Russia.
Their segregation was complete to a degree incomprehensible to citizens of modern nations. As a student he was not even allowed to look at the letters of the Russian alphabet, still less to learn Russian. This learning opened a new world to him, but his faith and security in that world were badly shaken by the pogroms of which put an end to the hopeful liberal reform era of Alexander II. The old man, remembering the days of his youth when he longed for a broader education and contact with the world outside, tells the story of how a visiting government official suggested to his father that he be sent to a high school.
Though he wrote much in later years, he never became a professional writer. He remained a merchant, jealous of his independence of mind and thought. For six years, from to , he was editor of the Hebrew monthly Hashiloah. In his editorial statement he omitted all references to Palestine or Zionism. He wished to create an open forum which, far removed from any spirit of party or predetermined solution, would seek for deeper understanding of, and an unprejudiced approach to, the Jewish problem.
He introduced, and insisted upon, a strict respect for meticulous standards of literary form and genuine expression. A master of the cogently reasoned, lucid essay, he wrote only when he felt impelled by a sense of responsibility for the Jewish heritage and for the Jewish future.
Quality not quantity was his keyword for his own work, as for the solution of the Jewish problem. Deeply steeped in the Hebrew prophetic tradition, he felt a close affinity with England and English literature. Of modern thinkers Locke and Hume, Mill and Spencer influenced him as decisively as they had influenced Masaryk. In he settled in London. Though he was then only fifty years old, his work was done. Not in London did he find the cultural atmosphere of that Russian Jewish environment in which he was rooted and of which he was the noblest fruit; and which apparently he needed to feed his spirit.
Nor was he to find it later in Palestine, either. He could not understand that people of Jewish descent and faith could be, by their cultural roots and their free decision, Americans or Italians. This feeling in him was as strong and as unbending as in the Jewish masses of his time: when his daughter married outside the Jewish race she died to him. Yet, as with Masaryk, the survival of his people seemed to him important and justified only through and for the sake of its spiritual heritage and ethical tradition.
These seemed to him almost extinguished after three thousand years. To rekindle them was the goal and meaning of his nationalism, of his love of Zion. It made him unpopular within his own people, and unpopular he remained, as the prophets had been in their days. In his modesty he would never compare himself to them, yet it was as their disciple and for their sake that he was a Jewish nationalist.
He demanded the survival of the Jewish people with every fiber of his heart, but in the fullness of his mind he knew that it was desirable and even practicable only if the Jews did not become like other peoples. Therein he disagreed fundamentally with the Zionists. Their nationalism seemed to him based upon an overestimation of quantity and power, of numbers and speed, so characteristic of the nationalism in the era of nationalistic conflicts in the years after He knew the means determine the end and the foundations define the strength of the structure.
Like all ethical theorists, he was modest as regards the goal and exacting about the means. To create a small state, based upon power and diplomatic favors, would not add a glorious chapter to Jewish history but would undermine the historical basis of Jewish existence.
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