Aḥad Ha‘am

Aḥad Ha‘am was the founder of Cultural Zionism. He was a critic of Herzl and political Zionism, and argued that first, before the return to Eretz Israel, there must be a spiritual awakening of the Jewish people.

He founded the “Sons of Moses” society to materialize his ideas. He defined the goals of the society in his essay “Way of Life” and in the journal “Hive”, which he was the editor of. The society dispersed in 1897. Aḥad Ha‘am travelled to Palestine in 1891, 1893 and 1900 and wrote about his journeys in HaMelitz, in his articles called “Truth from Palestine”.

The Philosophy of Aḥad Ha‘am

According to his philosophy, “Love of Zion” is not a part of Judaism, but is Judaism in its complete form, and is not dependent on Palestine, but on its spirituality.

The settlement of Palestine does not exist simply to settle Jews on their land, but rather that “we ourselves return in spirit to Zion”. The solution to the revival of the nation is to make Zion a national center, to which the people of Israel will aspire to return to revival: the revival of hearts, and will aspire to develop anew in a free spirit in a national life on general human foundations.

This aspiration will begin in the Diaspora, and only one settlement is needed that will be an example from which to learn how to renew the new revival of the Israeli nation on historical foundations. Foundations on which the national morality was imprinted that will develop from generation to generation by national laws.

Aḥad Ha‘am strongly opposed the reform Judaism invented by Ashkenazi Jews. He called their system, “slavery from freedom”: political freedom founded on the slavery of the spirit; the body is free and the spirit is forbidden in prison. The aspirations of Jews in Western countries are freedom in state affairs for the sake of their bodies, and they are not afraid of the national enslavement of all Israel on which the essence of Judaism depends.

In his opinion, these Reformers gave rise to foreign feelings when they rejected the “certificate of Israel among the nations” and distanced themselves from the doctrine of nationalism. They say that Judaism is only a religious church and not a people or a nation.

Even the observance of the practical commandments as written in Shulḥan Arukh is, in his opinion, slavery, and he complains (in his essay “Torah that’s in the heart”) about “our misfortune that we are not a people of literature, only of the book”: that we are slaves to the book of the written Torah, and therefore we are “a people whose soul blossomed from its heart and entered entirely into the things in the book.” We should be free in the way the national spirit developed and developed throughout our history as a nation on its own land before it was exiled from it.

Quotes

• Learning, learning, learning—that is the secret of Jewish survival.
  • Said in 1910
• The heart of the people—that is the foundation on which the land will be regenerated.
  • In “The Wrong Way,” 1889. Translated in Ten Essays.
• More than Israel has guarded the Sabbath, the Sabbath has guarded Israel.
  • From “Sabbath and Zionism”
• In Palestine we can and should found for ourselves a spiritual center of our nationality.
  • In “Dr. Pinsker & His Pamphlet.” See quote cited by himself at “A Spiritual Centre” in the collection Ten Essays
• [Zionism] provides an opportunity for communal work and political excitement; his emotions find an outlet in a field of activity which is not subservient to non-Jews; and he feels that, thanks to this ideal, he stands once more spiritually erect and has regained his personal dignity, without overmuch trouble and purely by his own efforts…. For it is not the attainment of the ideal that he heeds; its pursuit alone is sufficient to cure him of his spiritual disease, which is that of an inferiority complex, and the loftier and more distant the ideal, the greater its power to exalt.
  • In The Jewish State and the Jewish Problem, translated in The Zionist idea.
• What is national existence if not the existence of a national spirit? What is a nation’s importance if not the importance of the spiritual treasures it has added to human culture?
  • Quoted in Ha-Shiloah magazine. Volume 6, 1902.
• The national center will not be a “secure home of refuge” for our people, but it will be a home of healing for its spirit.
  • In Summa Summarum. Translated in Ten Essays.
• Our very existence in dispersion is possible only because we feel ourselves to be “the aristocrats of history.”
  • From an April 17, 1910 letter to A. V. Ravnitzki. Quoted in Essays, Letters, Memoirs by Aḥad Ha‘am, p. 268
• The salvation of Israel will be achieved by Prophets, not by diplomats.
  • In his essay “The First Zionist Congress” (Translated in Ten Essays)
• After two thousand years of untold misery and suffering, the Jewish people cannot possibly be content with attaining at last to the position of a small and insignificant nation, with a State tossed about like a ball between its powerful neighbours.
  • In his essay “The First Zionist Congress” (Translated in Ten Essays)
• Pharaoh is gone, but his work remains; the master has ceased to be master, but the slaves have not ceased to be slaves. A people trained for generations in the house of bondage cannot cast off in an instant the effects of that training and become truly free, even when the chains have been struck off.
  • In the essay “Moses”.
• We cannot conceive Christianity without Jesus, or even Islam without Mohammed... Judaism, and Judaism alone, depends on no such human “likeness.” God is the only idea of absolute perfection, and He only must be kept always before the eye of man’s inner consciousness.
  • In the essay “Judaism and The Gospel” (translated in Ten Essays)
• As to the war against the Jews in Palestine, I am a spectator from afar with an aching heart, particularly because of the want of insight and understanding shown on our side to an extreme degree. As a matter of fact, it was evident twenty years ago that the day would come when the Arabs would stand up against us.
  • Letter to a friend.
• We Jews have been taught by our history to appreciate the real value of laying foundations for future developments. Our share, as a people, in the building up of the general culture of Humanity has been nothing else than the laying of its foundations long before the superstructures were built by others.
  • Letter to Ḥaim Weizmann.
• The existence of an original Hebrew culture needs no proof. So long as the Bible is extant, the creative power of the Jewish mind will remain undeniable.
• Zionism for us means simply the foundation in Palestine, by means of diplomatic negotiations with Turkey and other powers, of a ‘safe refuge’ for all oppressed and persecuted Jews...
• The solution of the Jewish problem lies in the revival of the spirit.
  • In “The Spiritual Revival.”