Words of Fire: Selected Essays of Ahad Ha'am

Brian Klug

– Introduction –

What’s in a name? It all depends on the name and the person in question. A name might be nothing more than a mere label that identifies a person in a purely formal sense, as when we distinguish between two people by calling them A and B or Janet and Jill. Such a name is detachable and replaceable; it has no inner connection to the individual whom it denotes. However, there are names that not only identify a person but attribute an entire identity: names that are more like descriptions condensed into a single word or phrase. Such a name is Yisra’el (Israel), a Hebrew word that combines ‘struggles’ with ‘God’: the name Jacob was given after he wrestled all night with a mysterious stranger (Genesis 32:29). Ahad Ha’am, Hebrew for ‘one of the people’, is another example, a name taken rather than given but no less replete with meaning. The name sums up the man, or so I shall argue in this introductory essay. It is under this rubric that he addressed the Jewish people, the people of whom he was one. And it is from this position that, indirectly, he addresses people at large; for the essays of Ahad Ha’am speak to a much wider audience than the one for whom he wrote.

Ahad Ha’am’s story begins as Asher Ginzberg. Ginzberg was born on 18 August 1856 into a Hasidic family in Skvire, a shtetl (small town) in the Kiev province of the Russian Ukraine, where he spent the first twelve years of his life. It was not a place for which he felt great affection, describing it in a memoir as ‘one of the most benighted spots in the Hasidic districts of Russia’. His opinion of his environment did not improve when the family moved to the village of Gopchitse, deep in the Ukrainian countryside. Here he went through adolescence and entered adulthood. He remembered this period as ‘the furnace of iron, in which I had spent eighteen years, the best years of my youth, and which had eaten me up and destroyed whatever of worth nature had endowed me with when I was born’. Except that it hadn’t. It might have felt like prison, but the ‘furnace of iron’ – an echo of the biblical phrase for Egypt as the house of bondage (Deuteronomy 4:20) – was the crucible within which the future essayist was formed. Far from having eaten him up, it had nourished him on a cultural and intellectual diet that sustained him in the world beyond Gopchitse.

He was studious. On the one hand, he was steeped in the Torah, the Talmud and other texts in the Jewish canon, which, as numerous references and quotations in his essays testify, became a wellspring on which he drew, drawing on it long after he had parted company with Orthodox (traditional) Judaism. On the other hand, following his marriage (at the age of sixteen), he immersed himself in the literature of the European Enlightenment, both Jewish and general, reading a wide variety of authors, either directly or in translation. They included Herder, Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill. He became acquainted with the positivism of Comte. ‘In general literature,’ he wrote, ‘my favourite books were English, especially the philosophical works of Locke, Hume and the rest’. These two currents of thought, one religious and the other secular, one old and the other new, flowed into each other, and in the turmoil of their confluence, in the blending of their waters, Asher Ginzberg became Ahad Ha’am.

In contrast with the biblical Jacob, this metamorphosis did not happen overnight. It was a gradual process over several years. But certain moments, and one place in particular, stand out. In the spring of 1884, he recalls in his memoir, ‘I took my family to Odessa … and there I began a new life’. Odessa was everything that Skvire and Gopchitse were not – at least intellectually. Its very location, a port on the Black Sea, indicated openness to the world beyond the village and the inward-looking shtetls of the Russian hinterland. It was not so much Russian as European. Pushkin, who lived in the city between 1823 and 1824, wrote that in Odessa ‘the air was filled with all Europe, French is spoken and there are European papers and magazines to read’. Jews settled there in large numbers and from 1830 onwards Odessa was the home of prominent figures in the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment). There was a circle of like-minded Jewish intellectuals in the city when Ginzberg arrived and they welcomed him into their midst. The circle was small, but to Ginzberg it must have seemed to circumnavigate the globe.

He did not, however, settle in Odessa until two years later, which is when his new life began in earnest. At first it took the form of participating in meetings of the Hovovei Zion (‘Lovers of Zion’), whose headquarters were in the city, arguing about the society’s project of establishing Jewish agricultural settlements in Palestine (a project that gained momentum after the wave of anti-Jewish pogroms across Russia, including Odessa, in 1881 to 1882). Then in 1889, as he puts it in his memoir, ‘I suddenly and accidentally became a Hebrew writer.’ The article, ‘This is not the Way,’ appeared in Ha-Melitz (‘The Advocate’) under the name ‘Ahad Ha’am’. Thus he became a ‘man of letters’, known, from that day to this, by the alias he used. It seems appropriate that his new name was a pen-name.

Ahad Ha’am is mainly remembered as ‘the father of cultural (spiritual) Zionism’, an epithet that simultaneously honours him and limits him, consigning him to history, as though he were a spent force. This collection of essays is intended to release him from this label, or from the idea that the label exhausts the capacities of the man, and to bring him to mind in other ways. The essays reflect a life lived on the cusp, at the intersection between antiquity and modernity, tradition and Enlightenment – not just as an individual but as one of the people. As such, they contain acute observations on a variety of topics of general human interest, including the crisis that occurs when worlds collide. His focus was on Judaism but his insights into human nature cross boundaries of identity as well as time and space. It is true that we live in a different epoch. For one thing, this is no longer the era of the rise of the nation-state, the context within which Ahad Ha’am argued for a form of Jewish nationalism. For another, more than twenty years after his death a Jewish state – the State of Israel – came into existence (in 1948). The parameters have changed and we do not face identical questions today. But some of our predicaments, especially regarding the survival of old identities in a new form, are similar. Furthermore, if he is widely regarded as Zionism’s greatest thinker, Ahad Ha’am was also an outspoken critic of the Jewish national project in Palestine. Speaking out, especially on the use of physical force and brutal conduct towards Arab inhabitants of the land, he earned the opprobrium of many people in the Zionist movement; but this did not faze him. In all these ways, his writing contains resources for readers today – readers beyond the narrow band of secular Hebraist contemporaries for whom he wrote.

Even if you do not follow him down the byways – or even the highway – that he took, the essays in this collection are a pleasure to read. They are miniature masterpieces of form and style. Ahad Ha’am was an outstanding essayist. In this sense, he was a writer who contributed not only to Hebrew letters – all his essays were written in Hebrew – but to world literature. Now, there are essays and there are essays, ranging from Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, a massive tome of over three hundred thousand words, to the humble weekly homework assignment that children at school are set (or were when I wore short trousers). Ahad Ha’am’s writing is neither of these: it is anything but juvenile and he did not model his essays on Locke’s magnum opus. He was a master of what Tom Kremer, founder of Notting Hill Editions, has called ‘the classical essay’. Let us pause to take stock of this idea.

As a literary genre, the classical essay (on Kremer’s account) typically possesses certain key features. (I say ‘typically’ because it is not necessary for an essay to possess every one of these features to count as ‘classical’. Even the classical essay is a flexible form. But even a flexible form has its limits.) It helps, to begin with, to say what the essay is not. It is not narrative fiction; actually, it is not narrative fact either. An essay must do more than tell a story: it must have a point to make and it must make it directly, not indirectly via a fable. Yet it is not an academic paper or scientific study or dissertation, the product of a voice from on high. The essay must have ‘an individual voice’. The essayist is not a remote, detached being but someone affected by the subject of the essay, someone who has a ‘personal impulse’ to write about it, someone with something to say. In other words, the authentic essay has the voice of its author – not the impersonal voice of the scholar (however well researched it might be). Moreover, someone with something to say has someone in mind to whom they want to say it: an ‘intended audience’. This in turn implies that author and reader share the same space: the former must use language that the latter understands and the subject must interest both parties. But sharing a space is not the same as sharing an opinion or even an approach. ‘A great essay,’ says Kremer, ‘may well, and very often does, divide opinions.’ What makes it great? Partly, the idea at its core, the central idea that, like the sun, pulls the whole essay around it and (also like the sun) illuminates its ostensible subject, however humble that might be, giving it ‘universal relevance’. (In the hands of the essayist even flies and dust can have universal relevance.) The essay should capture the reader’s attention from the start, possibly with a commonplace, and conclude by returning to ‘the point of its departure’,. It should not (with due respect to Locke) exceed three hundred thousand words: it ought to aim for conciseness. And it should achieve clarity: in the words of the Talmud, ‘Do not say anything which cannot be understood at once, in the hope that it will be understood eventually’ (Rabbi Hillel the Elder). This, in a nutshell, is the classical essay, of which several elegant examples can be found between the covers of this book. Ahad Ha’am is the real McCoy, a writer’s writer.

It is, therefore, arresting to read the explanation he gives in his memoir for the pen-name he chose: The negative reason is this: ‘The idea of this pen-name was to make it clear that I was not a writer, and had no intention of becoming one …’ He continues at once with the positive reason: ‘… but was just incidentally expressing my opinion on the subject about which I wrote, as one of the people who was interested in his people’s affairs’. The paradox is resolved when we realise that it is precisely because he did not think of himself as a writer, but as a man with an opinion that he wanted to convey to his people, that he was a writer. The authentic essayist, is not the aesthete who practises the art of writing for art’s sake but someone with something to say, someone who has a vital connection with their intended audience. In short, writing was not Ahad Ha’am’s raison d’être, his reason for being. It was the other way round: his being was his reason for writing.

Being one of the people, Ahad Ha’am put pen to paper. But what is the being of the people? Or (to use the word that is his trademark), what is the spirit of the people? This is the question that he carried with him in his bosom when he left his old life in Gopchitse without leaving his Jewish identity behind. It is the question that emerges in that critical moment when old and new intersect. It lies at the heart of the man, it is the fire that burns in his oeuvre, and it runs like a scarlet thread through the selection in this book.

Judaism, as he saw it, was in crisis. On the one hand, it had ossified: its spirit was trapped within its body. On the other hand, its existence was threatened by the way the world around it had changed. Thus it was endangered from within and from without. It needed, in his eyes, to enter the modern world without losing itself. (In a sense, it needed to do as a whole what he himself had done as an individual.) This meant that it needed both to assert itself in the world and also to transform itself. His ‘cultural Zionism’ was a response to this predicament. It was cultural as distinct from political because it sought to revive the spirit of the people – wherever Jews happen to live across the globe – rather than found a state to which they would migrate. (This is the crux of his difference from Theodor Herzl.) For this purpose, he believed there needed to be a centre from which the revival would radiate out to Jews all over the world. That centre, he thought, should be located in Palestine, in Zion; hence (and in this sense) he was a Zionist.

Being the man he was, Ahad Ha’am’s pen gravitated towards Judaism. But being the audience that it was, his intended readership could only be reached via the lexicon of modernity. So, partly in order to articulate what he wants to say and partly because he wants to be heard, he joins the dots that connect the Jewish people to the wider world. A typical ploy in his essays is to begin on the plane of the universal and then descend