Politics and Letters: On the Rhetoric of the Nation in Pinsker and Ahad Ha-Am

This essay seeks to amend a peculiar shortcoming in the current scholarship on Ahad Ha-Am: whereas his style and rhetoric are commonly celebrated, they are seldom examined or analyzed in any detail. Scholarship tends to conflate his literary with his political endeavors and to trace his political impact to his preeminence as an essayist and editor; yet this approach fails to account for his political ineffectuality even at the height of his literary success. This essay suggests, on the contrary, that his essays manifest a struggle to reconcile the demands of politics with those of rhetoric, that is, to reconcile the dialectic form of his argument, the vehicle of his political argument, with the figurative form his rhetoric aspires to achieve. In a reading of three of Ahad Ha-Am's major essays, "Emet me'erets yisra'el" (1891), "Te'udat Ha-Shilo'aḥ" (1896), and "Mosheh" (1904), the essay probes how this struggle shapes his political vision, his literary vision, and his perception of the role of the historical leader (and, ostensibly, his own) in forming a national community.

The essay traces Ahad Ha-Am's difficulties in reconciling rhetoric and politics to his tussle with the bequest of Hibbat Zion literature. Whereas Ahad Ha-Am's reliance on traditional Jewish genres, on the one hand, and on English and German philosophical literature, on the other hand, has been readily noted, his indebtedness, to the writings of Hovevei Zion in general, and to that of Leo Pinsker in particular, is yet to be recognized. It is in Pinsker, I shall contend, that one finds one of the most important precursors to Ahad Ha-Am, not only in politics, but in rhetoric as well.

Last, this essay probes the prevalent (Marxist) model of reading the political character of Hebrew literature. Such a model fails to give account for the tension that structures the Ahad Ha-Am essay. Whereas this model presupposes that literary rhetoric can take part in the symbolic struggles that make up the political realm, the reading of the Ahad Ha-Am essay put forward in this essay questions the nature of the exchange between rhetoric and politics. It thus suggests that a different model of reading of rhetoric and politics is in need, a model that would account for the failure to reconcile the two.