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CHAPTER 8 The Zionist as Thinker: Ahad Ha-Am and Hibbat Zion DAVID VITAL The history of Zionism up to the outbreak of the Great War is to no small degree a function of the ebb and flow of that tendency within it which it is customary to call Hibbat Zion. Hibbat Zion, as a more or less identifiable strain in modem Jewry, preceded the Zionist movement proper as founded in 1897; and the majority of the Hovevei Zion allowed themselves, with varying degrees of grace, to be incorporated into it-mostly as individuals, it must be said, as distinct from whole, formal groups and associations. So proto-Zionism would serve as a convenient label for Hibbat Zion-or could so serve, were it not for the fact that as an ideological tendency and as a socio-intellectual category, and to some extent too, as a formal grouping (consider the Odessa committee, for example), Hibbat Zion persisted under Herzl and in opposition to him. Indeed, after a while, it gathered further strength. It can be argued that once Herzl was gone, the late leader's movement was slowly, and seemingly inexorably , taken over by the men of Hibbat Zion and set ever more firmly and frankly in the direction they had always wished it to move and that Herzl had opposed. Even after the Great War had changed the terms of the Zionist problem almost beyond recognition and had altered the thinking of the activists by encouraging a return to political action, the influence of Hibbat Zion upon the movement Herzl had created remained strong and indelible; and, broadly speaking , the men of the Hibbat Zion tendency remained in charge. So all in all, in the long term, its influence and historical importancefor good or ill-were a great deal more extensive than the life and 87 DAVID VITAL death of Hibbat Zi.on narrowly constructed-that is, in purely protoZionist terms-would indicate. And this had a great deal to do with the fact that it was not a movement susceptible of clear-cut definition, least of all in institutional terms. It was more in the nature of a congeries of groups of various types and sizes and varieties of composition, very loosely bound to one another or not at all. Its feeble structure is partly accounted for by the fact that its locus was preponderantly in Eastern Europe, notably in imperial Russia; partly by the fact that after Leon Pinsker's resignation and his death soon after (1891), it had no acknowledged leader-indeed, in his own lifetime, despite all the respect in which he was held, even Pinsker qualified for the term leader only with great difficulty; and partly by the extreme disparity between its modest purposes and the immensity of the problems towards the solution of which its members were groping. Hibbat Zion can probably be seen most usefully as a tendency of the more or less like-minded; and what gave it such unity and firmness of shape as it had was the common cast of mind and broadly similar social disposition and origins of its membership-of which more will be said in a moment. It is for this reason that the role of Ahad Ha-Am within Hibbat Zion must be subject to special scrutiny. For he was, without a shadow of a doubt, its most distinguished member, its finest mind, and its foremost ideologist. It is true that Ahad Ha-Am's position within Hibbat Zion (as within the Zionist movement as a whole) was of a peculiar nature. He was at once closely and publicly identified with it and, as publicly, its sharpest critic. He was on close terms with virtually all its leading figures and at the same time famous for disagreeing sharply-and to great effect-with them on both matters of principle and questions of practice. But he was in no obvious sense of the term their leader. If a true successor to Pinsker as the preponderant figure is sought, the strongest candidate would be Menahem Ussishkin. Ahad Ha-Am was never remote from the practical business of the movement, such as it was. He was a longterm member of the Odessa committee, one among many, but more active than most in its affairs. Time and again he can be found called on to undertake an inquiry or to join in some mission of intercession or negotiation or to articulate his views in gatherings held explicitly to thrash...

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