On Reading Ahad Ha'am as Mordecai Kaplan Read Him

Mordecai M. Kaplan was temperamentally ill equipped to acknowledge intellectual antecedents. Deeply influenced as he was by John Dewey, the philosopher is noted only twice in Judaism as a Civilization. One is left to probe, based often on stray acknowledgments made by Kaplan sometimes quite late in life, the impact on him of Mathew Arnold, Émile Durkheim, William James, or, for that matter, Ahad Ha'am (Asher Ginzberg, 1856–1927). Kaplan read very widely, he borrowed lavishly and with good effect, and he was better at savaging others than admitting debt. There can be honest, legitimate disagreement about whose impact was felt by him the most.

One influence, incontestable and of an altogether different sort, is that of Europe. Kaplan lived his life—certainly the first few decades of his uncannily long life—in a state of uneasy, fertile contention, both reliant on and at odds with a Europe distant and ever at hand. His relations with it were inescapable (as inescapable, of course, as his parents), but Europe was clearly for him made of many different parts. From it came the inspiration for his father's dignified, uncompromising, enlightened piety, and also the erudite, Germanic condescension of Kaplan's Jewish Theological Seminary colleagues (a "nasty satirical squeak" is how Kaplan characterized the voice—and, no doubt, the mind—of Louis Ginzberg). There the young Kaplan had experienced republican Paris, and he encountered a very different side of Europe afterward in the brash, intrusive world of New York's fundamentalist rabbis whom he publicly and, from an early age, excoriated as "Jesuits." Rabbinic Europe minted him (he received rabbinic ordination, on a momentous trip back, from the great Yitzhak Reines); it haunted and inspired him (his classic Judaism as a Civilization is dedicated to the memories of his father and mother). Nearly all his original readers were immigrants themselves or the children of immigrants.¹

This personal history remained deep in the background of his great book, barely explicated, little less remote than the Middle Ages and, more or less, contiguous with that period.² To the extent that Kaplan would formulate an ongoing, pertinent relationship between his own thinking and the European past, it was, above all, with reference to the Zionist thinker Ahad Ha'am. Reading the writings of the young Kaplan leaves one with the following impression regarding Ahad Ha'am's influence on him: Both the assertions that credit Kaplan with great reliance on Ahad Ha'am and those that insist he maintained a distance from Ahad Ha'am are each, in their way, true. Kaplan learned quite early how to use and how not to use Ahad Ha'am. It is this feature of his early education—which, of course, for Kaplan, extended well into his thirties—that I examine below.

His debt to Ahad Ha'am remains, on some level, altogether clear. Still, even the most illuminating interpretive works on him pass over the topic quickly, which, presumably, is because it is so difficult to formulate quite what it entailed. As a result, there is a terseness in the analysis of a relationship that was abiding, even unsurpassed, but difficult to pin down. Arnold Eisen states that Ahad Ha'am was "Kaplan's principle master" and yet devotes a single paragraph (true, a deeply interesting paragraph) to the relationship in his The Chosen People in America.³ Mel Scult, too, is as always helpful and judicious but equivocal, and, as I will soon argue, rightly so. Few were closer to Kaplan than his son-in-law—and ideological heir—Ira Eisenstein, who writes in 1952 that "Only one figure may be said to have helped Dr. Kaplan in his search for a method of reconstructing Judaism. . . . That figure was Ahad Ha'am."⁴ Kaplan himself admitted, in 1960 in The Greater Judaism in the Making, that "Zionism for Ahad Ha'am is no more or less than a . . . thoroughgoing reconstruction of Judaism as a whole." Elsewhere, Kaplan said that "He started me thinking along the lines that inevitably led me" to Reconstructionism. Yet in an arch letter...