Elusive Prophet: Ahad Haam and the Origins of Zionism (review)

Book Reviews 111 Elusive Prophet: Ahad Haam and the Origins of Zionism, by Steven J. Zipperstein. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. 386 pp. $35.00. Ahad Haam's Cultural Zionism has usually been overshadowed by the Political Zionism of Herzl, the Practical Zionism of Weizmann and Ben Gurion, or the Revisionist Zionism of Jabotinsky. Ahad Haam had impressive followers, among them Gershon Sholem, Chaim Nahman Bialik and Martin Buber, but to many he seemed a luftmensch-bookish, highminded , and cautious-a prophet to be honored rather than heeded. He seemed to exemplify the DiasporaJew's intoxication with the word rather than· Zionism's intoxication with the deed. His rivals appealed to the imagination. Herzl negotiated with crumbling empires, A. D. Gordon called for renewal through labor, Jabotinsky formed clandestine armies. Ahad Haam responded to all of these adventures with scorn. His battles were over the editorship of Hebrew journals, his power struggles over the leadership of obscure study groups in Odessa. His works, like Marx's Capital, could be evoked to demonstrate the theoretical depth ofZionism, but they did not send youthful idealists to clear the swamps and make the desert bloom. Steven Zipperstein's brilliant biography, though still focusing on the thinker and intellectual controversialist, restores the real Ahad Haam as a gadfly with a sting. Though the most important material in the volume remains Ahad Haam's series of articles, Zipperstein provides a number of skillful sketches that reveal the man. There are the paragraphs describing his icy response to his father's death, or his outrage against his daughter Rachel's marriage to a gentile. The pages on Ahad Haam's world, Jewish Odessa at the turn of the century, are especially graphic. As he describes it, it was an anarchist's dream, a free-for-all of contending Hassidic rebbes, religious and secular, "a natural setting for experimentation," eternally subverting established authority. One thinks of the world-quarrelling Russian Socialist exile in Switzerland. Ahad Haam's austerity, singlemindedness , and impatience with adversaries reminds one of the young Lenin. like Lenin, Ahad Haam created a vanguard to guide and transform the masses, though this vanguard, called B'nei Moshe, seemed more like the Freemasons than the Bolsheviks. The volume is primarily an intellectual history. Zipperstein presents the unfolding of Ahad Haam's thought article by article. He begins with Ahad Haam's critique of the Haskala and takes us slowly through the entire series: his critique of the fledgling Jewish settlement in Palestine, his scheme for a revival of Hebrew culture, his notorious review of Herzl's 112 SHOFAR Spring 1995 Vol. 13, No.3 Alteneueland as well as his dismissal of the early romanticism concerning Hebrew labor. Ahad Haam called for a Zionism of the tortoise, a cultural revolution, a Jewish state, but one that would ripen slowly. He abhorred adventurism. He emerges as a paradox, a messiah wary of messianism, a nationalist wary of nationalism. like the other Zionists he too was a prophet, but his prophecies, like those of old, contain a legacy of warnings. Ahad Haam's nay-saying was so relentless and unsparing that he could have been called the Zionist curmudgeon. As editor of the Hebrew journal Ha-Sbiloacb he did not suffer inferior prose. He was critical of the Rothschild enterprises in Jewish Palestine as "inimical to the growth of a self-respecting, pioneering elite"; he scandalized the Zionist movement by ridiculing Herzl's Alteneueland as "inferior" for envisaging a non-Jewish Jewish state with "English games, German or French Theatre, and continental conviviality" and dismissed one of the great Zionist icons, A.D. Gordon, and his call for "Hebrew labour" as "misguided." But Zipperstein also gives a persuasive account of Ahad Haam as a constructive builder of Zion. His cultural revolution was solid and enduring. The revival of the Hebrew language, the establishment of Haifa Technion, the Hebrew University, and Herzliya all gave the Jewish state a strong educational infrastructure. These achievements were more than cultural. At least one Arab writer credits Israel's scientific culture with its military and economic edge. As well, Ahad Haam's vision of a Jewish state as a spiritual rallying point for...