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CHAPTER 13 The Disciple, Chaim Weizmann BEN HALPERN Sir Leon Simon, a devoted admirer who was also a shrewd and judicious observer, said of Ahad Ha-Am, "Many of his ideas ... became part of the stock in trade of Jewish writers and public men who often had no notion of their source.") Chaim Weizmann, who played a major role in advancing Ahad Ha-Am's influence, acknowledged his debt to his master, whom he dearly cherished. But the notion of influence in history is a complex one and hard to establish except by the evidence of direct textual borrowing. Moreover, Ahad Ha-Am exercised no patriarchal dominion over his followers as did Freud or Marx; nor was Weizmann one who accepted instruction implicitly, even when he pledged himself to do so. Weizmann became-rather than began as-Ahad Ha-Am's disciple. He was deeply attached to his master; but it was far less personal dependency than a convergence of temperaments and of views independently arrived at that shaped their relationship. Like Ahad HaAm , Weizmann became a pragmatic empiricist of the English school and developed strong leanings to a policy of gradualism. His "synthetic " practical Zionism was an independent, natural extension of Ahad Ha-Am's "cultural" Zionism and remained true to its spirit long after the master could no longer be consulted. During the period of Weizmann's crucial achievement, the Balfour Declaration, his personal bonds with Ahad Ha-Am, whom he continually consulted, were at their closest. But Weizmann was not from the beginning part of Ahad Ha-Am's innermost circle. Weizmann had probably developed a confirmed habit of Zionist activism in adolescence, even before Ahad Ha-Am burst upon the 156 THE DISCIPLE, CHAIM WEIZMANN consciousness of Russian Jewry with his first published article in 1889. The conservative Zionism of Rabbi David Friedman in Pinsk, one of the few Orthodox Zionists of the early decades, may have helped anchor the emotional foundations of Weizmann's Zionism, as the Hasidic milieu in which he was raised did for Ahad Ha-Am. But Weizmann's clearly defined ideological commitments-like the distinctly secular ones of Ahad Ha-Am-were first established in his student days at German and Swiss universities, under the influence of his peer group, the leaders of the Russian Jewish Academic Society. In 1896 Leo Motzkin, immediately senior to the young Weizmann in his academic and Zionist career, persuaded his junior aide to seek admission to the Zionist order of Benei Moshe, of which Ahad HaAm was still the recognized spiritual leader.2 At that point, Ahad Ha-Am had for years been the storm center of Zionist ideological debate; and while he had bowed out of his role of official leadership in a Zionist elite faction and retired to the less active role of editor of a new Hebrew monthly, Ha-Shilo'ah, he remained the leading voice in current Zionist thought, and the center of continuing polemics . It cannot be said that Weizmann's Zionist position was at once fixed in clear, unequivocal alignment with that of Ahad Ha-Am. Like other young people of that circle, Weizmann's opposition to the Orthodox conservatives who bitterly attacked Ahad Ha-Amism was considerably more militant than that of Ahad Ha-Am himself, who sought to conciliate his traditionalist foes. As editor of Ha-Shilo'ah, Ahad Ha-Am now became the target of a new attack by radical youths, who resented the restraints he imposed on their Nietzschean enthusiasm, their "art for art's sake" principles, and their activist urge to do something concrete immediately to relieve the economic and political woes of Russian Jewry. The last point of contention in particular separated Weizmann from Ahad Ha-Am, with his decisive concentration on the "problem of Judaism" rather than on the "problem of the Jews." At that time Weizmann's chief interest in social action was to ease the plight of Russian Jews and above all of Russian Jewish students; and this alertness to the social and economic, rather than the cultural, problems of Jewish life, remained characteristic of Weizmann thereafter. Not long after joining Benei Moshe, Weizmann first met Ahad HaAm when paying a call on him as part of a delegation of the Russian Jewish Academic Society, during the revered writer's brief visit to Berlin. Weizmann's impressions, reported in a letter to his friend and leader, Leo Motzkin, were rather lukewarm. "On the whole Ahad 157 [18.191.174.168...

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