Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg (1856-1927) was born in Ukraine to a Hasidic family. At the age of eight, he taught himself to read Russian. He attended cheder, the religious school for boys, until the age of 12. He then studied with private tutors, excelling as a student. He attempted to continue his studies in Vienna and Germany, but was unsuccessful. Ginsberg was highly critical of the dogmatic nature of Orthodox Judaism, but remained faithful to his cultural heritage and ethical ideals.

He returned to Odessa where he met Leon Pinsker, leader of the Hovevei Zion, a movement that sought to settle Jews in the Land of Israel. He visited the settlements in 1891 and saw them impoverished, forgotten by world Jewry, and dependent on his aid for survival. Ginsberg, whose pseudonym was Ahad Ha’am, «One of the People,» believed that the program of Theodor Herzl, the leader of political Zionism, was impractical. He argued that, rather than establishing a Jewish state, the Zionist movement should gradually bring Jews to the Land of Israel and, with that nucleus, form a Jewish cultural center that would revive the Hebrew language and create a new spiritual culture, free from the negative influences of the Diaspora. This nucleus would spread its nationalism to Jewish communities around the world, giving them the strength to come and help build the new Land of Israel.

He believed that this new Jewish culture would be the way to reconnect young people with Judaism and its national values, rather than its religious ones. His greatest contribution was his struggle to revive the Hebrew language and its culture, both in the Land of Israel and in the Diaspora. His writings would cement the relationship between the future State of Israel and Jewish culture expressed in Hebrew. Ahad Ha’am said that not only did Jews emerge from the ghetto. Judaism emerged from the ghetto as well.

For Jews as individuals, the escape from the ghetto depended on the situation in each country and depended on the acceptance of the local population. But for Judaism, its escape was something else: contact with modernity nullified its internal defenses, and it could no longer remain isolated, living a life cut off from the rest of the world. He said that the Jewish spirit always seeks to develop, so it absorbs elements of the general external culture, assimilates them, and makes them part of itself. This had happened previously in multiple periods of Jewish history. He said: «The secret of the persistence of the Jewish people is that from very early on, the prophets taught us to respect spiritual power and not to worship material power.

For that reason, Judaism did not disappear, as happened with other ancient nations. As long as we remain faithful to this principle, our existence is assured.» Ahad Ha’am’s Zionism emerged from that spiritual world and sought to resolve the problem of Judaism, while Herzl’s emerged from the material world and sought to resolve the problems of the Jews, which is not the same thing.

By Marcos Gojman:

Bibliography: Ahad Ha’am «The Jewish State and Jewish Problem» (1897), articles by Louis Jacobs, Steven J. Zipperstein, and other sources.