The Failure of Cultural Zionism

In Hillel Halkin’s masterful portrait of Ahad Ha’am we meet a man whose approach to Zionism hardly reflected his pen name of “One of the People.” An archetypal elitist, this Zionist leader shunned extensive contact with either the Jewish public or the life of practical politics. Not only was the B’nei Moshe association that he founded in Odessa short-lived and of limited influence, but he also regularly abstained from most gatherings of the Zionist Congress. Further distancing him from the activities of the movement, and from the younger generation of Zionists, were the many years he lived in London.

Nevertheless, until the 1930s (he died in 1927), Ahad Ha’am’s powerful advocacy of a highly intellectualized “cultural” or “spiritual” Zionism might be said to have dominated the ideological center of the movement as a whole—until, with the rise of genocidal Nazism, it was supplanted by the frankly and urgently political Zionism championed by the heirs of Theodor Herzl. Nowadays, in the very different atmosphere of contemporary Israel, the thought of Ahad Ha’am is enjoying something of a revival, if not a vogue. So we have before us a complicated figure, whose place in history remains a puzzle.

Correctly identifying the quarrel between Ahad Ha’am and Herzl as one of the most fateful and enduring controversies in the annals of 20th-century Jewry, Halkin opens his essay with the former’s searing critique of the latter’s 1902 novel Altneuland and concludes with a balance sheet of their respective successes and failures. In what follows, I want to assess Ahad Ha’am’s position and enduring relevance by calling to the witness stand one of his most forceful critics, Yeḥezkel Kaufmann (1889-1963): a figure whose Hebrew political writings have largely been forgotten today, even in Israel.