The Forgotten Polymath Who Almost Succeeded in Creating a Ḥasidic-Zionist Alliance

Born in Hamburg in 1843, Ahron Marcus received substantive Jewish and secular educations, then—following an apparent adolescent religious crisis—left Germany for Galicia, studied in a ḥasidic yeshiva, married a ḥasidic woman, and found himself a ḥasidic rebbe. He went on to author works of biblical and talmudic scholarship, in addition to books and articles (some in Hebrew, some in German) on Josephus, the relevance of recent archaeological discoveries in Egypt and Mesopotamia to the Bible and Talmud, and the application of contemporary psychological theories to Ḥasidism, as well as the first-ever scholarly history of the movement. In the 1880s, he became a leading figure in the pre-Herzlian Zionist movement Ḥibbat Tsiyon, as Shlomo Zuckier writes: