Ahad Ha'am Elusive Prophet

It is within this context that Ginzberg’s choice of the pen name Ahad Ha’am must be understood. He first used it in “Lo zeh ha-derekh,” and he claimed that he selected it to highlight his unprofessional standing, to explain that the essay was for him simply a casual excursion into literature: “The idea of this pen name was to make it clear that I was not a writer, and had no intention of becoming one, but was just incidentally expressing my opinion on the subject about which I wrote as ‘one of the people’ interested in the people’s affairs.”

He flatly denied, often with great indignation, the group’s hunger for power and its grand aspiration to constitute itself as a secularized and resurrected Yavneh—the rabbinic center of Palestinian Jewish life credited with having sustained Judaism after the second temple’s destruction

The vast ambitions of the author of “Lo zeh ha-derekh”—no less than to replace Judaism’s theological foundations with national-cultural ones—were clear from the essay’s first paragraph.

Before sending the article, he set down conditions for its publication similar to those that he would later as an editor reject out of hand.

“Lo zeh ha-derekh” was sent to Zederbaum in November or early December 1888 (some accounts say that Ginzberg wrote it in one night) and it was published in March 1889, after being delayed and cut by the censor who thought it excessively nationalistic.

The essay, signed Ahad Ha’am, launched Ginzberg’s political career and, in effect, that of the Bnei Moshe as well.

The rebbe lights Sabbath cigarettes, and his hasidim follow suit.

Lilienblum’s position on cultural nationalism was, however, equivocal, and though he never altogether dismissed the importance of a cultural transformation of Jewry, he insisted that the task take a backseat to the socioeconomic reconstruction of Jewish Palestine.

Der Yidisher Veker and later, in 1890, Kaveret.

The maskilic nationalists close to Ginzberg meanwhile were enjoying a shortlived prominence because of the publication of their long-awaited Der Yidisher Veker. The volume was ambitious and impressive: it drew on the most talented Yiddish writers of the period—Abraham Goldfaden, Sholem Aleichem, Eliakum Zunzer, and Abraham Ber Gottlober, along with lesser-known talents with a local reputation in Odessa and nearby Kherson.