Ahad Ha Am

A second influential European Jewish thinker of the time that agreed with the notion of Jews facing severe problems by the late nineteenth century was Ahad Ha’am. Ha’am grew up in the Russian empire and, to him, the Jewish culture was everything which was reflected in his journals. He emphasized the need to sustain Jewish culture in respect to answering the Jewish Question and he was the leader of the Jewish nationalist Bnei Moshe society. According to Ahad Ha’am, the solution to the problems the Jewish population faced was to address the “inner slavery brought on by assimilation” (Zipperstein “Ahad Ha’am and the Politics of Assimilation” 358). His solution was oriented towards addressing the issue of assimilation that Jews, specifically, in …show more content…
By doing so, a spiritual centre for the Jewish population would be developed, thus enabling the spirit of Judaism to flourish towards all the Jewish communities in the Diaspora. For him, the best thing to do was “establish a state which will be a Jewish state, and not merely a State of Jews” (Ha’am “The Jewish State and the Jewish Problem”); something Herzl supposedly put forward. Similar to Herzl, however, Ha’am felt that the growth of such a spiritual centre would be gradual and this was a good thing because if there were large amounts of Jewish migrants to their State, “home competition in every branch of production… [would] prevent any one branch from developing” (Ha’am “The Jewish State and the Jewish Problem”). This would then send the Jews out of their State, since the amount of people looking for jobs would be greater than the amount of jobs that would be available. Ha’am and Herzl both believed that the Jewish state, or spiritual centre in Ha’am’s case, had to be in Palestine but they differed in the value of Hebrew as the dominant