Ahad Ha-'Am's politics

Abstract

the Perplexed," and, as Dan Miron has wisely observed, with a badly needed father figure. ' That he was not a politician nearly all agreed. To his admirers, their sage's temperament was too frank, too modest, too honest for the brutish, disingenuous world of political intrigue. To his enemies, he was a prissy, prudish spoiler, who, in David Frischman's memorable description, bested Saturn by devouring his offspring before they were born. Frischman wrote: "He runs away from taking action or anything resembling action. Upon seeing something that might demand activity, he is seized by a kind of anxiety. He frets and trembles.. ."2 "Herzl was the leader of the generation, Ahad Ha-'Am its teacher," remarked his first biographer and close friend, in a statement considered authoritative, and which constituted, as we shall see, a much sanitized gloss on a contentiously political career.3 From the vantage point of nearly all who observed him (favorably or not), it was schools, journals, and encyclopedias that most preoccupied the outstanding foe of political Zionism. He himself readily acknowledged his lack of administrative aptitude, his disinterest in shaping the will of others, his deference. In retrospect it is apparent that he certainly was a political leader, albeit a rather ineffective and even anachronistic one. And though he repeatedly claimed that he was pressed, drafted against his will, into the leadership positions he attained, that his prominence, for example, in the semi-secret Bnei Moshe society was