On Reading Ahad Ha'am as Mordecai Kaplan Read Him

Abstract

-M ^ordecai M. Kaplan was temperamentally ill equipped to acknowledge intellectual antecedents. Deeply influenced as he was byJohn Dewey, the philosopher is noted only twice inJudaism as a Civilization. One is left to probe, based often on stray acknowledgments made by Kaplan sometimes quite late in life, the impact on him of Mathew Arnold, Emile Durkheim, WilliamJames, or, for that matter, Ahad Ha'am (Asher Ginzberg, 1856-1927). Kaplan read very widely, he borrowed lavishly and with good effect, and he was better at savaging others than admitting debt. There can be honest, legitimate disagreement about whose impact was felt by him the most. One influence, incontestable and of an altogether different sort, is that of Europe. Kaplan lived his life-certainly the first few decades of his uncannily long life-in a state of uneasy, fertile contention, both reliant on and at odds with a Europe distant and ever at hand. His relations with it were inescapable (as inescapable, of course, as his parents), but Europe was clearly for him made of many different parts. From it came the inspiration for his father's dignified, uncompromising, enlightened piety, and also the erudite, Germanic condescension of Kaplan's Jewish Theological Seminary colleagues (a nasty satirical squeak is how Kaplan characterized the voice-and, no doubt, the mind-of Louis Ginzberg). There the young Kaplan had experienced