Allan Arkush on Ahad Ha'am and "The Jewish State and Jewish Problem" (Rebroadcast)

The Tikvah Podcast

Tikvah

Judaism, Politics, Religion & Spirituality, News

4.6 • 620 Ratings

🗓️ 19 August 2021

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In an 1897 essay called “The Jewish State and the Jewish Problem,” the Zionist writer Aḥad Ha’am argued that “Judaism needs at present but little. It needs not an independent state, but only the creation in its native land of conditions favorable to its development: a good-sized settlement of Jews working without hindrance in every branch of culture, from agriculture and handicrafts to science and literature.” Ha’am believed that the most powerful arguments for Zionism were not economic but moral, and in his many essays he stressed the importance of forming a modern Jewish identity from authentically Jewish culture and ideas. Culture first, sovereignty later, in other words.

Ha’am was born in 1856 this week by the name Asher Ginsburg, and so we thought we'd mark the occasion by rebroadcasting a conversation about him between the Tikvah Fund’s executive director Eric Cohen and Allan Arkush, a professor of Judaic studies at Binghamton University and the senior contributing editor at the Jewish Review of Books. The two discuss Ha’am’s background, his ideas in this essay and elsewhere, and compare them to his more politically-minded Zionist rivals, namely Theodor Herzl.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

Transcript

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0:00.0	An important late 19th century essay by an important Zionist writer announced that Judaism seeks
0:06.4	to return to its historic center, in order to live there a life of natural development,
0:12.3	to bring its powers into play in every department of human culture, to develop and perfect
0:17.7	those national possessions, which it has acquired up to now and thus to
0:21.7	contribute to the common stock of humanity in the future, as in the past, a great national
0:27.9	culture, the fruit of the unhampered activity of a people living according to its own spirit.
0:34.2	This writer went on now to describe just what would be needed for the development of that great national culture he'd spoken of.
0:42.4	For this purpose, he said, Judaism needs at present but little.
0:46.9	It needs not an independent state, but only the creation in its native land of conditions favorable to its development.
0:55.7	A good-sized settlement of Jews, working without hindrance in every branch of culture, from agriculture and handicrafts
1:02.3	to science and literature. This Jewish settlement, which will be a gradual growth, will become
1:09.0	in the course of time the center of the nation, wherein its
1:12.7	spirit will find pure expression and develop in all its aspects up to the highest degree
1:17.9	of perfection of which it is capable.
1:20.7	Then, from this center, the spirit of Judaism will go forth, to the great circumference, to all the communities of the diaspora,
1:29.8	and will breathe new life into them and preserve their unity. And when our national culture in
1:36.3	Palestine has attained that level, we may be confident that it will produce men in the country
1:42.2	who will be able, on a favorable opportunity, to
1:46.0	establish a state, which will be a Jewish state, and not merely a state of the Jews.
1:53.0	Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver. What I've just read for you is a passage
2:00.0	from an 1897 essay called
2:03.6	The Jewish State and the Jewish Problem. It was written by a Zionist essayist who adopted
	...

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