Proclamation

Ahad Ha-Am (“One of the Nation”) was born Asher Zvi Ginzberg in Skvira, Russian Empire (now Ukraine), to an affluent Hasidic family. He received private lessons in secular languages in addition to his heder studies, easing his transition from Hasidism toward the Haskalah and Zionism. In 1886, he moved to Odessa and began working in his father’s mercantile business. Ginzberg lived in Odessa for more than twenty years, becoming an active member of the “Odessa Circle,” a cadre of nationalist-minded maskilim. Yet even as he brought his talents to the service of the Ḥibat Tsiyon movement, he sharply criticized what he deemed its unrealistic and provocative vision of mass Jewish settlement in Palestine in a famous and immediately controversial essay, “Truth from the Land of Israel.” In 1896 he became the editor of Ha-Shiloaḥ and took on the pen-name for which he is known, Ahad Ha-Am. From this platform he published influential essays, many of which elaborated his ideas of “spiritual” or “cultural” Zionism while also criticizing Herzl’s political Zionism. At the heart of his vision was a deep commitment to secular Jewish nationhood, the Hebrew language and what he deemed the unique tradition of Jewish ethics, coupled with a sense that Jewish nationhood had to be reconstructed in an age when Jewish religious tradition was fading and assimilationism was rampant. His goal was thus not mass Jewish settlement in Palestine per se but rather the establishment of a modern Hebrew cultural center there that would in turn revitalize the diaspora. He lived in London from 1907 to 1921, principally as an agent of the Wissotzky Tea Company but also as a Zionist activist; after 1921, he moved to Tel Aviv. He strongly influenced the thinking of the preeminent Hebrew poet Chaim Naḥman Bialik and Israel’s first president Chaim Weizmann.

Simon Dubnow (Dubnov) was the dean of Jewish historians in Eastern Europe, the progenitor of Jewish nationalist historiography that cast the Jewish people rather than Judaism as the central actor in Jewish history, and a founding thinker of Jewish diaspora nationalism and national autonomism (as well as a pioneering scholar of Hasidism and of early modern Jewish communal autonomy). Born in Mtislavl in the Russian Empire (now in Belarus), Dubnow received a fine traditional education but embraced the Russian language, Russian culture, and radical secularism as a young man; much of his foundational historical work would be written in Russian, though he would also write at times in Hebrew and eventually Yiddish. 

As a young man, he involved himself extensively in debates in the emerging Russian-language Jewish public sphere about emancipation, identity, nationhood, and language, but his greatest passion was historical research. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, he wrote a pioneering series of essays about the early history of Hasidism. Pursuing historical research and synthesis tirelessly in Odessa and then St. Petersburg, he also maintained an important presence in nationally minded Russian Jewish intellectual life, counting himself among the mostly Hebraist-Zionist “wise men of Odessa” with his friend Asher Ginzberg (Ahad Ha-Am). His greatest ideological influence came from his early twentieth-century Pis'ma o starom i novom Evreistvi'e (Letters on Old and New Jewry), in which he articulated the view that Jews had long been and should remain a diasporic nation organized around shared culture and communal self-determination rather than territory. Embodied in the political movement he founded during Russia’s 1905 Revolution, the Folkspartei, the idea that East European Jews should seek maximal legal autonomy as a corporate entity enjoyed vast influence across Jewish political life, becoming part of the programs of diaspora socialists and Russian Zionists alike. 

Dubnow continued to write and revise his general histories of Russian Jewry and world Jewry while bearing down on topics like Hasidism and founding the Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society and the historical journal Evreiskaia starina (Jewish Antiquity) in St. Petersburg. A supporter of the February 1917 Revolution but a sharp opponent of the Bolshevik takeover in October 1917, he left for Berlin in 1922 and helped to establish YIVO in Vilna. When Hitler came to power, Dubnow moved to Riga, where in 1938, he completed the final version of his magnum opus, the eleven-volume Weltgeschichte des jüdischen Volkes (World History of the Jewish People), published in many languages. He also completed his compelling three-volume memoir Kniga zhizni (The Book of My Life). He was murdered on the streets of Riga by a Nazi.

Born in Odessa to a traditional family, Yehoshu‘a Ḥana Ravnitski (Ravnitsky) became a leading figure of cultural Zionism and Hebraism in the Russian Empire and left a substantial impress on modern Hebrew culture and, in the 1890s, Yiddish culture. After studying at heder and yeshiva, Ravnitski became a fixture in Odessa’s Jewish-national cultural milieu from 1888 to 1921; he was very close with the great Zionist-Hebraist figures Ahad Ha-Am and Chaim Nahman Bialik, whose ideals he embraced. As founding editor of the literary journal Pardes, Ravnitski facilitated Bialik’s poetic debut in 1892. Unlike some Zionist Hebraists in that milieu, like the literary critic Joseph Klausner, Ravnitski saw Yiddish not as a hated competitor to Hebrew but as an essential—if perhaps temporary—vehicle of the Jewish national revival Zionism sought. Thus, in the late 1880s and 1890s he played a central role in creating and editing some of the first stable venues for serious Yiddish literature, most notably Der yud (1899–1902), which published some of the most significant works of Y. L. Peretz and Sholem Aleichem (with the latter of whom he was close). But the revival of Hebrew culture was Ravnitski’s enduring passion, and in addition to his extensive work as an editor, he cofounded and ran a number of the most important Hebraist publishing houses in the Russian Empire and later Berlin and Tel Aviv, including ‘Olam Katan (1894), Moriah (with Bialik, Simḥa Ben-Tsiyon, and Elhanan Leib Levinsky, 1901), Turgeman (1911), and, again with Bialik, Devir (1919). Ravnitski was also coeditor with Bialik of the famous Sefer ha-agadah (The Book of Legends, 1908–1911), which drew Jewish narrative texts and legends out of their context in rabbinic literature to present them as pieces of a classical national literature.

The foundational figure of modern Hebrew poetry, recognized across and well beyond Hebraist and Zionist circles as “the Jewish national poet” by the time he was thirty years old, Chaim Nahman (Ḥayim Naḥman) Bialik was born in Radi and, having lost his father at age six, was raised in the nearby city of Zhitomir (today in Ukraine) by his grandfather. Bialik received a traditional education, and while studying at the Volozhin yeshiva, he immersed himself in secular writings. First coming to the attention of Zionist-Hebraist readers for a beautiful 1892 lyric poem expressing exilic longing for the Land of Israel, “El ha-tsipor” (To the Bird), Bialik developed into the most important Hebrew poet of his generation (alongside Saul Tschernikhovsky) between 1897 and 1908. 

Combining unprecedented musicality with deft use of intertextual reference to biblical and rabbinic classics to create profound resonances, Bialik became the first Hebrew poet to successfully interweave Jewish national themes—meaning, for him, the woeful condition of the exiled and exposed Jewish people—with deeply personal themes in a Romantic mode: poems of innocence and experience, deeply introspective and philosophical poetry of the self in nature and time, poetry about eros and shame, and the first great children’s poetry in Hebrew and Yiddish. His shattering poem of public rebuke “In the City of Slaughter,” composed in response to an unprecedentedly murderous 1903 pogrom in the southern Russian town of Kishinev, instantly became his most famous work in and beyond Hebrew. Although (or perhaps because) it heaped scorn on Jewish men for their ostensible cowardice and on the Jewish public for responding with alms and mourning rather than fury, it spurred many young Jews to organize self-defense groups. 

Emerging as a leading editor and publisher in Hebrew letters in Odessa and later Berlin and British Palestine, Bialik also conceived two grand projects of Jewish national-cultural revival beyond his literary writing. Reimagining the ancient corpus of Agadah (stories by and about the classical Jewish sages) as a Jewish “national epic” hiding in plain sight, he compiled with Yehoshu‘a Ḥana Ravnitski on Sefer ha-agadah (The Book of Legends), an anthology of rabbinic tales wrested out of their original legalistic and philosophical contexts and reworked in a supple, accessible Hebrew. Somewhat later, wracked by growing doubts about the health of the Hebrew cultural revival and the adequacy of secular-national cultural ideals, Bialik called for the new Hebrew culture to reconnect to the textual tradition of the whole classical Jewish library, albeit in a secular mode. He envisioned a grand collective national project of kinus (gathering) that would recover, select, and recast the classical Jewish texts most suited to modern secular-national needs. 

During the last twenty years of his life, Bialik wrote little poetry and instead focused on these editorial projects, continuing and expanding them after moving in 1924 to the Yishuv in Palestine; he also wrote extensively for children. His prose fiction was a minor part of his oeuvre but powerfully connected realistic depictions of the small-town Jewish life of his childhood to deep questions of Jewish and modern life, as in “Behind the Fence,” about the attraction between a young Jewish man and a Ukrainian, Christian young woman.

Born near Mogilev (today Mahilyow, Belarus), Ḥayim Mordechai (Mark) Rabinovich (Ben-Ami) moved at age four to Bessarabia following his father’s death. When he was ten, he moved to Odessa with his mother and studied in a maskilic Talmud Torah before finishing his studies in a gymnasium. With the outset of pogroms in the spring of 1881, he became active in organizing Jewish self-defense groups. Following the pogroms, he moved to Paris and began contributing Russian articles to Voskhod under the pen name Reish-Galuta. Returning to Odessa in 1886, he became active in Ḥovevei Tsiyon and Zionist politics, taking the pen-name Ben-Ami (“A Son of My People,”) and strategizing with Ahad Ha-Am, Leon Pinsker, and Theodor Herzl, among others. Around the time of the 1905 Russian Revolution, he moved to Geneva, where he lived until immigrating to Palestine in 1924. Ben-Ami’s articles and memoirs about the Jewish question reflect the period of emergent and evolving Jewish nationalism in Russia.