Asher Ginsberg (Ahad Ha’am), was a reclusive, self-taught intellectual active in a small circle of Hebraists in early twentieth-century Odessa. Though born to a wealthy Hasidic family, he reinvented himself as a secular rationalist and modeled himself after a prophet-hero he identified in biblical, rabbinic, and Kabbalistic traditions. Ahad Ha’am’s monumental prophetic persona, though, carried within it demonic forces that he couldn’t shake: ever-present anger, despair, and failure. As Ahad Ha’am, then, takes up a Romantic prophetic figure to convey a strong nationalist ideal, his multivalent allusions to Jewish and European culture expose his personal anxieties and weaknesses – as well as those of the secular Hebrew culture he hoped to create. Ahad Ha’am draws on an eclectic array of sources to construct his heroic, seemingly indigenous, Jewish prophetic model: perhaps the most surprising is Thomas Carlyle’s Victorian portrait of Muhammad, which inadvertently introduces a (Scottish) Zionist Muhammad into early Hebrew literature.

Chapter 1 considers the accounts of law offered by early Zionist utopian works and clarifies the distinction between the cultural and the meta-cultural debate in Zionism; that is, between the disputes over culture and identity, and the debate whether a cultural dispute over modern Jewish identity would be worthwhile and wise. In light of the emotional Jewish and Zionist cultural debates, the question inevitably arose as to whether such culture wars were advantageous or detrimental to the realization of Zionism’s goal, the establishment of a Jewish national home. To avoid a Kulturkampf, Zionist leaders decided to stress the common and consensual elements of national culture, while stifling the religious, cultural and identity differences over the definition of Judaism, Jewish state and Jewish law, and block their entry into the Zionist movement’s official documents and projects.