Ahad Ha'am אחד העם

Asher Ginsberg was born in 5616 into a hasidic family near Kiev, studied nothing but Torah until he was twenty, and then taught himself, in secret, Russian, German, English and philosophy. He signed his first article "Ahad Ha'am"—"one of the people"—and the signature became his name.

"This is not the way". The essay appeared in 5648 in Ha-Melitz and was addressed to Hovevei Zion, to his own people: you are in a hurry, you buy land and send settlers, but the nation is not ready. Revival begins not with land but with people who want that land out of love and not only out of distress. In 5649 he and his friends founded Bnei Moshe, a secret society of those who took that work upon themselves.

"Truth from the Land of Israel". In 5651 he went to the country for the first time and came back with five essays that offer almost no comfort: land is dear, the settlers live on the Baron's subsidy, Arabs do the work, and "we abroad are used to believing that Eretz Israel is now almost wholly empty"—which is untrue; people live there and will have to be reckoned with. His own side attacked him for these essays.

The quarrel with political Zionism. After the First Congress he wrote that what he had seen there was not the beginning of a state but "a dream in a top hat": diplomacy can obtain a charter, it cannot make a people into a people. His Zionism is called spiritual: the Land of Israel should become not a refuge for all but a "spiritual centre"—a place where Jewish culture in Hebrew lives its full life and from there feeds the dispersion. From 5656 to 5663 he edited Ha-Shiloah, the best Hebrew journal of its day, and demanded that his authors write about Jewish things in a Jewish way.

How it ended. He worked for the Wissotzky tea firm, from 5668 in London, took part in the work that led to the Balfour Declaration, and in 5682 settled in Tel Aviv, in a house on a street named for him in his lifetime. He died there in 5687. Whether he was right is argued to this day: the state came about along Herzl's lines, but Ahad Ha'am's question—what that state is filled with—was never closed.