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Chapter 4 - Ahad Ha’am’s Mask of Moses and the Secularization of Prophetic Power

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 December 2023

Yosefa Raz
Affiliation:
University of Haifa, Israel
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Summary

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.

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The Poetics of Prophecy
Modern Afterlives of a Biblical Tradition
, pp. 121 - 151
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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