Book contents
- The Poetics of Prophecy
- The Poetics of Prophecy
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Seraphic Choirs and Stuttering Prophets: Symmetry, Disorder, and the Invention of the Literary Bible
- Chapter 2 Walking through William Blake’s Irregular Bible
- Chapter 3 The Myth of Primordial Orality and the Disfigured Face of Written Prophecy
- Chapter 4 Ahad Ha’am’s Mask of Moses and the Secularization of Prophetic Power
- Chapter 5 Haim Nahman Bialik: The National Poet’s Cup of Sorrows
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
- Index of Biblical Quotes
Chapter 4 - Ahad Ha’am’s Mask of Moses and the Secularization of Prophetic Power
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 December 2023
- The Poetics of Prophecy
- The Poetics of Prophecy
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Seraphic Choirs and Stuttering Prophets: Symmetry, Disorder, and the Invention of the Literary Bible
- Chapter 2 Walking through William Blake’s Irregular Bible
- Chapter 3 The Myth of Primordial Orality and the Disfigured Face of Written Prophecy
- Chapter 4 Ahad Ha’am’s Mask of Moses and the Secularization of Prophetic Power
- Chapter 5 Haim Nahman Bialik: The National Poet’s Cup of Sorrows
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
- Index of Biblical Quotes
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 ProphecyModern Afterlives of a Biblical Tradition, pp. 121 - 151Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023