Political Role
Ahad Ha'am's influence in the political realm can be ascribed to his charismatic personality and spiritual authority rather than to his official functions he fulfilled. For the "Democratic Faction", the party that propagated cultural Zionism (founded in 1901 by Chaim Weizmann), he served in the words of his biographer, Steve Zipperstein, "as a symbol for the movement's culturalists, the faction's most coherent totem. He was, however, not – certainly not to the extent to which members of this group, especially Chaim Weizmann, would later contend – its chief ideological influence." It is not widely known, that the rather shy Ahad Ha'am was a talented negotiator: In this role he was engaged during the "language controversy" that accompanied the founding of the Haifa Technikum (today: the Technion) and in the negotiations culminating in the Balfour Declaration.
Read more about this topic: Ahad Ha'am
Famous quotes containing the words political and/or role:
“I hold it that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.... It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“Scholars who become politicians are usually assigned the comic role of having to be the good conscience of state policy.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)