GINZBERG, ASHER. Asher Ginzberg (1856–1927), best known by his pen-name Ahad Ha˒am (meaning, literally, "One of the People") was the most influential intellectual in the Zionist movement in its formative years in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He produced, in the form of many highly influential Hebrew-language essays, a thorough-going reassessment of Judaism that deemphasized the centrality of religion and saw culture, writ large, as the true basis for Jewish life in the past and present. Born in Skvira, Ukraine, he was raised on a rural estate as a Hasidic prodigy, but by his early thirties he was able to read Russian, English, French, and German and was a Jewish nationalist devotee of Herbert Spencer and John Locke. His life was spent mostly in Odessa, London, and Tel Aviv (where he died), and he worked as a businessman, an editor, and, eventually, as a...