BOOK REVIEW / BIOGRAPHY : Revisiting ‘Moral Underpinning’ of Zionism for Message on Destiny : ELUSIVE PROPHET: Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism, <i> by Steven J. Zipperstein</i> UC Press $35, 411 pages

Zionism is sometimes called the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, especially by Zionists who struggle to realize the lofty ideals that animated the earliest pioneers of the Jewish homeland.

The same earnest point is made in “Elusive Prophet,” Steven J. Zipperstein’s biography of Ahad Ha’am, a founding father of Jewish nationalism and “the foremost exponent of a humanistic, liberal Zionism.” But, at the same time, the author seems to be addressing the Zionists themselves and invoking Ahad Ha’am to remind them of the “moral underpinning” of the movement.

“Ahad Ha’am”--a Hebrew phrase that means “One of the People”--was adopted as a pen name by Asher Ginzburg when he began to articulate his vision of Jewish self-liberation in Odessa in the late 1880s. By the time of his death in Palestine in 1927, Ahad Ha’am had come to be regarded--along with such other luminaries as Theodor Herzl--as a prophet of modern political Zionism.

“Herzl was the leader of his generation,” wrote one biographer, “Ahad Ha’am was its teacher.”

Ahad Ha’am, as Zipperstein points out, advocated a secular version of Jewish nationalism, and he insisted on a pragmatic approach to the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Indeed, what makes Ahad Ha’am so compelling to Zipperstein is his insistence on realism rather than on romanticism or religious fervor in Zionism.

“Despite the lyricism with which he described the Jewish attachment to the hills of Judea and the Galilee or the view from atop Mt. Carmel,” Zipperstein explains, “Ahad Ha’am never lost his awareness of the thin line separating illusion from state building, and separating obsession with the impossible from the sober prerequisites of national revival.”

Zipperstein’s book must be read in light of the most recent crisis in Zionism--the conflict between secular and religious Zionists in Israel over making peace with the Palestinian Arabs. Although Ahad Ha’am called on Jews in the Diaspora to look to Palestine as the focus of Jewish destiny, to “(make) the land the object of our hopes,” Zipperstein wants us to understand that Ahad Ha’am would have rejected any notion that Jewish settlement on the West Bank is somehow justified by a biblical mandate from the Almighty.

“The present generation has seen the birth of a new and far-reaching idea,” Ahad Ha’am wrote in the seminal 1889 essay that became the credo of “practical” Zionism, “one that promises to bring down our faith and aspiration from the heavens, and transform them into living and active forces.”

Zipperstein, professor of Jewish studies at Stanford, does not pretty up the man who is the subject of his scholarly book: Ahad Ha’am was “a slight, reclusive, somewhat bitter, taciturn, untalkative and rather snobbish man.”

As Zipperstein shows us in rather taxing detail, Ahad Ha’am was eclipsed in his own lifetime by activists such as Herzl and Chaim Weizmann, and he confined himself to the role of theorist, critic and goad.

“As the father of Jewish cultural nationalism, he found himself savaged by restless, radical heirs,” Zipperstein writes. “The very term ‘Ahad Ha’amist’ had become something of an obscenity even in circles otherwise congenial to his teachings.”

Still, Zipperstein believes that Ahad Ha’am represents a certain moral vitality in the Jewish national liberation movement, and he insists that the movement still has something crucial to learn from Ahad Ha’am on the subject of Zionism’s greatest challenge: an accommodation between Arab and Jew in the land that both peoples claim as a homeland.

“If Palestinian Jewry is unable to exercise restraint and decency now that it holds little power,” Ahad Ha’am wrote of the troubled relations between Arab and Jew in Palestine in 1913, “how much worse will it be when we control the land and its Arab inhabitants?”

“Elusive Prophet” is a solid work of scholarship--indeed, sometimes too, too solid--but Zipperstein’s book can also be approached as an oblique comment by the author on the hottest controversies in contemporary Zionism. Zipperstein resurrects Ahad Ha’am and invokes his considerable moral authority to put across a pointed message about the destiny of the Jewish state.

“If Zionism failed to create a society in which an Arab minority could live with dignity,” concludes Zipperstein, drawing on the notions of Ahad Ha’am and making them his own, “it would mean that the Jews had defiled Zion, had taken hold of what had always been the most treasured feature of Jewish life and distorted it beyond recognition.”