| Abstract: | This article explores the dissonance between the radicalism of Ahad Ha'am's essays such as “Ancestor Worship” (1897) and “Moses” (1904), and his defense of the Masoretic Text as the starting point for teaching the Bible and rejection of source criticism as a pedagogic tool in the Herzliya Gymnasium debate. While Ahad Ha'am consistently deployed the Bible as a tool for promoting national revival, his polemics against Yosef Haim Brenner's attempt to divorce national identity from cultural allegiance to the Bible, and against Claude G. Montefiore's attempt to place the New Testament on a Jewish pedestal, drove him to a more conservative position. |
