Originally published in Achad Ha’am, Ten Essays on Zionism and Judaism (1973). Asher Hirsch Ginzberg, known to the world of Jewish letters by his pen-name Achad Ha-Am (‘One of the People’) was born in the Russian town of Skvira in 1856. His Hasidic father, a follower of the Sadigora Rebbe, was a man of means who…