Asher Ginsberg, better known by his pen name Ahad Ha'am (”One of the People”), moves to Odessa at thirty with the vague hope of modernizing Judaism.

Here he is influenced both by Jewish nationalism and by the materialistic philosophies of the Russian left-wing nihilist Dmitry Pisarev and the English and French positivists.

The son of a Hasidic rabbi, he is typical of the Russian maskalim, the leaders of the Haskalah (”enlightenment”) movement.

Reared in Russia in a rigidly Orthodox Jewish family, he had mastered rabbinic literature but soon was attracted to the rationalist school of medieval Jewish philosophy and to the writings of the Haskala.