and concern. In his earliest published articles, dating from his pre-academic years in Odessa, he sharply challenged the Spencerian hypotheses and the “spiritual-center” Zionism of Ahad Ha-Am,5 a position from which he never deviated.6 The major thesis of the Golah—the backbone, as it were—is Kaufmann’s argument that religion prevented complete assimilation, that is, absorption and disappearance of the Jewish diasporas, both in earlier (pagan) and later (Christian and Moslem) societies. This is the