About Hashiloach

Hashiloach

Hashiloach is a Hebrew-language journal of thought and policy published in Jerusalem by Shibolet Press in association with the Tikvah Fund. Subtitled an Israeli journal for thought and policy, it publishes long-form essays on Israeli society, politics, culture and Jewish thought, written for general readers rather than for an academic audience. The modern journal deliberately revives one of the most famous names in Hebrew letters: the original Ha-Shiloah, the literary monthly founded by Ahad Ha-Am in 1896, which set the standard for Hebrew essay writing at the beginning of the twentieth century before ceasing publication in 1926. Today's Hashiloach borrows that inheritance to argue, in Hebrew and at length, about public policy, economics, strategy, law, education and the philosophical foundations of Israeli public life.

A name taken from Isaiah

The journal's name refers to the text of Isaiah 8:6, "the waters of Shiloah that flow slowly." The YIVO Encyclopedia explains that the name was chosen to characterise the original journal's moderate temper, a deliberate contrast to the polemical heat of the Hebrew press of its day. The name also carried the resonance of the Pool of Siloam in Jerusalem and of a quiet stream rather than a flood: influence exercised steadily, through argument, over time. By reviving the title in Jerusalem in the twenty-first century, the modern editors signalled the same ambition for their own publication: to shape the terms of Israeli debate patiently, essay by essay, rather than to chase the daily news cycle.

The original Ha-Shiloah, 1896 to 1926

The historic Ha-Shiloah was founded in 1896 by Ahad Ha-Am together with the Ahiasaf publishing house, with initial financing provided by the businessman Kalonymus Ze'ev Wissotzky, the tea magnate and supporter of Hebrew cultural projects, on condition that Ahad Ha-Am serve as editor. Because Russian censorship made a publishing licence difficult to obtain, the journal was first printed in Berlin from 1896 to 1900 and then in Krakow from 1901 to 1905. Permission to publish inside Russia was finally granted in 1907, with editing carried out in Odessa and Warsaw, where the great majority of its readers lived. The upheavals of the 1905 Russian Revolution interrupted printing for two years, and the journal's final period, from 1919 to 1926, was published in Jerusalem.

Ahad Ha-Am and an exacting editorship

Ahad Ha-Am edited Ha-Shiloah until December 1902 and imposed exceptionally high standards. He wanted a Hebrew monthly that could stand comparison with the great European reviews of the age, such as the Contemporary Review in England and the Revue des Deux Mondes in France. In the statement of purpose printed in the first issue, in October 1896, he set out four kinds of content: scholarship concerned with Jewish life and spiritual development; publicistics, explaining the condition of Jewry and how it might be improved; criticism, judging works and ideas by truth, goodness and beauty; and a deliberately limited section of belles lettres. He edited contributors' manuscripts meticulously, cutting and clarifying to protect Hebrew style and the reader's taste, a rigour that some writers found humiliating even as publication in the journal became a mark of honour. The journal was devoted to Zionism, Jewish scholarship and literature in a style accessible to the average reader, and it was meant to raise the national consciousness of the Jewish people; true to Ahad Ha-Am's cultural Zionism, it often expressed antagonism toward Theodor Herzl and political Zionism.

Klausner, Bialik and the Jerusalem years

On Ahad Ha-Am's resignation, the editorship passed in 1903 to the historian Joseph Klausner, who remained editor until the final issue in 1926. Klausner widened the journal's scope beyond purely Jewish subjects, expanded the belles lettres section that his predecessor had kept small, and promised more writing on general affairs and less heavy scholarship. Under Klausner, the poet Hayim Nahman Bialik edited the literary section from 1904 to 1909, applying standards nearly as strict as Ahad Ha-Am's and often filling gaps with his own work; Jacob Fichman joined Klausner as co-editor for the final volumes of 1925 and 1926. The contributor list across the journal's life reads as a roll of modern Hebrew literature: it included Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Sholem Asch, Asher Barash, Simcha Ben-Zion, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and Micha Josef Berdyczewski, alongside Ahad Ha-Am and Klausner themselves. In Jerusalem, however, the journal no longer enjoyed the importance it had commanded in Russia, and it came to an end in 1926.

Why the name was worth reviving

For later Hebrew publishers, Ha-Shiloah remained the model of what a serious journal of ideas could be: non-partisan in form, national in purpose, and edited as literature rather than as ephemera. Encyclopaedia accounts note that it revolutionised the genres of Hebrew literature and journalism and became a model of Hebrew writing in both form and content, so that its articles are still read for their style as well as their subjects. A revival under that name therefore makes a claim before a single article is read: that contemporary Israeli policy debate deserves the same long-form seriousness, in Hebrew, that Ahad Ha-Am demanded for the debates of the Zionist movement more than a century ago.

The modern journal and the Tikvah Fund

The revived Hashiloach is published in Jerusalem by Shibolet Press in association with the Tikvah Fund, the philanthropic foundation and ideas institution that supports educational and intellectual projects for the Jewish people and the State of Israel. Shibolet Press is known for translating works of conservative and classical political thought from around the world for an Israeli audience, books that have stood the test of time and whose ideas carry real-world implications, with the stated aim of expanding the boundaries of Israeli intellectual discourse. Hashiloach performs the complementary task inside the Hebrew debate itself: it commissions original long essays by Israeli writers rather than translations, building a Hebrew-language literature of policy and political thought. By 2016 the revived journal was already publishing substantial issues; a scholarly bibliography of Israeli typography, for example, cites an essay on conservative Harediism in Hashiloach issue 2 of that year.

What Hashiloach publishes

The journal describes its range as running from the concrete questions of public policy to the philosophical roots of the discourse Israelis take part in, and it insists that its articles, while not academic, are written with intellectual rigour, integrity and precision. Contemporary descriptions of the journal characterise it as a collection of long-form quality essays on policy issues from economics to strategy and society, together with philosophical accounts of modern culture, Judaism and Zionism. Recent essays on its Hebrew site illustrate the breadth: an account of American originalism and the internal conservative argument over legal interpretation; a defence of the moral benefits of the free market; a critique of Israeli educational leadership programmes that lack content and identity; an argument that equality as an absolute value should not override documented physiological differences in military policy; and an analysis of Israel's party system as a market of checks and balances. Poetry and cultural criticism appear alongside the policy writing, preserving something of the original journal's mix of publicistics and literature.

Hashiloach Frontlines and the English reader

Alongside the Hebrew print journal, the editors maintain an English-language site, Hashiloach Frontlines, which carries selected essays in translation for readers outside Israel. Through it, arguments first made for a Hebrew audience — on strategy, society and the conduct of Israel's wars and public life — reach the wider English-reading public that follows Israeli affairs. The bilingual structure mirrors the journal's institutional setting: the Tikvah Fund works in both Israel and the United States, and its other publications include English-language journals of Jewish ideas. Hashiloach itself, however, remains at its core a Hebrew publication, addressed first to Israeli readers and to the internal argument of Israeli society.

Place in Israeli intellectual life

Hashiloach occupies a distinctive place among Israeli magazines. Israel has many news weeklies, literary supplements and academic quarterlies, but few periodicals devoted to long, non-academic essays on policy and political philosophy written originally in Hebrew. Its association with the Tikvah Fund and Shibolet Press places it within the institutional world of Israeli conservatism — the network of journals, translated books, educational programmes and conferences that has sought, since the 2010s, to give the Israeli right an intellectual literature of its own — while its chosen name reaches back past party politics to the founding generation of modern Hebrew culture. For the directory reader, the essential facts are these: a Jerusalem-based Hebrew journal of thought and policy, published by Shibolet Press with the Tikvah Fund, heir in name and ambition to Ahad Ha-Am's Ha-Shiloah of 1896, and devoted to the slow work its biblical name promises — changing a country's conversation by the steady flow of argument.