Born in Hamburg in 1843, Ahron Marcus received substantive Jewish and secular educations, then—following an apparent adolescent religious crisis—left Germany for Galicia, studied in a ḥasidic yeshiva, married a ḥasidic woman, and found himself a ḥasidic rebbe. He went on to author works of biblical and talmudic scholarship, in addition to books and articles (some in Hebrew, some in German) on Josephus, the relevance of recent archaeological discoveries in Egypt and Mesopotamia to the Bible and Talmud, and the application of contemporary psychological theories to Ḥasidism, as well as the first-ever scholarly history of the movement. In the 1880s, he became a leading figure in the pre-Herzlian Zionist movement Ḥibbat Tsiyon, as Shlomo Zuckier writes:
Marcus’s Zionism reached its peak . . . upon his reading Theodor Herzl’s Der Judenstaat in 1896, on which he lectured in the following year. Breaking with Maḥzikey ha-Dat, [Galicia’s dominant] Orthodox communal organization, Marcus spent the next four years in lengthy correspondence and personal friendship with Herzl, discussing theoretical matters but, most importantly, the possibility of bringing East European traditionalists into alliance with the Zionist movement. . . . Marcus spent significant energies endeavoring to forge an alliance between . . . David Moshe Friedmann, the Czortkower rebbe, and Herzl’s Zionist movement, toiling in vain to set up a personal meeting between the two.
Ideologically, he combined a certain messianic view idealizing the potential restoration of the Jewish homeland with a down-to-earth position focused on uniting European Jewry around pragmatic alliances. Zionist nationalism should be uncontroversial, Marcus argued, because nationalistic loyalty is simply based on the extension of familial ties, and the ties of the Jewish family are strong. . . .
Unfortunately, the ḥasidic-Zionist alliance was not meant to be. The meeting between Herzl and Rabbi Friedmann never took place. By 1900, several ḥasidic leaders explicitly opposed Herzl and his project, Marcus despaired of his great plan, and in 1912 was among the founders of [the ultra-Orthodox party] Agudat Yisrael.
Read more on Lehrhaus: http://www.thelehrhaus.com/timely-thoughts/2017/2/27/ahron-marcus-the-leading-hasidic-zionist-scholar-of-ancient-judaism-you-never-heard-of