although he had a good knowledge of English , and a great admiration for the British and their political tradition , his diffidence and his conservative temperament made it virtually impossible for him to adapt himself to the very different life of the British capital . Anglo-Jewry , as indifferent in those days to Jewish learning as to Jewish nationalism , was for him no better than a whited sepulchre , and English Zionism , still dominated by Herzlian conceptions , had no attraction . the foreign Jews of London , though not so denationalised as the assimilated Anglo-Jews who despised and patronised them , were scarcely less remote from him in the cultural sense . he took life too seriously to have much time for its lighter side , and his personal contacts were determined by his serious interests , which were for practical purposes limited to the Jewish national movement in the widest connotation of that term . it resulted that throughout his London period he remained outside the Jewish community , and made practically no new friends , with the exception of a handful of young English Jews , who had been influenced by his writings and broadly shared his outlook . there were in England a few Russian Jews whom he had known while still in Russia - among them Chaim Weizmann , who was a lecturer in chemistry at the University of Manchester - and the society of those of them who lived in the metropolis , and of old friends from elsewhere who visited London from time to time , saved him from complete isolation . but he remained a stranger in a strange land . he had come to London with hopes of being able at long last to retire from the field of Zionist controversy and from committee work , and to devote his spare time to study in the Library of the British Museum , and to writing a book on Jewish nationalism or the ethics of Judaism , two subjects on which he was eminently qualified to make an original contribution to Hebrew and Jewish literature . these hopes were disappointed . he found the hubbub of the City of London , and the strain of the daily underground journeys to and from it , nerve-racking and exhausting , and sustained intellectual work after office hours was seldom possible . he got so far as to map out the plan of a projected work on Jewish nationalism , but no further . in the six years preceding the summer of 1914 , when the first world war broke out , he wrote in all about a dozen pieces for publication , and these , together with a few of earlier date , were included in the fourth and last volume of at the crossroads , which appeared in 1913 ; but he never wrote a book . the dozen pieces included two of his best-known essays , called in their English translations Judaism and the gospels and Summa Summarum . the first of these , written in 1910 , in the form of an extended review of Claude Montefiore &apos;s synoptic gospels , is of permanent value because of the original view which it propounds as to the fundamental nature of the difference between the religious and ethical standpoints of Judaism and Christianity . the well-worn antithesis between Judaism as the religion of justice and Christianity as the religion of love does not , in Ahad Ha-Am &apos;s opinion , go to the root of the matter . what essentially distinguishes Judaism from other religions is its absolute determination to make the religious and moral consciousness independent of any definite human form , and to attach it without any mediating term to an abstract , incorporeal ideal . hence the Christian idea of a divine-human being , who mediates between God and man , is one which Judaism can never accept ; and on the ethical side , Judaism rejects the Christian ideal of altruistic self-sacrifice , and holds to the principle of abstract and impersonal justice , according to which the self and the other must be regarded with complete impartiality , and a man is forbidden to satisfy his own selfish desires at the expense of his neighbour , but is not called upon to place his neighbour &apos;s life or interests before his own . the other essay , written in 1912 , gives his impressions of Zionist progress after a visit to the tenth Zionist congress and to Palestine in the preceding year . it was written for once in a mood of comparative optimism , which enabled its sceptical author to discern encouraging signs both of new thinking in the Zionist camp , and of the emergence of a new Hebrew type of life in Palestine . the grandiose ideas which Zionism still professed officially seemed to him as remote from reality as ever , but he was happy to see Palestine beginning to develop into that national spiritual centre which the Jewish people needed above all things . outside the literary field , he was , during the years immediately preceding the war , an active member of the board of Governors of the technical high school which it was proposed to establish at Haifa , with money provided partly out of a charitable fund set up under Kalman Wissotzky &apos;s will , and partly by the German-Jewish philanthropic organisation known as Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden . Ahad Ha-Am was appointed to the board by the Wissotzky trustees , and along with Shmarya Levin and Yehiel Tchlenov , two of his old friends who were prominent in the Zionist organisation , represented the Zionist point of view against the assimilationists of the Hilfsverein , who held the whip hand because only they would have been able , if the need arose , to finance the scheme out of their own resources . he attached very great importance to the project both from the point of view of the material progress of the yishuv and from that of the prestige of Jewish Palestine in the middle east , and he patiently acted as a moderating influence in the inevitable clashes of opinion on the board ; but in spite of his efforts the uneasy partnership broke up in 1913 , when the erection of the school buildings was in progress . the immediate cause of the rupture was the insistence of the Hilfsverein on making German the language of instruction for all but Jewish subjects . the nationalist members of the board , including Ahad Ha-Am , resigned on that issue ; and , in sympathy with their point of view , the teachers of the already existing Hilfsverein schools in Palestine declared a boycott of all its educational institutions . the outcome of this action was the establishment by the Zionist organisation of its own Hebrew school system , which marked a turning-point in the history of the yishuv . Ahad Ha-Am objected in principle to the boycott weapon - it seemed to him not to differ essentially from the herem , or excommunication , which was a dreaded weapon in the hands of religious bigotry - and he also had grave doubts about the ability of the Zionist organisation to find the money for the upkeep of an efficient Hebrew school system ; but the activists had their way , and on this occasion the results did not justify his fears . as for the technical school project , the Hilfsverein&apos;s intention to implement it alone was frustrated by the outbreak of war in the following year ; and after the war , when Palestine was placed under a British mandate as the destined national home of the Jewish people , the present Haifa technion was established under Zionist auspices . the war years . the outbreak of the first world war in 1914 put an end to Ahad Ha-Am &apos;s literary career . he disdained to write for publication under war conditions , in which censorship precluded the absolutely unfettered expression of opinion ; and the Hebrew-reading public waited in vain for some indication of his views on the attitude to be adopted by the Jewish people towards the war , or his expectations of what the future might bring . nor was it possible for him to find in wartime the peace of mind which might have enabled him to retire into an ivory tower and devote himself to philosophy or scholarship . the world war meant for him a relapse into barbarism , which shook the foundations of his implicit belief in the progress of humanity ; and without that belief he was like a lost soul . the massacre of the Jews in his beloved Ukraine , and the uncertainty as to what might be the fate of the yishuv , intensified his unhappiness ; and his malaise adversely affected his physical health . paradoxically , it was during this period of acute distress that he made for the first time a direct contribution to the shaping of the policy of the Zionist organisation . thanks to his intimacy with Dr Weizmann , he was kept informed from the outset of the steps which were taken during the war to win the sympathy of the British government and British public opinion for Zionism . he was throughout in close touch with those who conducted the negotiations which ultimately led to the issue of the Balfour declaration of 2nd November , 1917 , and was a member of the small informal political committee which was set up to advise Weizmann and Sokolow when those negotiations reached the decisive stage . his great moral influence was consistently exercised in the interests of realism and moderation in the formulation of Zionist demands , both during the war and later , when the Zionist case for the Versailles peace conference of 1919 came to be prepared . taking , as always , the long view , he regarded the unequivocal recognition by the civilised world of Jewish national rights in Palestine as of greater value than the immediate establishment of a Jewish state , for which in his opinion neither Palestine nor the Jewish people was as yet prepared . the Balfour declaration , designed to create conditions in which the political future of Palestine would be determined primarily by the amount of effort and sacrifice that world Jewry was prepared to put into the task of developing the country , was in line with his gradualist approach , and seemed to him to go as far as could be reasonably expected at that time in the recognition of Jewish national rights . he realised , however , as not all Zionists did in those days , that there was an important difference between the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people , which was what the British government undertook to support , and the re-establishment of Palestine as the national home of the Jewish people , which was the formula suggested on the Zionist side . he looked forward to an era of steady expansion of the yishuv under British tutelage , and of the progressive revitalisation of diaspora Jewry through the influence of the national spiritual centre , which for him was of greater moment than any spectacular achievement in the political or economic sphere . his last years . the end of the war , in 1918 , found him a broken man , psychologically even more than physically . he was still able to carry on his duties as manager of the Wissotzky business in London for a time , but he had no strength left for study or writing . a breakdown of his health towards the end of 1919 necessitated months of sanatorium treatment , and left him suffering from some deep-seated nervous trouble , which defied precise diagnosis . he now had only one desire , to spend his last years in Palestine , where he hoped , and was encouraged by his medical adviser to hope , that he might recover his health sufficiently to be able to make some contribution to the life of the yishuv . it had always been his wish to settle in Palestine , but his passionate love of independence had stood in the way of his seizing any of the opportunities of doing so which had presented themselves at one time or another . now , at the age of 63 , he felt that he had earned the right to retire on a pension which would enable him to live in reasonable comfort in the land of his dreams . for unknown reasons , over a year elapsed before the necessary arrangements could be made ; and it was not till the end of 1921 that he was able to leave London for Palestine , accompanied by his wife and their son and daughter-in-law . he preferred to live in Tel-Aviv , which was a creation of the new spirit of Jewish nationalism , rather than in the holy city of Jerusalem , to which the aura of medievalism still clung ; and the Tel-Aviv municipality built him a house next to the Gymnasia Herzlia , the first all-Hebrew secondary school of modern times . 