Martin Buber

Mordechai Martin Buber was born in Vienna in 1878 to assimilated Jewish parents whose marriage broke up when he was three. He was sent to live with his grandfather, Solomon Buber — a major scholar of midrashic literature — in Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine), where he was educated in both classical Jewish learning and the German cultural tradition. He studied at the universities of Vienna, Leipzig, Berlin, and Zurich, completing a doctorate in 1904 with a dissertation on Nicholas of Cusa and Jakob Böhme — a topic that already pointed toward his lifelong interest in the meeting of contemplative traditions.

In his twenties he discovered Hasidism — a movement his rationalist Berlin-Vienna circles regarded as backwoods superstition — and became its great modern literary translator. He spent decades rendering Hasidic stories in elegant German prose, producing The Legend of the Baal Shem (1908), The Tales of Rabbi Nachman (1906), and ultimately the two-volume Tales of the Hasidim (1947–48). Through these the movement reached readers it would never otherwise have reached.

In 1923 he published Ich und Du — I and Thou — a short philosophical work that has shaped Christian, Jewish, and secular thought for a century. He emigrated to Palestine in 1938 (delayed in part by his commitment to leading the Mittelstelle für jüdische Erwachsenenbildung in Frankfurt — Jewish adult education in the years of escalating Nazi persecution; he was forced out by the regime), taught at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and continued writing until his death in 1965 at eighty-seven.

I and Thou

The book’s central claim is that there are two fundamental modes of being-in-relation:

• I-It — the encounter with what we treat as object. We measure it, analyze it, use it, fit it into our categories. Most of life is, of necessity, I-It; the world is in part a world of objects.
• I-Thou — the encounter with what we meet as full presence. Another person, an animal, a tree, a piece of music, occasionally a stranger on a train: when we meet them as Thou, the categories fall away, the relationship is direct, the I is constituted in the meeting.

The two modes alternate; pure I-Thou cannot be sustained in ordinary life. But Buber insists that all real living is meeting — that the moments of I-Thou are the ones in which we are most fully ourselves, and that through every authentic Thou, the eternal Thou (Buber’s term for God) is met. Every particular Thou is a glimpse through to the eternal Thou.

The book has been read and re-read by Christians (Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Rahner), Jews, secular philosophers (Levinas in critical dialogue), psychotherapists (Carl Rogers acknowledged its formative influence), and ordinary readers. Its short final section — on God as the eternal Thou, on prayer as turning toward, on the sustained difficulty of relation — is one of the great pieces of 20th-century religious writing.

The Bible translation

From 1925 to 1961 (with a long interruption after Rosenzweig’s death in 1929), Buber and Franz Rosenzweig worked on a German translation of the Hebrew Bible. The translation is famously distinctive: it tries to recover the Hebrew text’s rhythm, its etymological texture (different German verbs for different Hebrew roots, even where modern German would use one word), its strangeness. The result reads unlike any other German Bible. Buber completed the project alone after Rosenzweig’s death; the final volumes appeared in the early 1960s.

On Buber and Hasidism

A note for honesty. Gershom Scholem — Buber’s contemporary and the founder of academic Jewish-mysticism studies — repeatedly criticized Buber’s interpretive approach to Hasidism. Scholem’s argument: Buber emphasized the existential and ethical dimensions of Hasidic teaching at the expense of its theurgical, magical, and Lurianic-kabbalistic substrate, producing a Hasidism more palatable to modern readers but selectively shaped. The criticism is substantial and largely correct as scholarly history. Buber’s Tales, however, remain a remarkable literary achievement and have introduced more people to Hasidic narrative than any other modern source. Both can be true.

Politics

Throughout his life Buber advocated, against the prevailing currents of Zionism, for a binational Arab-Jewish state in Palestine. He was a founder of Brit Shalom (Covenant of Peace) in the 1920s and continued to argue for binationalism after 1948. He was, by his own account, repeatedly disappointed by the political directions taken; he remained, by his own account, committed to dialogue across the divide. His writings on this remain difficult and important reading.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Subset of: [[jewish-mysticism]]
• Parallels: [[hasidism]] · [[spirituality]]
• Member of: [[person]]

Sources

1. Martin Buber. I and Thou. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. Scribner, 1970. Source class: book / primary.
2. Martin Buber. Tales of the Hasidim (2 vols.). Schocken, 1947–48. Source class: primary anthology / classic retelling.
3. Martin Buber. The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism. Horizon, 1960. Source class: book / theoretical reflection on the Tales.
4. Martin Buber. On Judaism. Schocken, 1967. Source class: collected essays.
5. Maurice Friedman. Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue. University of Chicago Press, 1955 (rev. 2002). Source class: book / authorized biography.
6. Paul Mendes-Flohr. Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent. Yale, 2019. Source class: book / contemporary biography.

Lenses still to grow

• The Buber-Rosenzweig translation as a piece of literary-religious history.
• The Buber-Scholem dispute about Hasidic interpretation.
• Brit Shalom and binationalism — the political road not taken.
• I-Thou and clinical psychology — the influence on Carl Rogers, Erving Polster, and the existential-humanistic tradition.
• The friendship and dialogue with Rosenzweig as one of the great intellectual partnerships of the 20th c.