Martin Buber

Austrian philosopher and scholar

• Born: February 8, 1878
• Birthplace: Vienna, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in Austria)
• Died: June 13, 1965
• Place of death: Jerusalem, Israel

One of the greatest Jewish philosophers of the twentieth century, Buber postulated an interpersonal relationship between God and humanity. This theoretical relationship, which he called I-Thou, profoundly affected diverse thinkers of all faiths.

Early Life

Martin Buber (BEW-behr) was born in Vienna to Carl Buber and Elise (née Wurgast) Buber. When Martin was only four years old, his mother mysteriously disappeared. (It was discovered later that she had eloped with another man.) The motherless boy was sent to Lemberg (now Lvov, Ukraine) to live with his paternal grandparents. His grandfather, Salomon Buber, was a landowner, grain merchant, mine operator, and philologist. He was also one of the last great scholars of the Jewish Enlightenment, responsible for authoritative critical editions of the Midrash, a special class of Talmudic literature comprising interpretations of the Bible, wise sayings, and stories.

Buber’s grandmother, Adele, was also a lover of words. A rebel who taught herself to read and write in an era when such things were proscribed for the women of her class, she arranged for young Martin to be tutored at home until he was ten years old. Because the household of Salomon and Adele Buber was one in which many languages were spoken, Martin learned the integrity of the “authentic word,” the word that cannot be paraphrased. The boy, not having many playmates, made a game of creating conversations between people of different languages, imagining what a German would think when talking with a Frenchman, or a Hebrew with an ancient Roman.

When Buber was nine, his father remarried, and the boy began spending summers on his father’s estate. There he learned to love horses. More important however, he learned to relate to the world in a way that became the basis for his most famous work, Ich und Du (1923; I and Thou , 1937). He later credited his father, a farmer who knew how to relate directly, one-on-one, both to animals and to other people, with teaching him to practice “immediacy.”

At the age of ten, Buber was enrolled in the local gymnasium, where he studied until he was eighteen years old. The school was primarily Polish; Jews were the minority. At the school, Christians and Jews alike were obliged to participate in daily devotional exercises. Buber would later recall that he and the other Jewish children would stand through these prayers, head bent, feeling only that the services meant nothing to them. The experience left him with a lifelong antipathy toward missionary work.

Buber moved from his grandparents’ home into his father’s town house at the age of fourteen. At eighteen he finished his studies at the gymnasium and entered the university.

Life’s Work

Buber spent his first year of university study in Vienna, a city of mixed German, Jewish, and Slavic influences. In Vienna, Buber discovered the living theater and became acquainted with many contemporary writers. At the University of Vienna, he studied literature, art history, and philosophy, and wanted to become a poet.

In the winter of 1897-1898, he studied at the University of Leipzig, and in the summer of 1899 at the University of Zurich. His subjects included philosophy, history of art, literary history, psychiatry, Germanics, classical philosophy, and national economy. Buber soon discovered a preference for seminars over lectures. He worked in a psychological seminar and was the only nonmedical student in the physiological institute. He belonged to a number of intellectual and social clubs, including the literary society.

Buber met two people in 1899 who would change his life forever. One of these was Gustav Landauer, a socialist who led and taught a group known as the Neue Gemeinschaft, or New Community. Founded by Heinrich and Julius Hart, the New Community believed in divine, boundless moving upward, as opposed to comfortably settling down. It saw in the ideal future a communal settlement in a new age of beauty, art, and religious dedication. Buber’s relationship with Landauer prompted him to change his major course of study from literature and the history of art to German mysticism.

Even more important than his friendship with Landauer, though, was Buber’s marriage to Paula Winkler, a fellow student in Zurich. One year his senior, Paula was probably his superior intellectually when the two met. That meeting was to have inestimable meaning for Buber, compensating as it did for the “mismeeting,” a word coined by Buber, between his unforgotten mother and himself. Reared as a Roman Catholic, Paula converted to Buber’s faith before the two were wed, giving up her earlier life and family for him. It has been said that the existential trust that underlies I and Thou would not have been possible without Buber’s relationship with Paula.

It was Paula’s strength that enabled Buber to be decisive about the direction of his life. With her help and encouragement, he found his path through Hasidism, a form of Jewish mysticism. Paula also increased his self-confidence. Buber believed marriage to be the lifestyle most suitable for humans. He dedicated his books to his wife, as in the following poem from Tales of the Hasidim (1949):

Do you still know, how we in our young yearsTraveled together on this sea?Visions came, great and wonderful,We beheld them together, you and I.How image joined itself with images in our hearts!

Paula and Martin had two children, Rafael and Eva. Paula was a writer of fiction who published under the pseudonym of George Munk.

Buber joined the Zionist movement in 1898, and was a delegate to the Third Zionist Congress in 1899. Although he addressed the congress on behalf of the propaganda committee, he stressed the importance of education over propaganda. He became editor of the Zionist movement’s Die Welt. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on German mysticism and received his Ph.D. from the University of Vienna in 1904, then withdrew for five years to concentrate on the study of Hasidism, long regarded as occult and disreputable by most modern thinkers. Hasidism had flourished in the isolated villages of Poland during the mid-eighteenth century. While the movement stressed inward renewal, it was also characterized by exuberant manifestations of spiritual experience. Buber’s study ultimately resulted in three books on Hasidism: Gog u-Magog (1941; For the Sake of Heaven, 1945), Or haganuz (1946; partial translation as From the Treasure House of Hassidism: A Selection from “Or haganuz,” 1969), and Be-pardes ha-Hasidut (1945; The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism, 1960).

At the start of World War I, Buber founded the Jewish National Committee, which was devoted to wartime work on behalf of Eastern European Jewry. In 1916, he started a monthly magazine called Der Jude, for eight years the most important organ of the Jewish renaissance movement in Central Europe. Buber believed strongly in Utopian socialism and envisioned a world in which people would live communally and in direct personal relationship with one another. From 1926 to 1930, he coedited another journal, Die Kreatur.

In 1922, Buber published Ich und du (I and Thou, 1937), a basic formulation of his philosophy of dialogue. He published in 1925, in collaboration with Franz Rosenzweig, a German translation of the Bible, in which the translators attempted to preserve the original literary character of the Hebrew Bible as a work meant to be spoken rather than simply read silently. Buber held the only chair of Jewish philosophy at a German university when he became professor of comparative religion at the University of Frankfurt (1925-1933). In 1933, he became director of the Central Office for Jewish Adult Education in Germany after Jews were barred from all German educational institutions. In 1935, he was finally forbidden to speak at Jewish gatherings in Germany.

Buber moved his family to Palestine in 1938 and became professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University. Not surprisingly, he was very active in public affairs in Israel. He pressed for a peaceful settlement of the Arab-Hebrew disputes and was a strong advocate for rapprochement and a joint Arab-Israeli state. He was the first president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities (1960-1962). In his later years, Buber lectured outside Israel, widely influencing Jewish and Christian thinkers alike. He served at the end of his life as a counselor for kibbutz members. Buber died in Jerusalem on June 13, 1965.

Significance

Buber’s beliefs often ran contrary to contemporary thought. His interpretation of Hasidism, for example, came under fire again and again, and his interpretation of the revelations in the Bible is still controversial. His study of Hasidism changed scholarly opinion about the subject; it is now considered one of the great mystical movements of the world. As a member of the Zionist movement, he favored a renewal of Jewish culture over the creation of a Jewish state, an unpopular stand among his peers. In Israel, he argued for the peaceful coexistence of Hebrews and Arabs.

Buber believed that the only real evil is refusing direction, because the only possible direction is toward God, the theme of Good and Evil (1953). He believed strongly in a “living God,” one with whom it is possible to have a direct personal relationship. He wrote of the inseparability of humanity’s relationship to God and to his humankind. The old theory of the duality of existence was reinterpreted. Rather than two worlds, the sacred and the profane, there are, according to Buber, two ways to respond to the mundane world. The world may be perceived as a thing to be experienced, a distant thing, or the individual may enter into direct relation with the world and experience the immediacy of God. In this immediacy is the key to eternity, because time becomes meaningless and the relation is all. For Buber, faith becomes an entrance into the whole of reality, because when one stands in direct relation to the world, one speaks the words “I-Thou.” Buber believed that dialogue with God, not monologue about God, is the root of the Hebrew faith.

Bibliography

Bach, H. I. The German Jew: A Synthesis of Judaism and Western Civilization, 1730-1930. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. This volume in the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization touches on Buber’s work in the context of a history of German Jewry. An excellent survey, providing valuable background for an understanding of Buber.

Biemann, Asher, ed. The Martin Buber Reader: Essential Writings. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Presents excerpts of Buber’s most significant writings on several subjects, including the Bible, Hasidism, Judaism and Jewish religiosity, and community and politics.

Diamond, Malcolm L. Martin Buber: Jewish Existentialist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960. A discussion of Buber’s work in the context of Jewish thought. Indexed. College-level material.

Friedman, Maurice. Martin Buber’s Life and Work. 2 vols. The Early Years, 1878-1923. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1981-1984. Based in part on personal acquaintance, Friedman’s three-volume biography provides by far the fullest available account of Buber’s life and work. Included are extensive discussions of the revival of Hasidism and other relevant subjects.

Mayhall, C. Wayne, and Timothy B. Mayhall. On Buber. Belmont, Calif.: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2003. One of the volumes in the Wadsworth Philosophers series, this book provides a concise overview of Buber’s most significant ideas.

Streiker, Lowell D. The Promise of Buber. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1969. One professor’s response to a study of Buber’s philosophy of dialogue. Provides many valuable insights. Contains a suggested reading list of Buber’s works and an index.

Vermes, Pamela. Buber. New York: Grove Press, 1988. This volume in the Jewish Thinkers series provides a concise and well-informed introduction.