Martin Buber Reading Guide

READING GUIDE

By Paul Mendes-Flohr

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CONTENTS

Timeline

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Discussion Guide

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Primary Sources

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About Jewish Lives

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TIMELINE February 8, 1878

Martin Buber is born in Vienna.

1881

His mother Elise née Wurgast, an actress, separates from her husband Carl Buber (1848-1936), a wealthy agronomist and landowner. Apparently as knowledge of her affair with a Russian officer had surfaced, she suddenly left home without bidding her three-year-old son farewell. He was then sent to live with his paternal grandparents, observant traditional Jews who lived in Lemberg (Lvov), the capital of Galicia, the eastern most province of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. His grandparents raised him until he was fourteen, when his father remarried.

1896

Buber enrolls at the University of Vienna, followed by semesters at universities in Leipzig, Berlin, Germany, and Zurich, Switzerland. At the latter university in 1899, he meets his future wife, Paula Winkler – a Catholic woman from Germany with whom she had two children out-of-wedlock.

1898/9

Buber is among the founders of the Leipzig branch of the World Zionist Movement led by Theodor Herzl.

1899

Buber attends the 3rd Zionist congress in Basel, Switzerland.

1901

He gives an address at the 5th Zionist congress, also in Basel, which evoked the admiration of Herzl who would appoint him to edit the movement’s weekly newspaper, Die Welt.

1902-1904

His advocacy of Cultural Zionism, which held that the spiritual and renewal of Judaism should be the principal objectives of the movement, leads eventually to his break with Herzl and political Zionism.

1904

He submits a doctoral dissertation at the University of Vienna on Nicholas of Cusa, one of the first German proponents Renaissance Humanism.

1904-1912

Intensive study of mystical and mythic texts of various traditions.

1906

His grandfather, a renowned scholar of Midrash, Salomon Buber dies at the age of 79. Shortly thereafter, Paula converts to Judaism and marries Martin in April 1907.

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TIMELINE 1906

Die Geschichte des Rabbi Nachman (The Tales of Rabbi Nachman), dedicated to his grandfather.

1908

Die Legende des Baalschem (The Legend of the Baal-Shem)

1909

Ekstatische Konfession (Ecstatic Confessions: The Heart of Mysticism)

1910-1911

Buber publishes works on Chinese philosophy and mythic literature

1910

Drei Reden über das Judentum (Three Addresses on Judaism). Lectures Buber delivered from 1909 to 1910 in Prague at the invitation of the Bar-Kochba’s Students Association.

1913

Daniel. Gespräche von Verwerklichung (Daniel. Dialogues of Realization).

1916

Founding editor of Der Jude, a cultural and literary on Judaism.

1921

Buber addresses the 12th Zionist Congress, convened at Carlsbad, Czechoslovakia. He cautioned the movement from pursuing a nationalism based solely by the dictates of Realpolitik, which would betray Zionism’s mandate to promote the spiritual renewal of the Jewish people.

1922

Der große Maggid und seine Nachfolge (The Great Maggid of Mezeritch and his disciples).

1922

Religion als Gegenwart – a series of lectures delivered at the Franz Rosenzweig’s, Free Jewish Hause of Learning in Frankfurt, Germany.

They served to clarify his concept of dialogue.

1923

Ich und Du (I and Thou).

1923

Lectureship on Jüdische Religionswissenscaft und Ethik (the Scholarly Study Jewish Religion and Ethics) at the University of Frankfurt; in 1930 Martin is promoted to a Honorary Professorship, from which he would resign with Hitler’s seizure of power.

1923

Rosenzweig published an open-letter, Revelation and The Law, challenging Buber’s dismissal of traditional Jewish religious practice as a human constructed “Law” and not in accord with divine revelation. Buber published his response to Rosenzweig first in 1936.

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TIMELINE 1925

Collaboration with Rosenzweig in a German translation of the Hebrew Bible.

After Rosenzweig’s death in December 1929, he continued alone, completing the project in Jerusalem in February 1961.

1926-1930

Die Kreatur, a transconfessional quarterly edited by Buber together with Josef Wittig (a Catholic) and Viktor von Weizsächer (a Protestant).

1932

Königtum Gottes (Kingship of God). Introduces Buber’s concept of “theo-politics” (as opposed to “political theology”).

1933

Buber established in Frankfurt a Center to coordinate a ramified program of adult education to mount a „spiritual resistance“ to Hitler’s policies to deprive German Jewry’s political rights and dignity.

1938

Buber emigrates in March to Mandatory Palestine, where he is appointed a Professor of Social Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

1939

Letter to Gandhi, urging the Indian sage to acknowledge the plight of the Jews in Nazi Europe and grant his blessings to Zionism as a movement of national liberation, assuring him that the settlement of the Jews in Palestine need not be at the expense of the native Arab population.

1942

Founds together with Judah L. Magnes and Henirietta Szold the Ihud (Unity) a political party advocating Palestine as a binational Arab-Jewish state.

1944

Gog and Magog. A Chronicle (Hebrew); English, For the Sake of Heaven. A Hasidic Chronicle/Novel, 1945.

1945

Tales of the Hasidim. The Early Masters.

1945

“Hebrew Humanism”

1948

Tales of the Hasidim. The Later Masters.

1949

Paths in Utopia

1951

Two Types of Faith.

1951

Receives Goethe Prize

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TIMELINE 1952

Israel and Palestine. The History of an Idea

1953

Peace Prize of the Association of German Book Trade

1957

Lecture tour in the U.S.A.

1958

Death of Paula Buber; she is buried in the Jewish cemetary of Venus, Italy

1958

Awarded the Israel Prize in the humanities

1961

Awarded the Bialik Prize for Jewish thought

1963

Awarded the Erasmus Prize in Amsterdam

1965

Buber dies on June 13 in Jerusalem.

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DISCUSSION GUIDE

Preface: What are the challenges faced by a biographer? Can the complex strands of anyone’s life be related in a single coherent narrative?

As Martin Buber (1878-1965) himself noted, he is “unfortunately a complicated and difficult subject.” I have sought to honor this complexity as an often tortured and groping journey – a journey from which Buber’s thought emerged and crystallized.

Chapter One: A Motherless Child The three-year-old Buber experienced his mother’s sudden separation from his mother’s sudden separation from his father and himself as abandonment. It was a wound that festered throughout his life, and perhaps explains why interpersonal relations – their fragility and the imponderable difficulty of nurturing them – remained the overarching theme of his life’s intellectual and spiritual journey.

Thus, a recurrent question addressed in the biography is not only the centrality on interpersonal relations, but ever more importantly how to sustain the mutual trust that defines genuine relationships, relations of on-going dialogue between individuals, and ultimately between human beings and God. Significantly, the Hebrew term for faith – ‘emunah’ – denotes trust.

Chapter Two: Herald of a Jewish Renaissance Upon his parents’ separation, Buber was sent to live with his paternal grandparents. Although they pampered him with warmth and love, they failed – or perhaps chose not – to acknowledge his loss and abiding longing to be reunited with his mother.

When he would meet her as an adult with two children of his own, he could not look at her in the eyes. In reflecting on the ill-fated meeting he so fervently desired, he coined a term, “mis-meeting” – a meeting-that-had-gone-wrong, a meeting that had not taken place as one had hoped. Although everyone’s life is fraught with mismeetings of various intensity, they render us – as they surely should – to the abiding existential and ethical significance of dialogical relations, and not only in our interpersonal relations, but also in our political and social life. All spheres of the life’s often uncertain journey require faith, the trusting hand of another, and which we also with “fear and trembling” are challenged to extend to another.

Buber’s childhood was clouded with inconsolable sadness, which he sought to flee once he left for university studies in Vienna. Seeking to forge new happier horizons, he discarded all that was associated with his grandparents’ home, Jewish religious practice and affiliation. He wanted nothing to do with Jewish matters. He would eventually find his way back to Judaism by way of Zionism.

Here we may consider why it was Zionism as a catalyst for the Jewish spiritual renaissance – the reconfiguration of Judaism as an engaging humanistic culture – that allowed Buber and many of his generation to overcome their estrangement from their ancestral heritage.

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DISCUSSION GUIDE

Chapter Three: On the Open Seas Recurrently frustrated by his attempt to promote the vision of a Jewish Renaissance, Buber broke his ties with Zionism and set sail in unchartered waters. Finding himself by disposition ill suited for an academic career, he chose the path of a freelance writer and editor.

It is in this period that Buber increasingly engaged in the study of Hasidism, which had hitherto been viewed by Western-educated Jews and non-Jews alike as a primitive, superstitious, mystical cult of Eastern-European Jewry. In re-telling the stories and anecdotal teachings of Hasidic teachers, Buber presented Hasidism as a unique spiritual and ethical sensibility – a sensibility that he held addresses the prevailing discontents of the modern world and its weakening of the bonds of community and human solidarity.

Chapter Four: From Publicist to Author Buber gained public esteem as the editor of a highly acclaimed series of monographs on modern urban life as well as of more than a dozen collections – in addition to volumes of Hasidic lore -- of myths and mystical literature from a various theistic and non-theistic religious traditions.

It was only at the age of thirty-five that he began to give voice to his own philosophic vision: Daniel. Dialogues on Realization (1913).

With the poetic inflections of literary Expressionism, he evoked the mystical experience of realizing God through one’s deeds. Distinct from mystical ecstasy, which is episodic and transports one beyond the world, mystical experience and a this-worldly ethos meld. Buber would now seek to apply his conception of a mystical religiosity that hallows everyday life to Judaism.

Chapter Five: Prague. Mystical Religiosity and Beyond Buber opened a series of lectures he gave from 1909-1911 to a Jewish university students association of Prague, with the question, “Why do we call ourselves Jews?” This question would henceforth set the contours of Buber’s ramified writings of Judaism. The answer he sought would be independent of the dictates of cultural and ethnic identity, nor was it to be determined by formal religious affiliation. The answer he gave to the Jewish students in Prague reflected his distinctive conception of mystical religiosity. Over time his understanding to “why we call ourselves Jews?” would be revised and crystallize to what in his mature years he called the life of dialogue.

One crucial station on the road to his conception of dialogue as the heartbeat of Jewish existence would be a bitter and harsh lesson he learned during World War One. Initially inspired by the spirit of German national solidarity engendered by the call to battle, Buber celebrated the war as a mystical experience of community overcoming the divisive malaise of modern, urban civilization. He would, however, eventually be brought to confront that brutal reality of war and the ethical ambiguities of nationalism. Buber would apply this lesson both to an understanding of what constitutes genuine community and Zionism.

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DISCUSSION GUIDE

Chapter Six: Heir to Landauer’s Legacy The German-Jewish anarchist Gustav Landauer (1870-1919) played a crucial, indeed, decisive role in leading Buber from the “folly” of mystical nationalism. He would serve Buber as an intellectual and ethical alter ego. As a disciple of Landauer, who was assassinated by Right-wing German soldiers, Buber also understood religious faith to entail political responsibility, even when it would cast him as an outsider.

Chapter Seven: A Reverential ‘Apikoros.’ Friendship with Rosenzweig Whereas his friendship with Landauer contributed to shaping his political sensibilities, his friendship with Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) led to the maturing of his religious philosophy and conception of Judaism as a living faith.

Buber and Rosenzweig bonded despite the fact that Rosenzweig was a “ba’al teshuva” – one who from the midst of assimilation affirmed traditional Jewish religious practice – and Buber an “apikoros,” one who was raised in the tradition and broke with it. But he nonetheless retrained, as Rosenzweig noted, a “reverential” intimacy with the spiritual universe of Jewish tradition.

Buber and Rosenzweig thus shared a commitment to promote contemporary Jewry’s access to the spiritual patrimony of Judaism through a renaissance of Talmud Torah, the study of the classical texts of the tradition. In pursuing this objective, they perforce addressed the vexatious question how one who has been educated at wellsprings of Spinoza, Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche, Freud, Weber and Foucault read traditional religious texts.

Chapter Eight: The Tragic Grace of Everyday Reality The study of the foundational texts of Judaism, especially the Hebrew Bible, for Buber, attests to an unyielding affirmation of the God of Creation, and thus to embrace the reality of “the lived everyday” in which we are to seek our relationship to the Creator and our fellow human beings. “Creation is not a hurdle on the road to God; it is the road itself.” Biblical humanism, as he called this core religious sensibility of Judaism, would be challenged by the brutal political realities of Nazi Germany.

In meeting this challenge, Buber led the “spiritual resistance” to Hitler’s program to deprive German Jewry not only of their civil rights but also of their dignity and self-esteem. The resistance would be forged not by opposing “one nationalistic image of man with another nationalist image,” by but Talmud Torah – a re-appropriation of Jewish literacy through the study of the spiritual inheritance of Israel as inscribed in the canonical texts of traditional Judaism.

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DISCUSSION GUIDE

Chapter Nine: Professor and Political Activist Continuously harassed by the Nazi authorities from teaching and lecturing, Buber and his family emigrated to Palestine in March 1938, six months before the Kristallnacht, or the November pogroms of that year.

His inaugural lecture at the Hebrew University, “Demand of the Hour and Historical Reality,” signaled that he understood his professorial appointment to transcend the institutional limits of scholarly research. While publishing works in Hebrew on the biblical prophets, Hasidism, and the sociology of utopian settlements, Buber was thus actively engaged in the public discourse on the political direction of Zionism.

He relentlessly argued that some form of an agreement must be found to reconcile Jewish and Arabs claims to Palestine. Towards this objective, he advocated the establishment of a bi-national state in which Jews and Arabs would share political sovereignty based on absolute representational equality in governing the country. Was this vision at all feasible given the exigencies facing the Jews as the dark clouds of Hitler’s apocalyptic anti-Semitism and the Shoah gathered?

Chapter Ten: Despite Everything In a birthday greeting celebrating Buber’s seventieth birthday in February 1948, Judah Leib Magnes raised the cardinal question of Buber’s life’s work: “You combine within yourself two spiritual qualities that viewed superficially are in conflict with each other: you are capable of seeing political reality as it is, but also the spiritual reality as it is. Can these two realities be reconciled?”

Magnes concluded by wishing Buber the courage to continue, “despite everything, your struggle against the prevailing reality.” And so he did. With the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, he continued to voice concern that should the human and political rights of the Arabs be abused, it would redound to the spiritual and ethical degradation of the Zionist project, indeed, of Judaism.

Chapter Eleven: Not to Belong In his twilight years, Buber was increasingly accorded international fame, which did not soften his image in Israel as an outsider. Indeed, as he acknowledged, he did not, could not fully belong.

His misgiving about the direction of the Zionist project had taken remained undiminished. He continued to the very last months of his eighty-seven years to protest what he regarded to be the persistent abuses of Arab rights and dignity. To be true to its pristine mandate, Zionism must view its task to be both attentive to the political and quotidian needs of the Jewish people, and yet unyieldingly mindful of the spiritual and ethical imperatives of Judaism.

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PRIMARY SOURCES I and Thou, transl. by Ronald Gregor Smith, (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1937); 2ed. Edition (New York: Charles Scribners & Sons, 1958); (New York: Scribner Classics, 1986/2000).

Eclipse of God (New York: Harper and Brothers 1952); 2nd ed. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977).

Pointing the Way, transl. Maurice Friedman (New York: Harper, 1957), 2nd Edition (New York: Schocken, 1974).

The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism, transl. M. Friedman, New York: Horizon Press, 1960) Daniel: Dialogues on Realization, New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964). 2nd (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2018) The Knowledge of Man, transl. Ronald Gregor Smith and Maurice Friedman, New York: Harper & Row, 1965) The Way of Response: Martin Buber; Selections from his Writings, edited by N. N. Glatzer.(New York: Schocken Books, 1966).

A Believing Humanism: My Testament, M. Friedman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967).

On Judaism, edited by Nahum Glatzer and transl. by Eva Jospe and others, New York: Schocken Books, 1967.

On the Bible: Eighteen Studies, edited by Nahum Glatzer, New York: Schocken Books, 1968).

I and Thou, a new translation with a prologue “I and you” and notes by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1970).

Essays in Religion, translated by Greta Hort (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970).

Martin Buber and the Theater, Including Martin Buber’s “Mystery Play” Elijah, edited and translated with three introductory essays by Maurice Friedman, New York, Funk &Wagnalls, 1970).

Encounter: Autobiographical Fragments. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1972).

On Zion: the History of an Idea, with a new foreword by Nahum N. Glatzer, Translated from the German by Stanley Godman, New York: Schocken Books, 1973).

Tales of Rabbi Nachman. Trans. Maurice Friedman. (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 1988).

Meetings, edited with an introduction and bibliography by Maurice Friedman, La Salle, Ill.: Open Court Pub. Co., 1973); 3rd ed. (London, New York: Routledge, 2002).

A Land of Two Peoples: Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs, edited with commentary by Paul R. Mendes-Flohr, New York: Oxford University Press., 1983); 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

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PRIMARY SOURCES Ecstatic Confessions, edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr, translated by Esther Cameron, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985).

Chinese Tales: Zhuangzi, Sayings and Parables and Chinese Ghost and Love stories, translated

by Alex Page, with an introduction by Irene Eber, Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1991).

Tales of the Hasidim, foreword by Chaim Potok (New York: Schocken Books, distributed by Pantheon, 1991).

On Intersubjectivity and Cultural Creativity, edited and with an introduction by S.N. Eisenstadt, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

Scripture and Translation, Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, translated by Lawrence Rosenwald with Everett Fox. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).

Paths in Utopia, translated by R.F. Hull. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996).

The Letters of Martin Buber: A Life of Dialogue. Ed. Nahum N. Glatzer and Paul Mendes-Flohr.

Trans. Richard and Clara Winston and Harry Zohn. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1996.

The First Buber: Youthful Zionist Writings of Martin Buber, edited and translated from the German

by Gilya G. Schmidt, Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1999).

Martin Buber on Psychology and Psychotherapy: Essays, Letters, and Dialogue, edited by Judith Buber Agassi, with a foreword by Paul Roazin (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999).

Gog and Magog: A Novel, translated from the German by Ludwig Lewisohn (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999).

The Legend of the Baal-Shem, translated by Maurice Friedman (London/ New York: Routledge, 2002).

Between Man and Man, translated by Ronald Gregor-Smith, with an introduction by Maurice Friedman,(London/New York: Routledge, 2002).

2002c, The Way of Man: According to the Teaching of Hasidim (London/New York: Routledge, 2002).

The Martin Buber Reader: Essential Writings, edited by Asher D. Biemann (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) Ten Rungs: Collected Hasidic Sayings, translated by Olga Marx (London/New York: Routledge), 2002.

Two Types of Faith, translated by Norman P. Goldhawk with an afterword by David Flusser (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2002).

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