A grandfather’s library in Lemberg
Martin Buber, Mordechai in Hebrew, was born in Vienna on February 8, 1878, into a prosperous Jewish family at the heart of the Habsburg Empire. His parents, Carl and Elise Buber, separated when he was a small child, and the boy was sent east to be raised by his paternal grandparents in Lemberg, the Galician city now called Lviv in Ukraine. It was a decisive move. His grandfather, Solomon Buber, was a wealthy landowner and banker, but above all a scholar who produced the first modern critical editions of rabbinic midrash. He was a man of the Jewish Enlightenment who was nonetheless honoured by the traditional community around him.
The boy was schooled largely at home and grew up bookish and solitary, absorbing languages with ease: German at home, Polish at his gymnasium, Hebrew and Yiddish around him, then Greek, Latin, French, Italian and English. In his teens he went through a religious crisis, drifted away from Jewish observance, and read Kant, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. It was the beginning of a lifelong attempt to bring the East European Jewish world of his childhood into conversation with the philosophy and literature of the West.
Student, Zionist and editor
From 1896 Buber studied philosophy, art history, literature and psychology at the universities of Vienna, Leipzig, Zurich and Berlin, where his teachers included Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Simmel. He earned his doctorate in Vienna in 1904 with a dissertation on the problem of individuation in Nicholas of Cusa and Jakob Böhme. By then he was already a public figure in a different arena: he joined the Zionist movement in 1898, spoke at its congresses, and for a time edited its central weekly, Die Welt.
Buber’s Zionism was never Theodor Herzl’s. Herzl wanted a political solution, a charter, a state, safety for persecuted Jews. Buber, influenced by the cultural Zionist Ahad Ha’am, wanted a renewal of Jewish spirit and community, a Hebrew humanism that would make the Jewish people an example rather than merely another nation. The two men worked together and disagreed respectfully until Herzl’s death in 1904.
In Zurich in 1899 Buber met Paula Winkler, a Munich-born Catholic writer who published under the pen name Georg Munk. They became inseparable; their children, Rafael and Eva, were born in 1900 and 1901, and Paula converted to Judaism before they married in 1907. For the rest of his life she was his collaborator, editor, organiser and closest critic.
The Hasidic tales
Around 1904 Buber withdrew from Zionist politics to immerse himself in the literature of Hasidism, the popular mystical movement that had swept East European Jewry in the eighteenth century. Educated German Jews tended to regard the Hasidim as backward; Buber saw in them a religion lived in daily life, in which the holy could be met in work, eating, friendship and play. His retellings, The Tales of Rabbi Nachman (1906) and The Legend of the Baal Shem (1908), followed decades later by the Tales of the Hasidim, introduced that world to a vast modern readership, Jewish and non-Jewish alike.
Scholars have since noted that the books were partly a joint creation: Buber produced rough translations from Hebrew and Yiddish, and Paula, a gifted storyteller, shaped many of the narratives. Historians such as Gershom Scholem later criticised Buber for presenting Hasidism selectively, as a timeless spirituality rather than a historical movement with its own doctrines. But the tales did more than any scholarly work to make Hasidism part of the world’s spiritual literature.
I and Thou
Buber’s fame rests above all on a short, poetic book published in 1923, Ich und Du, I and Thou. Its argument is that human beings stand in two fundamentally different relations to the world. In the I–It relation we experience, measure, use and classify: other people and things become objects in our own scheme. In the I–Thou relation we meet another being whole, in mutuality and presence, without reducing them to a function. Buber’s examples ranged from two lovers and strangers on a train to a man contemplating a tree. ‘All real living is meeting’ he wrote.
Buber did not condemn the I–It: science, medicine and ordinary life depend on it. His warning was that modern society was letting it swallow everything, so that people treated even each other as instruments. And he argued that every genuine I–Thou encounter points beyond itself to the ‘eternal Thou’, God, who cannot be proved or defined, only addressed. The book became a classic. It was translated into English in 1937 and again in 1970, influenced theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr, and was cited by Martin Luther King Jr. in his 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail, where he described segregation as substituting an I–It relationship for an I–Thou relationship.
The Bible in German, and a school under the Nazis
In 1916 the Bubers moved to Heppenheim, a small town near Frankfurt, and Buber founded and edited the influential monthly Der Jude. He taught at the Free Jewish House of Learning founded by his friend Franz Rosenzweig, and from 1923 lectured at the University of Frankfurt. In 1925 the two men began a new translation of the Hebrew Bible into German, not a polished literary version but one that tried to let the reader hear the rhythm, repetitions and word-roots of the Hebrew behind it. Rosenzweig, paralysed by illness, died in 1929; Buber carried the work on alone for decades, completing it in Jerusalem in 1961.
When Hitler came to power in 1933, Buber gave up his university post before he could be dismissed. As Jews were driven out of German schools and professions, he directed the Central Office for Jewish Adult Education, training teachers and creating, as historians have put it, islands of free speech inside a totalitarian state; one of his assistants was the young Abraham Joshua Heschel. The Nazis forbade him to lecture and expelled him from the Reich Chamber of Literature. In 1938, aged sixty, he emigrated to Jerusalem to take up a chair in social philosophy at the Hebrew University. His house in Heppenheim was ransacked during the pogrom of November 1938.
A Zionist who argued for sharing the land
In Palestine Buber became the best-known voice of a minority position. From the early 1920s he had urged the Zionist movement to declare its wish to live ‘in peace and brotherhood with the Arab people’ and to build a common homeland. With his friend Judah Magnes he supported Brit Shalom in the 1920s and in 1942 co-founded Ihud, which campaigned for a binational state in which neither people would dominate the other, even if that meant Jews remaining a minority.
History went another way. In 1947–48 Buber and his family had to leave their home in the Abu Tor neighbourhood of Jerusalem during the fighting. After Israel’s independence he accepted the state, but kept arguing for a federation with its Arab neighbours, and he publicly criticised the government, including David Ben-Gurion, over the treatment of Arab refugees and citizens. Many Israelis found him naïve; others saw him as the conscience of the young state. Either way, he never stopped insisting that the means by which a nation was built would shape what it became.
The legend and the man
Small, with a long white beard and a gaze that photographs made famous, Buber looked to many admirers like an Old Testament prophet. Edmund Husserl is said to have remarked, ‘Buber? But he is a legend!’ After the Second World War he became a sought-after lecturer across Europe and the United States, and the first Jewish voice that many Germans were willing to hear: in 1953 he accepted the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, only eight years after the Holocaust, a gesture of dialogue that not every Jew could share.
Those close to him also recorded a more complicated figure. The philosopher of encounter guarded his privacy fiercely, allowed very few people to call him by his first name, kept a rigorous working schedule, and expected deference from family and students. Younger intellectuals of the 1920s mocked the cult around his expressive prose. Buber himself refused the labels ‘philosopher’ and ‘theologian’, saying he was concerned not with ideas but with lived relationship, with what happens ‘between’ people.
Last years
Buber continued to write into his eighties: on the Bible, on Hasidism, on education, on psychotherapy (he held a famous public dialogue with the psychologist Carl Rogers in 1957), and on the ‘eclipse of God’ in modern culture. He received the Israel Prize in 1958, the Bialik Prize in 1961 and the Erasmus Prize in 1963, and was nominated many times for the Nobel Prizes in literature and peace. Paula died in 1958, while the couple were travelling in Venice; it was the hardest loss of his life.
Martin Buber died at his home in the Talbiya neighbourhood of Jerusalem on June 13, 1965, aged eighty-seven. His funeral was a state occasion, and a delegation of the Arab Students’ Organization laid a wreath on his grave in recognition of his work for peace between Jews and Arabs, a small gesture that said much about the causes he had served.
Legacy
Buber’s influence runs far beyond Jewish thought. His distinction between treating a person as a Thou and as an It became part of the vocabulary of education, social work, nursing, counselling and interfaith dialogue, and his ideas helped shape humanistic psychotherapy. Christian theologians took him up as eagerly as Jews; his Bible translation remains a landmark of German-Jewish culture; his Hasidic tales are still in print in many languages. Doctoral students he supervised in Jerusalem, such as the sociologist Shmuel Eisenstadt, went on to shape Israeli social science.
Above all, Buber left a question that every generation has to answer for itself: whether we will meet the people in front of us, the stranger, the neighbour, the enemy, as persons, or only use them. He believed the fate of individuals and nations alike depended on the answer.
Sources & further reading
Martin Buber, Wikipedia · Martin Buber, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy · Martin Buber, Jewish Virtual Library · Martin Buber, Wikiquote · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.