Martin Buber’s full beard and modest bearing suggest an almost biblical presence. But, as the subtitle of this highly readable biography indicates, Buber was an “anomalous Jew,” an embodiment of the conflicts of the modern spiritually animated Jew freed from the restraints of ritual and practice.
Philosopher, religious thinker, Jewish activist, and humanitarian, Martin Buber played a major part in the movements for change in early twentieth-century Judaism. Although, he was not as influential as he would have hoped in the view of Paul Mendes-Flohr, professor emeritus of the University of Chicago Divinity School and Hebrew University and editor-in-chief of the German edition of Buber’s collected works. In this impressive biography, based on thousands of Buber’s letters and a few “autobiographical fragments,” Mendes-Flohr unfolds a history of Buber’s thought, influence, and activism that caused him to be considered an outsider, particularly in Israel, even as he was highly respected and admired in Europe and the United States.
Originally drawn to Zionism as a path to a revitalized Jewish communal life freed from ritual, Buber never entirely made peace with the political state, nor the state with him. Buber was particularly critical of the treatment of the Palestinians, and his opposition to the execution of Adolf Eichmann, one of the prime organizers of the Holocaust, was widely condemned. In translating the tales of Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav, he sought to restore “a great buried heritage of faith to the light,” but was criticized for romanticizing Hasidism. He did not practice Judaism after his fourteenth birthday, but his life was infused with a deep love for Judaism and its spiritual force.
Mendes-Flohr concentrates on Buber’s thought with only brief references to his personal life. Buber grew up in his grandparents’ rigorously observant Orthodox home after his mother ran off with a Russian officer when he was only three years old. Mendes-Flohr suggests that Buber’s abandonment by his mother left a permanent mark and underscored his heightened sensitivity to others and his insistence on fully open and attentive dialogue — the I‑Thou meeting expressed in I and Thou, his best-known work. Buber’s dedication to dialogue, to meeting others in total honesty, attracted Christian as well as Jewish thinkers and laid a foundation for interfaith dialogue.
Buber’s life divides into several stages. Arriving in Vienna at eighteen years old, he threw himself into its heady cultural life. He was actively engaged in Zionism as a lecturer and editor in the unrealized hope that Zionism would foster a cultural Jewish renaissance. As a student at the University of Zurich, he was influenced by prominent German thinkers and philosophers. At the outbreak of World War I, he was carried away by the “transcendental” unity of the war effort and urged Jews to see in the war an opportunity to experience “the spirit of community,” a position he reversed two years later. His response to the Nazi persecution in 1930s Germany was Jewish adult education to build a community of moral strength that “will stand firm.” He and his wife did not leave Germany for Palestine until 1938. On the personal side, Mendes-Flohr touches upon Buber’s loving and collaborative marriage to Paula Winkler, whom he met as a student and with whom he had two children out of wedlock, and on his friendship and work with Franz Rosenzweig through Rosenzweig’s debilitating illness.
Fundamental to all Buber’s work was his deep love of Judaism, his commitment to dialogue, and his effort to integrate “the transcendent and the everyday.” He wrote a poetic prose that could inspire, but laid out few specifics: “I have no teaching. I only point to something….I take him who listens to me…to the window. I open the window and point to what is outside.”
Maron L. Waxman, retired editorial director, special projects, at the American Museum of Natural History, was also an editorial director at HarperCollins and Book-of-the-Month Club.