Martin Buber

• 1. Introduction

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  Martin Buber was born in Vienna on the 8th of February 1878, into an Orthodox Jewish family with deep rabbinic roots stretching back to the 16th century. By the time he died on the 13th of June 1965 at his home in Jerusalem's Talbiya neighborhood, he had been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature ten times and the Nobel Peace Prize seven times. He never won either. What he left behind instead was something harder to quantify: a philosophy of human encounter that reshaped how people think about relationships, God, and what it means to be present with another person.

  Buber's most famous idea fits into two German word pairs: Ich-Du and Ich-Es. I-Thou and I-It. At its core, the question he posed was simple but disquieting. When you look at another person, do you meet them as a full human being, or do you treat them as an object in your world? He argued that most of modern life pushes us toward the second mode. And he believed that answer had consequences not just for philosophy, but for politics, community, and the future of the Middle East.

  How did a young man raised speaking Yiddish and German in the Jewish quarter of Lemberg come to write a book that would influence social psychology, religious existentialism, and the peace movement? And how did he hold together, across a long life, a commitment to mystical experience, Zionist politics, and a vision of Jewish-Arab coexistence that almost nobody else in his time was willing to defend?

• 2. Roots and Formation

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  When Buber was three years old, his parents divorced, and he was sent to live with his grandfather Solomon Buber in Lemberg, the city now known as Lviv in Ukraine. Solomon was a recognized scholar of Midrash and Rabbinic Literature, and growing up in that household gave Buber his first deep immersion in Jewish textual tradition. At home, the languages were Yiddish and German.

  Buber was a direct descendant of the 16th-century rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen of Padua, known by the Hebrew acronym Maharam. Karl Marx was another notable relative in that family line. Despite this distinguished heritage, a personal religious crisis in his adolescence led Buber away from Jewish observance. He began reading Immanuel Kant, then Soren Kierkegaard, then Friedrich Nietzsche. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, in particular, set him on the path toward secular philosophy.

  In 1896, he went to study in Vienna, taking up philosophy, art history, German studies, and philology. In 1898, he joined the Zionist movement. In 1899, while studying in Zurich, he met Paula Winkler, described in the sources as a brilliant Catholic writer from a Bavarian peasant family. Paula left the Catholic Church in 1901 and converted to Judaism in 1907. Together they would have two children, a son named Rafael and a daughter named Eva Strauss-Steinitz.

  In 1892, Buber had returned to his father's house in Lemberg before his university years began. Those years of shuttling between a grandfather steeped in rabbinic learning and his own restless philosophical searching would leave a permanent mark. Buber never fully abandoned Jewish culture; instead, he tried to transform it from the inside, finding in Hasidic mysticism a way to honor what he had inherited while building something new upon it.

• 3. I-Thou and I-It

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  In 1923, Buber published Ich und Du, the essay that would define him for the rest of the world. The book was later translated into English as I and Thou. Though Buber edited it later in life, he refused to make substantial changes to it, treating it as a foundational statement rather than a draft.

  The book draws on two key inspirations Buber named directly: Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity and Kierkegaard's concept of the Single One. From these, he built a framework built around modes of existence. In the Ich-Du relationship, two beings meet one another in their full, authentic reality. There is no qualification, no objectification, no mental representation standing between them. Buber illustrated this kind of encounter with examples from everyday life: two lovers, a person observing a cat, an author sitting with a tree, two strangers on a train.

  In an Ich-Du encounter, Buber argued, even infinity becomes actual rather than merely conceptual. He was careful to note that the relationship has no measurable structure and transmits no content in the ordinary sense. It cannot be proven to occur as a discrete event. Yet he insisted it is real and perceivable.

  The Ich-Es relationship works in the opposite direction. Here, the "I" does not meet another being; it encounters a mental representation of one. The other person or thing becomes an object to be used, classified, and experienced in terms of what it can offer the self. Buber traced this idea partly to Kant's theory of the phenomenon: the object exists as a thought in the individual's mind. The Ich-Es relationship is, in this sense, a monologue rather than a dialogue, a relationship with oneself disguised as a relationship with the world.

  Buber believed human life oscillates between these two modes, and that genuine Ich-Du moments are comparatively rare. He diagnosed what he saw as modern isolation and dehumanization as the result of an expanding Ich-Es orientation, a purely analytic and material view of existence that objectifies even other human beings. In 1949, he developed related ideas in Paths in Utopia, where he outlined what he called his theory of the dialogical community, founded on interpersonal dialogical relationships.

• 4. God, Mysticism, and Hasidism

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  Buber's engagement with Hasidism was not merely academic. He saw Hasidic communities as models of something his own secular world had lost: a way of living in which religious experience and daily activity were not separated from each other. A worker's relation to his tools, in Buber's reading of the Hasidic tradition, could itself be a form of encounter with the divine.

  In 1906, he published Die Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman, a collection of tales drawn from Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, a celebrated Hasidic rebbe, retold by Buber in what scholars describe as a Neo-Hasidic style. Two years later, in 1908, he published Die Legende des Baalschem, stories of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism. From 1906 until 1914, Buber published a series of editions of Hasidic, mystical, and mythic texts from both Jewish and world sources.

  His philosophical treatment of the relationship between humans and God fits directly inside the Ich-Du framework. Buber argued that God can only be encountered in an I-Thou mode, never through objectification or doctrinal analysis. To approach God while actively seeking that relationship is already to introduce qualities associated with I-It thinking, which forecloses the encounter. The person must be open but not grasping; then, Buber wrote, God comes in response to that welcome. And because the God he described is completely devoid of qualities, the I-Thou relationship with God lasts only as long as the individual wills it. When the individual returns to an I-It orientation, the deeper connection is lost.

  Buber rejected the labels of philosopher and theologian alike. He claimed he was not interested in ideas in the abstract, only in personal experience, and that he could not discuss God directly, only the nature of relationships to God. Gershom Scholem, whom Buber mentored, would become one of the foremost scholars of Jewish mysticism of the twentieth century; Scholem later dedicated his bibliography of the Zohar to Buber.

• 5. Zionism and the Binational Vision

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  Buber joined the Zionist movement in 1898, and in 1902, he became editor of Die Welt, the central weekly organ of the movement. His tenure lasted only a year before he broke away to pursue his Hasidic studies. But his disagreements with the dominant Zionist leadership, especially Theodor Herzl, never disappeared.

  Herzl did not envision Zionism as having religious objectives. Buber did. For Buber, Zionism was fundamentally about social and spiritual enrichment. He described Herzl in a 1910 essay called "He and We" as a person whose drive to act was so strong it prevented him from acquiring knowledge for its own sake. Herzl had died in 1904, but Buber used the essay to draw a parallel between Herzl and the Baal Shem Tov, arguing that both sought to reinstate the Jewish people through different paths: one through history and indirect political action, the other through direct spiritual renewal.

  By the early 1920s, Buber had moved toward a position that set him apart from mainstream Zionism entirely. He began advocating for a binational Jewish-Arab state, writing that the Jewish people should proclaim their desire to live in peace and brotherhood with the Arab people and to develop a common homeland as a republic in which both peoples could develop freely. In 1925, he and his friend Judah Magnes co-founded Brit Shalom, the Covenant of Peace, an organization devoted to the creation of a binational state. The group also served as an early venue for collaboration with Gershom Scholem on questions of Jewish-Arab coexistence.

  In 1942, after settling in Jerusalem, Buber co-founded the Ihud party, which carried forward the bi-nationalist program. After Israel's independence in 1948, he went further still, advocating for Israel's participation in a wider federation of Near East states. He remained vocal about the treatment of Arab refugees and was unafraid to criticize David Ben-Gurion, the country's first Prime Minister, directly. In a 1929 essay, he had already acknowledged that coexistence would not be without injustice, writing, "It is indeed true that there can be no life without injustice," but arguing that the human task begins the moment a person resolves not to do more injustice than survival requires.

• 6. Under Nazi Rule and Exile

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  In 1930, Buber was appointed an honorary professor at the University of Frankfurt am Main. Three years later, immediately after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, he resigned from the position in protest. On the 4th of October 1933, the Nazi authorities formally forbade him to lecture. In 1935, he was expelled from the Reich Chamber of Literature.

  Rather than leave Germany immediately, Buber founded the Central Office for Jewish Adult Education. The body became increasingly important as the Nazi government systematically excluded Jews from public education. It was a direct response to legislation with an act of institution-building. As the Nazi administration increased its obstruction of the Office, Buber continued the work.

  He also edited Der Jude, a Jewish monthly he had led since the war years, until 1924. And beginning in 1925, he and Franz Rosenzweig undertook a project of unusual ambition: a new German translation of the Hebrew Bible, which Buber called Verdeutschung, meaning Germanification. The translation did not rely on standard literary German. Instead, Buber and Rosenzweig sought newly coined, dynamically equivalent phrasings that would honor the multivalent character of the Hebrew original. Rosenzweig died before the project was complete; Buber continued it alone.

  In 1938, Buber finally left Germany and settled in Jerusalem. He received a professorship at Hebrew University, lecturing in anthropology and introductory sociology. The lectures from his first semester there were later published as The Problem of Man, in which he traced how the question "What is Man?" had become central to philosophical anthropology. Nine years after arriving in Jerusalem, in 1947, he was forced to flee his home in the Abu Tor neighborhood due to the advance of the Arab Liberation Army. His wife Paula Winkler died in 1958 in Venice. Buber himself died at his Talbiya home in 1965.

• 7. Recognition and Legacy

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  Buber's reputation during his lifetime crossed national and disciplinary boundaries in ways that were unusual for a philosopher working in German. In 1951, he received the Goethe Award from the University of Hamburg. In 1952, he began lecture tours of Europe and the United States, and that same year he publicly argued with Carl Jung over the existence of God. In 1953, he received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. In 1958, he was awarded the Israel Prize in the humanities. The Bialik Prize for Jewish thought followed in 1961, and in 1963, he won the Erasmus Prize in Amsterdam.

  His influence spread across social psychology, social philosophy, and religious existentialism. Though his social philosophy on questions of prefiguration aligns with anarchism in some respects, Buber explicitly rejected that affiliation during his lifetime, justifying the existence of a state under limited conditions.

  He was a mentor figure to both Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin during the years leading up to and through the Holocaust. Buber served as publisher and impresario to both men's careers, and Scholem helped arrange Buber's emigration to Palestine during the rise of Hitler. Benjamin did not survive his escape from Europe.

  Buber's personal archives, alongside several of his original writings, are preserved in the National Library of Israel on the campus of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. A critical edition of his collected works, the Martin Buber Werkausgabe, edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr and Peter Schafer and planned at twenty-one volumes, began publication in 2001 under the joint auspices of the Berliner Akademie der Wissenschaften and the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Buber's granddaughter Judith Buber Agassi, who was born in 1924 and died in 2018, edited a volume of his writings on psychology and psychotherapy that appeared in 1999.