Martin Buber

(or Mardochai). Born Feb. 8, 1878, in Vienna; died June 13, 1965, in Jerusalem. Jewish religious philosopher and writer. Exponent of Judaism. Wrote in two languages—German and Hebrew.

From 1924 to 1933, Buber was professor of the philosophy of Judaism and of ethics at the University of Frankfurt am Main. In 1933 he emigrated from Germany, going first to Switzerland and then to Palestine, where he was professor of sociology at the University of Jerusalem. He joined the Zionist movement at the end of the 1890’s, but as early as 1901 he moved away from political Zionism and became an influential ideologist of the Jewish cultural-nationalist movement. After World War II, Buber criticized Arab-Jewish hostility and the inhumane acts against Palestinian Arabs. Buber’s philosophy is close to existentialism; its central idea is of existence as a “dialogue” (between god and man, man and the universe, and so on; I and Thou, 1922). He sought the “dialogical” spirit—which stands opposed to the Greek spirit of “monologism”—in the biblical tradition of the past. He devoted particular attention to the pantheistic tendencies of Hasidism (Tales of Rabbi Nachman, 1906). Buber’s main literary work was the novel-chronicle Gog and Magog (1949), which was based on the life of the Polish Hasidim of the early 19th century. Also widely known are his retellings of the folk legends of the Jews of Eastern Europe about, the wise and just zaddikim. Buber’s sociological views were considerably influenced by anarchism.