Who Was Martin Buber?
Abigail Gillman heads the advisory committee on a nine million-euro effort to digitize the correspondence of the prolific German Jewish intellectual
By Jeremy Schwab
There is a scene in Philip Roth’s debut 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus where the protagonist, Neil Klugman, is being interrogated by his girlfriend’s mother as to what congregation he is a part of. He is desperately trying to avoid telling Mrs. Patimkin, part of a generation of newly suburban and middle class Jewish Americans, that he is not part of any congregation. Grasping for a life raft, he throws out the question, “Have you heard of Martin Buber?”
Unfortunately for Neil, she has never heard of the Austro-German, and later Israeli, philosopher whose perspective on religion jibes with Neil’s own and might help explain to her what kind of Jewish young man her daughter is dating. Had she heard of Buber, she certainly would not have approved. Martin Buber advocated for the personal experience of the divine, encouraging Jews to question traditional dogma and divisions. He coined the term “religiosity” to explain this spirit of religious experimentation and renewal.
“Religiosity is that impulse of every person in every new generation to make religion new, make it ‘speak to me,’” explains Buber scholar Abigail Gillman, a professor of Hebrew, German, and Comparative Literature at CAS. Gillman heads an international advisory board on a new €9 million, 24-year grant to digitize, translate, and commentate on over 40,000 letters and other pieces of correspondence written by and to the extraordinarily prolific writer.
The new project, led by Professor Christian Wiese, holder of the Martin Buber Chair at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, will help introduce Buber to future generations through this massive trove of correspondence, currently housed in Israel, as well as in Europe and the U.S. Buber wrote to Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish theologians, journalists, and literary writers. People such as novelist Franz Kafka, father of modern political Zionism Theodor Herzl, and first president of Israel Chaim Weizmann.
A Man for His Times
Buber lived through a period of turmoil and trauma for European Jews. Born in Vienna in 1878, he saw the persecution and displacement of Jews from Russia, the rise of Zionism, a crescendo of European nationalism, World War I, the rise of Nazism, persecution and migration of Jews to America, the Holocaust, and finally the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. Gillman calls these “apocalyptic decades in Jewish and European history.”
“He was a man of his times, and a man for his times,” she says. “He used multiple forms to try to speak to his generation and to speak to the crises of his age.”
Buber spread himself very broadly. Throughout his life, he engaged in dialogue about humanity, Judaism, language, history, life, inter-cultural and inter-religious understanding. He wielded the “soft power” of dialogue to attempt to influence others. Indeed, dialogue is at the heart of his philosophy. In his influential book I and Thou, Buber proposes his thesis of existence as encounter, meaning that we create meaning through our encounters with each other, with inanimate objects, with God, and with all of existence.
Buber lived his life outside of comforting certainties. As Gillman puts it, “Buber was on the wrong side of every issue.” He championed unpopular opinions. For example, he promoted the creation of a bi-national state for Jews and Arabs. He argued against executing Adolf Eichmann, one of the main organizers of the Holocaust, on the premise that the new state of Israel should not execute people.
He struggled against the tide in other ways. He stayed in Germany after the Nazis came to power in 1933, becoming a pioneer of adult education as he organized a “traveling university,” encouraging Jews to reconnect with their roots and find strength there. He finally fled to Israel in 1938 at the urging of intellectuals who found him a position at Hebrew University.
His longest project, begun in the 1920s as a collaboration with the philosopher and translator Franz Rosenzweig (who died in 1929) and completed by Buber in 1961, was a bold translation of the Hebrew Bible into German. Their translation used a minimalistic, literalistic approach that jettisoned commentaries and employed concrete, rather than abstract, language. Buber was pointing towards religion as he felt it should be: experiential. In the translation, Buber and Rosenzweig didn’t use any proper names for God, just personal pronouns in all caps: HE, HIM, HIS. They wanted to create the sense that God was in conversation and relationship to the reader.
“He wanted to transform the book into a voice,” says Gillman. “The voice makes me a listener. I am listening, I am in a conversation.”
Rosenzweig and Buber’s was one of over 15 translations of the Hebrew Bible into German from the 18th through the 20th centuries, as German Jews were giving up Yiddish, learning German, and becoming modern European citizens. While their translation isn’t widely read, it continues to be widely studied; it has influenced liberal German pastors and biblical interpretation, and it remains a landmark work in the history of Bible translation. It is part of the broader stream of humanist thought.
“Buber wanted to figure out how Judaism and Jewish texts could speak to modern people,” says Gillman. He did this, too, through his translations, and retellings of mystical Hassidic legends. “He saw the power in these tales to speak to modern, assimilated people,” she says.
Nurturing the Human Future
“Buber represents something important in Germany,” she continues. “He represents the possibility of inter-religious dialogue.” Buber was harshly criticized by many fellow Jews, even called a traitor, for returning to Germany a few years after the war to speak to university students there. In 1953, German intellectuals wanted to give him the prestigious Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, and many pleaded with him to return and speak to German audiences.
Gillman explains his rationale for accepting. “He realized that there were German people, humanists, who needed to be nurtured, who needed to be talked to by a Jewish thinker. He realized these students were going to build the future Germany, and he was going to speak to them.” Buber believed humanists needed to unite; he called it the cross-front: people on the other side of a battle who are fighting for the same things you are.
Like many other humanists, Jewish and non-Jewish, Gillman was drawn to Buber as she explored the world of ideas.
“It was Buber, and other great humanists of his generation, Freud and Kafka, who inspired me to learn German as an undergraduate at Yale, and eventually, to train as a Germanist,” she recalls.
She was exposed to Buber’s work early in life. Her father, Neil Gillman, taught philosophy and theology at the Jewish Theological Seminary and in Reform and Conservative synagogues. At the time, he and many of his contemporaries in America were developing new ways to transmit Jewish thought to the next generation of rabbis, educators, and laypeople. He taught Buber in every course.
“My father was an incredible teacher, who challenged his students intellectually, and theologically. He also cared about them deeply,” says Gillman. “He set a powerful model for me.”