The notion of politics plays an important role in Buber1 — all the more so given what we know of his biography. He was born in fin-de-siècle Vienna (1878) and raised in Galicia, in Lemberg. After studying in Vienna, Leipzig, Berlin, Zurich, and then Vienna again, where he defended his dissertation on Jakob Böhme and Nicholas of Cusa in 1904, Buber spent a year in Florence and then in Berlin (1906–1916). He settled in southern Hesse, at Heppenheim, until his departure for Palestine (1938), where he would teach at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, an institution he had helped to found through his programmatic essay of 1902 (with Weizmann and Feiwel). He was thus not only a subject of the Emperor but also a citizen of the Weimar Republic. Under Nazism, he would be placed under surveillance and discriminated against, like the community alongside which he chose to remain. He then lived in Jerusalem, where he witnessed the genesis of the State of Israel, of which he was one of the consciences until his death in 1965.
Buber saw four empires collapse, witnessed two world wars, was a contemporary of the Shoah, and an engaged spectator of the State’s first years, beginning with the “war of liberation” of 1948. Beyond his works on Hasidism, his major philosophical book, Je et Tu (I and Thou, 1923), and his work on the Bible, which he translated with Franz Rosenzweig (1925–1929), he is famous for his tireless commitment to respect for the Arab population of Palestine, whose life he shared for a few years when he lived in Abu Tor.2
There is no doubt that he was marked — like many Jews of his generation — by the experience of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was rather favorable to the Jews. Of course, the communities of Galicia cannot be compared with those of Vienna and Budapest, yet coexistence was nonetheless the rule. In Lemberg, where he lived from the age of three to fifteen, he encountered the diversity of languages, religions, and cultures right up into his (Polish) lycée. Beyond the famous descriptions of Shai Agnon, Alfred Döblin, and Joseph Roth, one often forgets that of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch — today known for other habits — who, as the son of the police chief of the city of Lemberg, knew admirably the Jewish milieus he describes with affection and sensitivity. He himself came of old Catholic “stock.”
After his parents’ divorce, Buber went to Lemberg to live with his grandfather, an immense scholar of Jewish learning, a shrewd businessman, and a correspondent of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU). In that city, the Jews were caught in the crucible of the various nationalisms (Austro-Hungarian, German, Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, and so on). Likewise, his grandfather stood at equal distance from the maskilim (proponents of the Haskala, the Jewish “Enlightenment”), the Orthodox, and the Zionists — something the young Buber observed daily.
It was in 1898, in Leipzig, that Buber founded the first local Zionist association. He then took part in the third (1899) and fifth (1901) Zionist congresses. Together with Chaim Weizmann and a few friends, he created a democratic faction within the movement, advocating a cultural and humanist Zionism little interested in Herzl’s design, which counted on diplomacy and on his encounters with the great men of this world to obtain a homeland for the Jews — if possible, Palestine. Buber was already an excellent orator and possessed a brisk pen. He co-founded a publishing house for the Jews and, in 1902, drew up with Chaim Weizmann a plan for the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
His first genuine political initiation, of which he would keep the trace all his life, was his encounter with Gustav Landauer (1870–1919). Thanks to the work of Michael Löwy, this figure — assassinated during the abortive November revolution, and whose complete works are now being published in Germany — is fairly well known. Buber had been to Munich to confer with the architects of that revolution, which would end in blood, including Landauer’s own. The latter was not only an anarchist3 but also a translator of Shakespeare and a great reader of Meister Eckhart. Buber was his testamentary heir. He edited several volumes of his work, notably a portion of his correspondence, and for ten years devoted himself to getting his friend’s texts published. Landauer’s pamphlet Révolution4 had been commissioned by Buber for his series “Society,” a collection of some forty monographs that Buber directed between 1906 and 1912. At bottom, this enlightened and spiritualist anarchism never left Buber, who did a great deal to make the unfinished thought and desperate action of a German revolution known in Europe, in Mandatory Palestine, and later in Israel. In 1911, Landauer’s text Aufruf zum Sozialismus (A Call to Socialism) made a deep impression on Buber, who would take part in the meetings of a small anti-statist group, the “Socialist League.”
The series brazenly titled “Society” (Die Gesellschaft) reminds us that Buber was present at the first congress of the German Society for Sociology, where there was a much-noted debate with its founder and first president, Ferdinand Tönnies — which, incidentally, would also yield a volume on Sitte (Custom). When one runs through the list of contributors, one is left astonished at the scale of the undertaking, and it is clear that this ensemble must be read as a philosophico-political gesture. Judge for yourself: Das Proletariat (W. Sombart), which opens the series, followed by Die Religion (G. Simmel5), Die Politik (A. Ular), Der Streik (E. Bernstein), Der Staat (F. Oppenheimer), Das Parlament (H. von Gerlach), Die Börse (F. Glaser), Die Frauenbewegung (E. Key), Die Partei (C. Jentsch), Das Recht (J. Kohler), Die Arbeiterbewegung (E. Bernstein), and of course Die Erotik (L. Andreas-Salomé6).7 At twenty-seven, Buber was thus at the head of a veritable general introduction to society.
One of the controversial aspects of Buber’s life was his few months’ commitment, in 1914, to German patriotism, even though he had belonged to pacifist circles. The man of peace that Landauer was would in fact reproach him for it. Very quickly, however, Buber abandoned this position, observing that Jews were firing on other Jews.8 In 1916, Buber moved “to the country,” to Heppenheim in the Odenwald. He founded and directed a monthly that would play a central role in Jewish culture, The Jew (Der Jude). Very present in the progressive circles of Frankfurt, where he taught in two strategic settings — the university and the Lehrhaus, an institution founded by Franz Rosenzweig that combined the ideas of the beit hamidrash (“house of study”) and the people’s university — Buber was in constant contact with the leading circles of the ephemeral Weimar Republic, which, when they were Jewish, regarded him as their mentor.
After 1933, and… a visit from the Gestapo followed by a ban on public speaking that was quickly lifted, Buber led the spiritual resistance, crisscrossing Germany for seminars, lectures, and colloquia in support of adult education. To train the trainers: this was, all his life, his mission — both in Germany (where it was necessary to re-Judaize a community cast out, even as its own Judaism was confined to reading Luther’s Bible and listening to the music of Bach) and in Palestine and Israel (where it was likewise necessary, within a few months, to provide schooling for hundreds of thousands of new immigrants). In both cases, he conceived and directed institutions devoted to this colossal task.
But let us go back a little.
A proponent of cultural Zionism, Buber struggled very early against the chauvinism imported from Germany; for though the Jews were a majority in Jerusalem, the same was not true of the country as a whole. Thus the socialism of the kibbutzim — which owes so much to Buber’s thought, and where a great deal of Landauer is read — had to take care not to despoil the Arabs, the idea being that there was room for everyone. But the Western powers were negotiating, lying, and seizing for themselves regions that did not belong to them. The (secret) Sykes-Picot agreements of 1916 preceded by a year the Balfour Declaration, which came the same week as the Russian Revolution in November 1917. The end of the war would alter the alliances, and Zionism would evolve. Let us recall that Herzl died in 1904. Buber had become the leader of a new generation devoted to a different conception of Zionism. To Stefan Zweig, who feared that Jewish nationalism might be no more than a pale imitation of the nationalisms beginning to ravage Europe, he replied on February 4, 1918:
“I simply want to tell you today that I know nothing of a ‘Jewish State’ with cannons, flags, and medals,” not even in the form of a dream. What will come about depends solely on those who will create this State; that is why people who share my ideas about man and humanity must play a decisive role now that it is once again given to men to found a community. As for the new people called to be born of an ancient lineage, I cannot take into account your deductions founded on History.9
Buber and his friends would at once be in opposition to the mainstream, which sought to create a Jewish majority in Palestine. To the faithful Shmuel Hugo Bergmann, newly arrived from Prague, he wrote:
“We must not hide from ourselves that most of the Zionists at the head of the movement (and no doubt most of those who follow it as well) are today unbridled nationalists (on the European model), imperialists, or even people who, without even knowing it, are mercantile minds athirst for success. They speak of renaissance and think in terms of enterprise. If we do not manage to oppose to them a force that carries authority, the soul of our movement may be forever corrupted” (February 3/4, 1919).
To be sure, the Faisal-Weizmann agreement of January 3, 1919, might create an illusion, but it would be short-lived, and the first pogroms in Palestine occurred on April 4 and 5, 1920. The great powers were incapable of bringing about a true peace. They would do still worse in the Middle East.
“The principle of the centralizing State has proven incapable of restructuring the East and Europe, and it fails just as much in establishing a new society. It is the principle of federative socialism that is called upon to renew society, and it alone can succeed in regenerating the relations between peoples and, in particular, between Europe and Asia.”
And he set out his credo, from which he would never depart:
“Only decentralized communitarian systems, composed of autonomous workers, can unite to form a true League of Nations that will be able to extend its hand to the East; and the East will respond with a fraternal handshake, for such a League of Nations will no longer have the will to do violence to anyone.”
It was at the Twelfth Zionist Congress (held in Karlsbad) in 1921 that Buber sought to strike a decisive blow to carry these ideas, with a conceptual distinction to which he would often return:
“For a people, self-affirmation is an instinct with creative effects; for a nation, it is indissolubly bound to a mission, to an idea; for nationalism, it becomes an end, a program.”
Thus the nation could not be an end in itself, and one had to choose between two nationalisms, one legitimate and one illegitimate. Certainly Judaism is a nation, but it is much more: it is a people as well as a religious structure that must help establish a Jewish community in Palestine. To change the nation, to change Judaism, in order to change men and women so as to promote a supranational ethical demand — this was the goal. He was therefore charged with a proposal for the settlement of the Arab problem. Although he deplored the time lost (the Balfour Declaration dated from 1917), Buber knew there was not a moment more to lose, despite the violent confrontations in Palestine:
“Our return to Eretz Israel, which must take the form of an ever-increasing immigration, does not wish to harm anyone. In alliance with the Arab people, we want to create on this land that we share a flourishing economic and cultural community, whose development will allow each of its members to become autonomous and to flourish without hindrance.”
This resolution would meet with such opposition that the bureaus amended it considerably, to Buber’s great dismay. But he had understood that the politicians had the upper hand over the Zionist congresses.
At the inauguration of the Hebrew University (May 1, 1925), the invited Arabists — often Germans who would form the backbone of the new institution’s Orientalist department — gathered at the home of Arthur Ruppin (1876–1943), a recognized sociologist who had been in Palestine since 1908 and was charged precisely with buying land. They founded an association whose name would become very well known, the Brit Shalom, that alliance for peace which would bring together a large part of the intellectual emigration from Central and Western Europe. There one finds Gershom Scholem, Ernst Simon, Shmuel Hugo Bergmann, Hans Kohn, Robert and Felix Weltsch, and of course Judah L. Magnes, the charismatic American rabbi who would be chancellor and then president of the Hebrew University — all of them doctors, who would make up the body of future professors. One notes a strong presence of Jews come from Prague in the midst of a multiethnic empire, as if bilingualism predisposed one to binationalism!
The aim of the association is clear: “to achieve understanding between Jews and Arabs, to organize their mutual relations in Palestine on the basis of an absolute political equality between the two culturally autonomous peoples, and to determine the framework of their cooperation for the development of the country.” There follows a series of proposals aimed at changing public opinion and, above all, at informing it of a reality of which many German Jews were unaware. There was still an enormous demographic difference — 75,000 Jews for a population of 750,000 Arabs! And yet one had to move quickly, for that same year saw Vladimir Jabotinsky create a “revisionist” Zionism — nationalist, chauvinist, muscular, and devastating. It would for a long time play, and still plays, a crucial role in the political life of the Jews, especially in Israel. Buber traveled in Palestine in 1927, listened a great deal, consulted still more, and prepared his departure for Jerusalem, to which he would return before settling there definitively at the end of March 1938.
In the meantime, the massacres of Hebron and Safed, and then the events at the Wailing Wall (summer 1929), would make the solution all the more urgent. On October 31, 1929, in Berlin, Buber presented his solution of a binational state — at which people scoff today, simply forgetting that it was conceived when the Jews were a minority in Palestine. “When we speak of colonization, we are not thinking of extending our power, but of gathering ourselves together; we are not even thinking of acquiring power.” And he reaffirmed:
“Our relationship with the Arabs ought to be established in a positive way in every domain. On the economic plane, we ought to found a concrete solidarity of interest, instead of giving assurances to an existing solidarity of interests, as has always been the case; everywhere, at every moment when economic decisions are to be made, we ought to take into account the interests of the Arab people. This has not been done sufficiently. Anyone who knows the situation knows that many opportunities have been lost.”
The members of the Brit Shalom would each go their own way, and Hans Kohn would even leave Palestine to pursue a great career in the USA.
A long, famous letter to Gandhi in 1938 allowed Buber to gather his arguments in defense of the Jewish presence in Palestine.
Buber did not lay down his arms, and in October 1939 he created a league for understanding and collaboration between Jews and Arabs. Between 1940 and 1942 it published a Hebrew-language review, Be’ayot ha-Yom (problems of the day), which would later become Be’ayot ha-Zman (problems of our time). As time went on, Buber also spoke out in English and in Hebrew. Meanwhile, the implementation of the Final Solution was beginning, and the conference at the Biltmore Hotel in New York called for the creation of a Jewish State — a response to the possibility of creating an Arab State envisaged in the White Paper of 1939. Buber then created the Ihud (Union), taking into account the catastrophic new conditions that made the creation of a refuge for the Jews urgent. The aim was still, while remaining of course within the Zionist movement, “to work out in Palestine a form of government on the basis of equal political rights for the two peoples.” It was therefore toward a federation of sovereign States that one had to steer, linking it with the Anglo-American union. The revelation of the Shoah would precipitate events. He even came to speak before the Anglo-American commission in March 1946, which had already heard Einstein in the USA. For Buber, there must under no circumstances be a separation between the two communities. The commission, for that matter, seemed to agree with him. It was indeed binationalism that was the solution. In the meantime, the King David Hotel blew up, the country was set ablaze, it was civil war and opposition to the British. Buber published with his group Towards Union in Palestine: Essays on Zionism and Jewish-Arab Cooperation, in English, in 1947. We know what followed: the Partition Plan, the unilateral declaration of the State of Israel, and then… the war, settled by a victory. But Buber would not relax his attention or his pressure on the government, which filled Ben-Gurion with respect! “I fear that a victory of the Jews may mean the defeat of Zionism,” he said in 1948! Bernadotte was assassinated in September 1948. In April 1949, Buber founded a new review, Ner, and set to work again with admirable constancy. He also exerted a growing influence over certain kibbutzim, founded by his pupils and by the permanent training seminary he had long dreamed of.
In 1954, in an Israeli newspaper, he observed:
“Our principal error was that we did not strive, from the moment of our arrival here, to give rise to trust in the hearts of the Arabs, on both the political and economic planes. We helped to reinforce the argument that we were foreigners, outsiders who had no interest in an agreement with the Arabs. This prepared the ground for all the subsequent conflicts.”
From then on, the problem of the refugees and the confiscations of land would be at the center of his public interventions, and he would become a kind of conscience of the young State, speaking out at the time of the massacres of Deir Yassin and Kfar Kassem, calling into question the military administration and the Eichmann trial.
But Buber well knew that, since the 1920s, there had been very little response on the Arab side. Some were even assassinated for having met regularly with Israelis. In 1950 he gathered his political position in Pfade in Utopia (Paths in Utopia).10 In 1960, he took part in Paris in a meeting intended to alert international public opinion about the Jews of the USSR, before going on to Florence, where he would hold a dialogue with Arab intellectuals within the framework of the Mediterranean encounters organized by Giorgio La Pira, the city’s charismatic mayor. Thus, having set out from a political reflection within Judaism, he came to international politics, where his voice was very much heard — as is attested by his encounters with Dag Hammarskjöld, secretary-general of the UN, shot down in flight while he was translating I and Thou into Swedish in order to have the Nobel Prize awarded to Buber.
Today, on the walls of the Hebrew University or on political leaflets, quotations recall this commitment and this utopia.
Notes
Maurice-Ruben Hayoun, Martin Buber. Une introduction, Pocket, coll. Agora, Paris, 2013.↩︎
A large part of Buber’s work is available in French, as is a volume of his correspondence.↩︎
Amedeo Bertolo (ed.), Juifs et anarchistes. Histoire d’une rencontre, Paris, 2001.↩︎
Anonymous trans., Paris 1974, Arles 2006.↩︎
Trans. Philippe Ivernel, afterword by Patrick Vatier, Paris 1998.↩︎
Trans. Henri Plard, introduction by Ernst Pfeiffer, Paris 1984.↩︎
Jacques Le Rider has just published Fritz Mauthner’s contribution, Le langage, Paris 2013.↩︎
Let us recall that in 1916 the German Ministry of War commissioned a survey to determine whether the Jews were not shirkers. The result demonstrating the contrary, it was given no publicity: of 120,000 Jewish combatants, 12,000 died at the front and thousands more were wounded. We know that the Jews of France were not to be outdone where patriotism was concerned.↩︎
Martin Buber to Stefan Zweig, February 4, 1918. All the texts cited in this article are drawn from two remarkable anthologies: Martin Buber, Une terre et deux peuples (A Land of Two Peoples), texts collected and presented by Paul Mendes-Flohr, trans. Dominique Miermont and Brigitte Vergne, Paris 1985. One will also find pertinent texts on our subject in the excellent anthology by Denis Charbit, Sionismes, Seuil, Paris.↩︎
Trans. Paul Corset, Paris 1977.↩︎