Martin Buber

Martin Buber, born in Vienna and raised in Lemberg/Lwów in Austrian Galicia (today Lviv, Ukraine), be­came a leading voice in twentieth-century religious and ethical thought within and beyond the Jewish world through a vast and diverse corpus of German and He­brew philosophical and cultural writing. His philoso­phy of dialogic relations between people and between the individual and God, first and most famously embodied in his 1923 Ich und Du (I and Thou), has enjoyed an ongoing impact on modern philosophi­cal, ethical, and religious thought well beyond the Jewish world. Also influential within Jewish life were his neo-Romantic reimagining of Hasidism’s impor­tance for acculturated Western Jewish readers and his existentialist vision of Zionism as a movement for Jewish spiritual and cultural renaissance that should be combined with a binational political solution to the Jewish-Palestinian conflict. At the turn of the century, Buber exerted an enormous influence on Jewish youth in Central Europe hungry for an alternative to assimi­lation with his vision of Zionism as Jewish individual and collective national renaissance through active and willed self-reinvention. Having joined the Zionist movement in 1898 and become the editor of Die Welt, the central organ of German Jewish Zionism, he began in 1916 to develop these ideas as editor of Der Jude, the most important journal of Jewish thought in Germany. In 1938, he was given a chair at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and moved to that city. Before 1948, he was active in Brit Shalom, which advocated for a bina­tional Jewish and Arab state in Palestine. He emerged as a leading voice in Western existentialist philosophy and religious thought particularly after World War II.