BUBER, MARTIN

BUBER, MARTIN (1878–1965), philosopher and theologian, Zionist thinker and leader. Born in Vienna, Buber as a child lived in Lemberg with his grandfather solomon buber , the noted Midrash scholar. From 1896 he studied at the universities of Vienna, Leipzig, and Zurich, and finally at the University of Berlin, where he was a pupil of the philosophers Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Simmel. Having joined the Zionist movement in 1898, he was a delegate to the Third Zionist Congress in 1899 where he spoke on behalf of the Propaganda Committee. In this speech, which bore the influence of modern Hebrew and Yiddish writers, notably of Aḥad Ha-Am, Buber emphasized the importance of education as opposed to a program of propaganda. In 1901 he was appointed editor of the central weekly organ of the Zionist movement, Die Welt, in which he emphasized the need for a new Jewish cultural creativity. This emphasis on cultural rather than political activity led, at the Fifth Zionist Congress in 1901, to the formation of the Zionist democratic fraction which stood in opposition to Herzl. Buber, a member of this faction, resigned before the Congress as editor of Die Welt. Together with his friends, he founded the juedischer verlag in Berlin, which went on to publish (in German) books of literary quality. At the age of 26 Buber took up the study of Ḥasidism. At first his interest was essentially aesthetic. After attempting to translate the tales of Rabbi Naḥman of Bratslav into German, he decided to retell them in German in the form of a free adaptation. Thus originated Die Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman (1906; The Tales of Rabbi Nachman, 1956) and Die Legende des Baalschem (1908; The Legend of the Baal-Shem, 1955). Later Buber's interest turned from the aesthetic aspect of Ḥasidism to its content. Deeply stirred by the religious message of Ḥasidism, he considered it his duty to convey that message to the world. Among the books he later wrote on Ḥasidism are Gog u-Magog (1941, in Davar; translated into English under the title For the Sake of Heaven, 1945), Or ha-Ganuz (1943), and Pardes ha-Ḥasidut (1945; translated into English in two volumes Ḥasidism and Modern Man, 1958, and The Origin and Meaning of Ḥasidism, 1960). In 1909 Buber resumed an active role in public affairs. He delivered three addresses to the Prague student organization, bar kochba , in 1909, 1910, and 1911 (At the Turning, Three Addresses on Judaism, 1952; see also bergman , in Ha-Shilo'aḥ, 26 (1912), 549–56), which had a great influence on Jewish youth in Central Europe, and also marked a turning point in Buber's own intellectual activity. With the outbreak of World War I Buber founded in Berlin the Jewish National Committee which worked throughout the war on behalf of the Jews in Eastern European countries under German occupation, and on behalf of the yishuv in Palestine. In 1916 he founded the monthly Der Jude, which for eight years was the most important organ of the Jewish renaissance movement in Central Europe. In the spring of 1920, at the convention of Ha-Po'el ha-Ẓa'ir-Ẓe'irei Ẓiyyon in Prague, Buber defined his Zionist socialist position and his adherence to utopian socialism in an address which reflected his affinity to aharon david gordon and gustav landauer . He was opposed to the current concept of socialism which looked upon the state, and not upon a reaffirmation of life and of the relationship between man and man, as the means of realizing the socialist society. Buber envisaged the creation of Gemeinschaften in Palestine, communities in which people would live together in direct personal relationship. During the years following World War I Buber became the spokesman for what he called "Hebrew Humanism," according to which Zionism, described as the "holy way," a notion explained in Der heilige Weg (1919), was different from other nationalistic movements. Buber also emphasized that Zionism should address itself also to the needs of the Arabs and in a proposal to the Zionist Congress of 1921 stated that "… the Jewish people proclaims its desire to live in peace and brotherhood with the Arab people and to develop the common homeland into a republic in which both peoples will have the possibility of free development." In 1923 Buber published his Ich und Du (I and Thou, 1937) which contains the basic formulation of his philosophy of dialogue. In 1925 the first volumes of the German translation of the Bible appeared as the combined effort of Buber and franz rosenzweig . In Die Schrift und ihre Verdeutschung (1936) the translators set forth the guiding principles of their translation: today's reader of the Bible has ceased to be a listener; but the Bible does not seek to be read, but to be listened to, as if its voice were being spoken today. The Bible has been divested of its direct impact. In the choice of words, in sentence-structure, and in rhythm, Buber and Rosenzweig attempted to preserve the original character of the Hebrew Bible. After Rosenzweig's death in 1929 Buber continued the work of translation alone and completed it in 1961. In 1925 Buber began to lecture on Jewish religion and ethics at the University of Frankfurt, and in 1930 he was appointed professor of religion there, a position he retained until   1933, when with the rise of the Nazis to power he was forced to leave the university. In 1932 Buber published his Koenigtum Gottes, which was to be the first volume of a series dealing with the origins of the messianic belief in Judaism. This work was never completed. The third German edition (1956) was translated into English (Kingship of God, 1967). In 1933 Buber was appointed director of the newly created Central Office for Jewish Adult Education (Mittelstelle fuer juedische Erwachsenenbildung) established to take charge of the education of Jews after they were prohibited from attending German educational institutions. In the same year he was invited to head the Juedisches Lehrhaus in Frankfurt. During the beginning of the Nazi period Buber traveled throughout Germany lecturing, teaching, and encouraging his fellow Jews, and thus organized something of a spiritual resistance. In 1935 he was forbidden to speak at Jewish gatherings. He was then invited to speak at Quaker meetings until the Gestapo prohibited his appearing there as well. In 1938 Buber settled in Palestine and was appointed professor of social philosophy at the Hebrew University, where he taught until his retirement in 1951. In 1942 his first book written in Hebrew, Torat ha-Nevi'im (The Prophetic Faith, 1949) was published. This book, a history of biblical faith, is based on the supposition that the mutuality of the covenant between God and Israel testifies that the existence of the Divine Will is as real as the existence of Israel. Another book born out of Buber's efforts to penetrate the essential meaning of the Bible is his Moses (1946). Buber in his later years remained very active in public affairs and in Jewish cultural endeavors. He was one of the leaders of Iḥud, formerly berit shalom , which advocated the establishment of a joint Arab-Israel state. Even after the outbreak of the Arab-Israel war, Buber called for a harnessing of nationalistic impulses and a solution based on compromise. Recognizing the importance of the cultural assimilation of immigrants to Israel, especially those from the Islamic countries, Buber was one of the founders of the College for Adult Education Teachers (Beit Ha-Midrash Le-Morei Am) established to train teachers from among the new immigrants themselves. Buber was the first president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities (1960–62), one of the founders of Mosad Bialik, and active in many other cultural institutions. In the years following World War II Buber lectured extensively outside Israel, visiting the United States in 1952, and again in 1957–58, and became known throughout the world as one of the spiritual leaders of his generation, making a deep impact on Christian as well as Jewish thinkers. (Samuel Hugo Bergman) Buber made a substantial contribution to the ethical thought and the religious consciousness of the 20th century. In his Hebrew humanism, he considered Judaism principally as a pioneering way of life in ethical openness. Philosophically he influenced many thinkers, including Gabriel Marcel, Theodor Steinbuechel, Ernst Michel, Paul Tillich, Wilhelm Michel, Walther Nigg, J.H. Oldham, M. Chaning-Pearce, John Baillie, H.H. Farmer, Reinhold Niebuhr, Sir Herbert Read, Karl Heim, Friedrich Gogarten, Eberhard Grisebach, Karl Barth, Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt and Emmanuel Levinas. -Philosophy Buber refused to be called a philosopher because he thought that philosophical language did not adequately render the idea of dialogical life. He wanted to conduct a conversation. He tended to disqualify systematic thinking as belonging the I–it domain, which he, in almost Manichaean fashion, separated from the I–you (I–Thou in Smith's translation) sphere. He only used the philosophical discourse because he had no alternative. The book "What is Man," first published in Hebrew in 1943, contains his philosophical anthropology: it discusses the self-understanding of man from Aristotle to Max Scheler, and defines human being as dialogical. However Buber's philosophical masterpiece is the small book, Ich und Du, "I and you." (The German "Du," which has widely been translated in archaic English as "Thou," is used in German for an immediate and intimate relationship, e.g., within the family or with children, and is also how God is addressed in prayer, in contrast with the formal form "Sie.") The first outline of "I and you" goes back to May 1916. The book received its final form in the spring of 1922. The two English translations are of Ronald Gregor Smith (first edition 1937) and of Walter Kaufmann (1971). "I and you" develops the idea that the I exists in-relation rather than as a separated Cartesian thinking entity. In a non-fragmentary attitude to what surrounds it, the I is I–you. It becomes I–it in a partial approach. In I–it there is a dichotomy between subject and object: things, persons, and ideas are situated in time and space. Causality reigns in the I–it realm. In the authentic relationship there is presence, mutuality, and directness. The I as the related I welcomes without interpreting, and is distinguished from the dominating, controlling, and mastering I. The other is to be approached not first of all by knowledge but in answerability as the one to whom one owes response from the whole and united I. Response leads to responsibility. Buber uses the term Umkehr, turning, to describe the return to the center of the self by the recognition of "you." The I is called to answer a you and to turn back to perfect relation. The I (Ich) by turning to a you (Du) becomes I–you. The two types of relationship, I–you and I–it, are mutually exclusive. When I experiences, utilizes, thinks, or imagines the other, the relation is characterized as I–it. When I relates with his whole being, in immediacy, the relation is characterized as I–you. There is a connection between I–it and I–you, since everything in the world can become you, but it necessarily also becomes an it, because one can not always live on the intense plane of I–you. The link and tension between the two ways of relating and Buber's own hesitations in this respect gave way to different interpretations in secondary literature (see Theunissen and Bloch). In Buber's perspective,   I–it is to be overcome. Man stands for a choice: either to address the world as "you" or to treat it as an object. The world of relation arises in three spheres: in our life with nature, with man, and with spiritual beings (geistige Wesenheiten). Relation (Beziehung), as the I that recognizes a you, leads to encounter (Begegnung) as the peak of relation. Encounter is the graceful moment of reciprocal openness of the I and you. Buber's I–you is not the result of a mere idealistic attitude: the relating I is part of an event that occurs between (zwischen) I and you. Encounter cannot be sought out. There is a task, man has to initiate it, but the grace of a real encounter can never be acquired in activism. The relation between the I and the eternal You is explicitly discussed in the third part of "I and you." In every you, one addresses the eternal You. One can only address God as You. He cannot be made object of speculation. Buber made one significant change in a subsequent edition of his "I and you." He found the biblical backing for his eternal You in the divine words in the episode of the burning bush, which he translated (with Rosenzweig) as "I am there such as I am there" (Ex. 3:14; the translation of Exodus was published in 1926; cf. Rashi's commentary on the verse). Buber now wrote: "The word of revelation is, I am there such as I am there (Ich bin da als der ich da bin)" and expressed thereby that revelation is divine Presence, the everlasting voice that sounds, nothing more. Various thinkers influenced Buber's thinking in "I and you," especially Franz Rosenzweig. Buber felt that his dialogical thoughts were close to those expressed in Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption, which he read as early as December 1921. The two friends had many parallel thoughts. But there were also disagreements. In the essay "Atheistische Theologie" (1914), Rosenzweig had attacked Buber's early thought as excessively immanent. He further criticized "I and you" for not appreciating the I–it and focusing too exclusively on the I–you, as if God did not create the world of objects. He also thought Buber ignored the we-it relation. Rosenzweig finally disagreed with Buber's rejection of positive, institutional religion in favor of informal and personal religiosity, which he regarded as the real kernel of all religions. According to Buber's own testimony, it is fruitful to compare his "I and you" with Ferdinand Ebner's "Das Wort und die geistigen Realitaeten" (Innsbruck, 1921; "The World and the Spiritual Realities") and with the work of the Protestant theologians Karl Heim, Friedrich Gogarten, and Emil Brunner. Buber knew Ebner's work, parts of which were first published in the periodical Der Brenner in 1920. Ebner formulated the dialogical principle of the I in relation with the divine You, who remains a-cosmic and exists only in the second person. Buber also speaks of God in the second person: God had always to be addressed in the second person and could not to be spoken of in the third person, which would degrade Him to an object and displace Him in the it-world. Like Ebner, Buber did not lend importance to religious forms. There are also divergences between the two thinkers: Ebner denied the world, Buber highlighted the relation between people. Rivka Horwitz analyzed the inception and development of Buber's "I and you" in his lectures "Religion als Gegenwart" ("Religion as Presence") which he delivered in Rosenzweig's Freies Juedisches Lehrhaus and contain the themes that later appeared in "I and you." (Buber's Way to I and Thou, 1988). -Thinking about God Buber thought that God is spoken to, not spoken about. His is a living God, to be met in dialogue, not a philosophical God. One has to get rid of the concept of God, in order to meet Him through the inter-subjective encounter. His living presence comes through the presence of a "you." In his essay "The Question to the Single One" ("Die Frage an den Einzelnen," 1936), Buber attacked Søren Kierkegaard's notion of the "single one," and contrasted this notion with that of the "person," who lives in the presence of others and, consequently, in the presence of the eternal You. There is no contact with the eternal You, except through relations with finite beings. God does not help or intervene: He is linked to the inter-human relation. By saying "you," one catches a glimpse of God. After the Holocaust, Buber had to cope with the idea of God and the problem of evil. In his Eclipse of God (1952), he maintained that God's face has been temporarily obscured by the deeds of humans. emil fackenheim has maintained that Buber did not cope with the Holocaust in his thinking. Others, including David Forman-Barzilai, have shown that this reading of Buber is incorrect. Buber's God is not magical: human beings are responsible for His absence. For Buber, revelation is an ongoing event. The content of revelation, however, remains undefined. Revelation is the meeting of the divine and the human, not a divine content poured into an empty human vessel. Whereas Ebner, under the influence of the Gospel of John and of Kierkegaard, developed a Gnostic view of God, Buber gradually internalized Rosenzweig's criticism and came to accept God as Creator of the world. His attack on Kierkegaard, who fully neglected the Creator and the inter-human relation to You, should be seen in this perspective, and gradually Buber put aside the Gnostic tendencies that are palpable in his early writings. -Religion Buber opposed religion as a domain apart. He developed a ḥasidic way of thinking in which the entire life should be hallowed. In contrast to Ḥasidism in its historic appearance, however, Buber opposed religious observance. He advocated religiousness as the recognition of divine Presence in daily life. He had a negative attitude towards religions which were an "exile." Consequently, he had an aversion to any kind of mission. Buber is critical of institutions, especially political and religious ones. His is a religiousness that combined humanism with a way of life inspired by the Bible and Ḥasidism. Ritual in this perspective is problematic and precludes the immediacy of God's presence. Buber felt that institutionalization of relations depersonalizes and that authentic life lies outside institutionalized religion. His emphasis was on religiosity, which   is spontaneous, informal, and personal, rather than on positive religion, which he regarded as institutionalized, formal, and historical. Buber inherited the term "religiosity" from his teacher Georg Simmel. He defined it as the attitude that needs not to be expressed in observances, prescriptions, or dogmas, which reduce it to a conditional universe. This explains why he wrote extensively on Ḥasidism without committing himself to the ḥasidic way of life, based on Halakhah and ritual observance. He was linked to the tradition, but felt himself free of its shackles. He laid bare the deeper layers of the Jewish tradition without considering the different commandments and ritual prescriptions as divinely promulgated. Religiosity brings no security, but is rather the difficult demand to become an answerable being. Buber appreciated the plurality of religions. He was one of the three editors of Die Kreatur, an inter-religious journal, the other two editors being the Catholic Joseph Wittig and the Protestant Viktor von Weiszaecker. In Two Types of Faith (1950) he distinguishes between the Greek word for faith, pistis, and the Hebrew one, emunah. Emunah is trust, belief "in" God, pistis is belief "that" God exists. Community creates emunah, pistis causes community. The first type of faith is that of a community that lives in teshuvah, in return to real life. The second is that of an individual who comes to faith through a mental act, metanoia. In his description of both types of faith that are different and related, Buber is influenced by Rosenzweig's theory in the third part of the Star of Redemption. Pistis is typical of Christianity, which is mainly a community of converted individuals, whereas emunah as characteristic of Judaism, which is a community of covenant into which one is born. Despite their fundamental differences, Buber sees the possibility of a true relationship between Christians and Jews. He held original Christianity in high esteem. The teaching of Jesus is authentically Jewish. Jesus is his Jewish "big brother." Nevertheless, with time, Buber became more and more critical of Christianity. He came to associate Christianity with a Gnostic dichotomy of matter and spirit and with a faith that lacks demands and realization. He severely criticized Kierkegaard's position and his "suspension of the ethical." -Judaism True religiosity for Buber is anti-magical and anti-Gnostic. Magic and Gnosis threaten true religiosity, i.e., true meeting: in magic, one manipulates the higher reality in a childish way and in gnosis, there is mastery through secret knowledge. Buber's Judaism is a believing humanism, a humanism which cannot exist without faith, and vice versa. The real humanum is the capacity of meeting other existing beings. Against Kierkegaard, who recognizes only the meeting between humans and God, and against Ludwig Feuerbach, who excludes any transcendent element from the inter-subjective relation, he sees the I–you relation as a relationship with God and humans. The Jewish people have the vocation of realizing unity. Buber was convinced that no other community had entered with such fervor into the experience of the dialogical situation as had the Jews. His position on the Jewish law (halakhah) is a much discussed topic in the secondary literature. In Buber's eyes, Judaism comes before the Law. The Law is addressed to the soul, which cannot be understood outside of this Law. But the soul is not the Law. For Buber, the soul of Judaism is pre-Sinaitic. He disliked halakhic Judaism, afraid as he was of objectivization and neutral codification. His attitude is not Lawless, yet he regarded all ritual as potentially magic. In Buber's eyes, symmetrical communication is the only authentic relation. Strategic rationality would belong to the domain of I–it. Buber made strategic rationality responsible for the evil in the world. He emphasized that this functional rationality in the economic, political, or scientific sphere is not enough. He separated the relating I–you from the controlling, knowing and comparing I–it. Yet, one may ask if institutions do not reduce man's problematic natural state. Buber could have placed more emphasis on the conjunction of I–you and I–it. Nonetheless, by his prophetic criticism of the institutions of Israel, by his stressing the prophet rather than the priest, he wanted to bring a healthy correction of structures that tend to eternalize themselves at the expense of dialogical, living reality. Buber called for a renewed, dialogic lifestyle of which Jews are destined to be pioneers. His Judaism was far from pious or dogmatic, and he approached it in terms of engagement with the world at large. -Mysticism and Dialogue Buber was attracted to mysticism. The subject of his doctoral thesis (Vienna, 1904) was: "The History of the Problem of Individuation: Nicolas of Cusa and Jacob Boehme." In 1909 he published his Ekstatische Konfessionen on ecstatic mystics, mostly Christians, but also Jewish, Sufi, Chinese, and Hindu mystics. Later, he moderated his initial enthusiasm and became a religious existential thinker for whom the realization of a true community was imperative. In "I and you" he rejects mystical union with God: I and You remain distinct and the one cannot be absorbed by the other. Paul Mendes-Flohr described Buber's transition from his earlier asocial interest in mysticism to dialogue, and illuminated the shift of the axis of Buber's thinking from pathos to ethos. Whereas Buber in his mystical enthusiasm initially overlooked the moral dimension, his later philosophy of dialogue required alertness to the interpersonal and to the moral dimension of reality. Buber wanted a true community such as he found in Ḥasidism, and it is not surprising that he became famous for his retelling of ḥasidic tales. Real life for him is meeting in which the I transcends itself. In the words of Daniel, it is "realization" (not "orientation"), or in the words of I and you: it is I–you, not I–it. -Zionism Buber advocated dialogue with the Palestinian Arabs. Very   early, he distanced himself from theodor herzl 's Realpolitik, which was first criticized by ahad ha-am and later by weizmann , feiwel , and Buber himself. The renewal of the Jewish spirit would depend upon coexistence with the Palestinian Arabs. Buber took part in the group Iḥud (Unity) that strived for cooperation between Jews and Arabs and for a bi-national state. This group, to which belonged Judah Magnes, Henrietta Szold, Ernst Simon, Chaim Kalvarisky, Gavriel Stern, and Moshe Smilansky, saw Palestine as the land of two peoples. Buber feared, as did the prophet Samuel, that the nation of Israel would become like all other nations, and wanted Zionism to be the teaching and realization of righteousness. Buber was critical of Israeli politics. Already at the Twelfth Zionist Congress in Karlsbad, in 1921, he pleaded that Arabs and Jews unite their life interests. Made aware of the pathology of nationalistic chauvinism by his friend Gustav Landauer, he became allergic to nationalism in the form of collective egoism. Before World War II, he thought, as did many Jews at that time, that a Jewish State was not necessary. Social units could be linked in a federation and form a greater society. After the foundation of the Jewish State, he had a dovish standpoint in the Jewish-Arab dispute. Buber believed that Israel is more than another nationalism. Buber conceived Zionism as the possible embodiment of Jewish Renaissance. His socialist, cultural Zionism, influenced by Ahad Ha-Am, hardly matched the practical, national approach of the movement. Although in 1901 he became editor of the Zionist periodical Die Welt, his Zionism was much more spiritual than political. He proclaimed that the renewal of Judaism and the renewal of the world were one. Judaism had had its creative periods: it was renewed in the time of the prophets, in early Christianity, through the ḥasidic masters, and finally, in the period of the Zionists pioneers. Buber longed for a just society in Israel and conjoined ethics and politics. He wanted the creation of a new community of Hebrew humanism. -Bible Buber studied and translated the Bible, and adopted biblical criticism as well as the unity of the Bible. However, what finally interested Buber, like Rosenzweig, was not the critical question of how the Bible was written (the Bible as Scripture, Ketuvim), but the spiritual question of how it is read (the Bible as Mikra). Biblical scholars did not consider him to be one of their own, because his aim was not so much the reconstruction of history as the hearing of the voice of the supreme Presence. He came to an existential-dialogical understanding of the biblical text, which was seen as an example of dialogue. In 1925 he started a new German translation of the Bible with Rosenzweig. In this project, Buber translated and sent his translation to Rosenzweig, who commented upon it. They discussed the translation in their correspondence and in regular meetings. In their translation, they wanted to recapture the spoken character (Gesprochenheit) of the Bible, so that the reader could become a listener of the ongoing Divine voice. They stayed close to the Hebrew original, to the Hebrew sentence structure and rhythm, to the Hebrew words and sounds. They did not Germanize Hebrew, they surprised German with Hebrew culture. The very fact of the translation itself was a bridging of German and Jewish cultures. At the time of Rosenzweig's death in 1929, they had reached the book of Isaiah. Buber finished the translation of the entire Bible only in 1961. Buber's other works on the Bible include Das Kommende. Untersuchungen zur Enstehungsgeschiche des messianischen Glaubens. I. Koenigtum Gottes (Kingship of God, 1932; Eng., 1967), Moses (first published in Hebrew, 1945; English, 1946; German, 1948), and Der Glaube der Propheten (The Prophetic Faith) (first published in Dutch translation, 1940; Hebrew, 1942; English, 1949; German, 1950). -Socialism In Paths in Utopia (English, 1947; Hebrew 1949) he gives vent to his utopian socialism from which he expected the birth of an authentic and true "religious" society. He discusses the theories of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen, Proudhon, Kropotkin, and finally Gustav Landauer. He further discusses Marx, Engels, and Lenin. The last chapter of the book is entitled "An Experiment that Did Not Fail," which deals with the kevutzah (village commune) and kibbutz (working collective) as small groups that did not fail. In his social as in his political thinking, Buber contributed to the ethical renewal of society. (Ephraim Meir (2nd ed.) -Centenary of Buber's Birth The centenary of Buber's death (1978) was marked in a number of ways. A four-day conference on his philosophy, attended by 300 scholars from Israel and abroad, was held at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev in January, and a one-day conference in New York in February, sponsored jointly by Fordham University and the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. The West German Government issued a special commemorative stamp to mark the centenary and the Hebrew University initiated a fund to endow a Buber Chair in Comparative Religion. Buber's former home in Heppenheim became headquarters for the International Council of Christians and Jews in 1979. A comprehensive bibliography of Buber's writings (1897–1978) was published in 1980, edited by M. Cohen and R. Buber. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: P.A. Schilpp and M. Friedman (eds.), The Philosophy of Martin Buber (1967), includes comprehensive bibliography; M. Friedman, Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue (1955), includes comprehensive bibliography; idem, Martin Buber: Encounter on the Narrow Ridge, 2 vols. (1969–70); M.A. Beele and J.S. Weiland, Martin Buber, Personalist and Prophet (1968); G. Schaeder, Martin Buber: Hebraeischer Humanismus (1966); A.S. Cohen, Martin Buber (Eng., 1957); Der Jude, 10 no. 1 (1928), special issue for his 50th birthday; H. Kohn, Martin Buber, sein Werk und seine Zeit (1961); G. Scholem, in: Commentary, 32 (1961), 305–16. ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: G. Schaeder, Martin Buber: Hebraeischer Humanismus (1966) = The   Hebrew Humanism of Martin Buber, trans. N.J. Jacobs (1973); idem, Martin Buber: Briefwechsel aus sieben Jahrzehnten, 3 vols. (1972–75; E. Simon, "Martin Buber and German Jewry," in: Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, 3 (1958), 3–39; H. Kohn, Martin Buber: sein Werk und seine Zeit (19612); G. Scholem, "Martin Bubers Deutung des Chassidismus," in: Judaica, 1 (1963), 165–206; idem, "An einem denkwürdigen Tage," in: Judaica, 1 (1963), 207–15; M. Theunissen, Der Andere. Sudien zur Sozialontologie der Gegenwart, Berlin (1965) = The Other: Studies in the Social Ontology of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Buber, trans. C. Macann (1984); S. Ben-Chorin, Zwiesprache mit Martin Buber (1966); P.A. Schilpp and M. Friedman (eds.), The Philosophy of Martin Buber (Library of Living Philosophers 12, 1967); B. Casper, Das dialogische Denken. Eine Untersuchung der religionsphilosophischen Bedeutung Franz Rosenzweigs, Ferdinand Ebners und Martin Bubers (1967); J.S. Weiland, Martin Buber, Personalist and Prophet (1968); G. Scholem, "Martin Bubers Auffassung des Judentums," in: Judaica, II (1970), 133–92; J. Bloch, Die Aporie des Du. Probleme der Dialogik Martin Bubers (Phronesis, 2, 1977); H. Gordon and J. Bloch (eds.), Martin Buber: A Centenary Volume (1978); W. Licharz (ed.), Dialog mit Martin Buber (1982); M. Friedman, Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue (19763); idem, Martin Buber's Life and Work, 3 vols. (1983); R. Horwitz, Buber's Way to I and Thou. The Development of Martin Buber's Thought and His "Religion as Presence" Letters (1988); P. Mendes-Flohr, From Mysticism to Dialogue. Martin Buber's Transformation of German Social Thought (1989); M. Friedman, Encounter on the Narrow Ridge, 2 vols. (1969 – 70); S. Kepnes, The Text as Thou: Martin Buber's Dialogical Hermeneutics and Narrative Theology (1992); P. Vermes, Buber on God and the Perfect Man (The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1994); A. Shapira, Between Spirit and Reality. Dual Structures in the Thought of M.M. Buber (Heb., 1994); D. Barzilai, Homo Dialogicus. Martin Buber's Contribution to Philosophy (Heb., 2000); H. Gordon, The Heidegger-Buber Controversy. The Status of the I–Thou (Contributions in Philosophy 81, 2001). (On this work, see E. Meir in Revue des études juives, 161:1–2 (2002), 280–83); D. Barzilai, "Agonism in Faith: Martin Buber's Eternal Thou after the Holocaust," in: Modern Judaism, 23:2 (2003), 56–179; E. Meir, Jewish Existential Philosophers in Dialogue, trans. M. Meir (2004), 68–83. P. Atterton, M. Calarco, and M. Friedman (eds.), Levinas and Buber. Dialogue and Difference (2004).