Martin Buber מָרְדְּכַי מַרְטִין בּוּבֶּר
The philosopher of dialogue, author of I and Thou; collector of the Hasidic tradition
He grew up in Lemberg with his grandfather Solomon Buber, the great scholar of Midrash, and everything comes from there: the Hasidic anthologies through which Europe first heard of the Baal Shem Tov; the German translation of the Hebrew Bible with Franz Rosenzweig, begun in 1925; Zionism from 1898 and the quarrel with Herzl—cultural against political.
I and Thou (1923) went far beyond all that: the relation to another as "Thou" rather than "It" entered Christian theology (Tillich, Marcel), psychotherapy (Rogers, Yalom) and education. Most of those who say "I–Thou" do not know it was said by a Zionist reader of the Hasidim.
In 1938 he left for Palestine and taught at the Hebrew University; in 1942 he founded Ihud, for a binational Jewish-Arab state, and argued with Ben-Gurion about the Arab refugees. In 1961–62 he personally petitioned President Ben-Zvi and pressed Ben-Gurion to commute Eichmann's death sentence: he opposed capital punishment as such. He was nominated ten times for the Nobel Prize in Literature and seven times for the Peace Prize, and never received either.
On the timeline
Related
Sources
Documents of the period
- M. Buber, I and Thou (1923); the Bible translation with F. Rosenzweig — the I–Thou relation; the translation begun in 1925
Scholarship
- TIME, “Philosopher's Plea”, 1962 — the plea to commute Eichmann's death sentence
Basis: documents and evidence.