Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent by Paul Mendes-Flohr

Abstract

Reviewed by: Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent by Paul Mendes-Flohr Peter C. Meilaender Paul Mendes-Flohr, Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2019. 405 pp. It has been over thirty years since a major biography of Martin Buber appeared in English, and the present volume has been worth the wait. No one could be more qualified to write it than Paul Mendes-Flohr, the dean of Buber scholars and joint editor-in-chief of the twenty-two-volume German Werkausgabe of Buber's writings. Mendes-Flohr's intimate knowledge of Buber's philosophy makes this a valuable book for scholars; its clear and unpretentious prose, lack of jargon, and manageable length make it similarly inviting for the non-academic reader hoping to learn more about Buber. This is sure to be the standard text for anyone seeking an introduction to the life and thought of this important twentieth-century thinker. Mendes-Flohr is especially interested in tracing Buber's intellectual development, which he consistently weaves together with the various stations along Buber's journey. Born in Vienna in 1878, Buber was soon sent to the Galician city of Lemberg (now Lviv, in Ukraine) when his mother abandoned her family. Only three years old at the time, Buber would never escape the haunting sense of loss this event occasioned. In Lemberg he was raised by his devout Jewish grandparents; his grandfather was a Judaic scholar of some repute. Lemberg was an ethnically, religiously, and linguistically diverse city (Buber himself attended a Polish-language Gymnasium), and it is tempting to suppose that his upbringing there might have shaped the later Buber's philosophy of dialogue. Buber would return to Vienna as a university student, initially interested mainly in literature and art. During his student years, however, he became active in the Zionist movement, the first step in what would become a lifelong and intense, if occasionally fraught, engagement with the faith and culture of the Jewish people. Mendes-Flohr describes the evolution of Buber's early, romantically tinged cultural Zionism into a much more critical engagement with nationalism and with Zionism's political goals. He also shows how intense intellectual and personal friendships with figures such as Gustav Landauer and Franz Rosenzweig, alongside a deepening immersion in Hasidism, helped transform the youthful Buber—who initially, like so many, had enthusiastic hopes that World War I might spark a cultural renewal—into the mature philosopher of dialogue who would inspire so many followers with his profound pursuit of genuine relationship among people of different cultures and [End Page 162] faiths. Buber's relational anthropology finds its most famous expression, of course, in the book Ich und Du, which begins with the distinction between the two "Grundworte"—"Ich-Es" and "Ich-Du"—that express the two modes through which we encounter the world around us, other human beings, and God. Interestingly, although Mendes-Flohr's book is in many ways an intellectual biography, Ich und Du does not loom especially large in his account; to the contrary, he covers it in about five pages. Indeed, I was somewhat surprised, retrospectively, to see how few pages are devoted to the title in the book's index. This is a testimony, however, to how successfully Mendes-Flohr has sketched Buber's entire life—not just a single especially well-known work—as one that was rich throughout in dialogue and relationship: with Jews and non-Jews, believers and non-believers, philosophers and theologians, artists and authors, cultural Zionists and political Zionists, Austrians, and Germans. And, of course, Jews and Arabs. It is this latter relationship that comes to cast an ever-longer shadow over the final third of the book. In fact, it is hard not to conclude that for Mendes-Flohr, the real key to understanding Buber the man and the thinker is his long and difficult struggle with this relationship. Forced to flee Germany for Palestine in the late 1930s, Buber sought consistently to articulate a vision of Palestine as a land that would be home equally to Jews and Arabs, both of whom had deep and justified claims there. Although he...