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 Martin Kavka Paul Mendes-Flohr . Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent . New Haven, CT : Yale University Press , 2019 . 405 pp. doi:10.1017/S036400942000063X It has been almost four decades since the dominant biography of Martin Buber, Maurice Friedman's three-volume Martin Buber's Life and Work , totaling over thirteen hundred pages, appeared. Readers of this journal will wonder whether Mendes-Flohr's biography of Buber has qualities that make it deserving of recommendation to students over and above its comparatively short length. It certainly does, and Mendes-Flohr has written a biography that fits many of [End Page 205] the needs of our academic age. That being said, some readers will wish for more, and there are hints that they could have gotten it. The relative brevity of Mendes-Flohr's biography, given Buber's extensive list of publications and activities, is not because of omissions. It covers what the knowledgeable reader would expect: the upheaval of Buber's childhood represented by his mother's having left his father (leading Buber to live with his grandparents until he was a teenager); his becoming a fan of Nietzsche and Simmel as a university student; his youthful Zionist activism; his intellectual turn "from mysticism to dialogue," about which Mendes-Flohr has written previously; the influence of Gustav Landauer and Franz Rosenzweig on Buber's thinking; his emigration to Palestine in 1938; his support of a binational state in Palestine; and the various intellectual and personal relationships that made Buber one of the most important (if to some, also one of the most controversial) Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century. In addition to its comprehensiveness, the volume is exceptionally readable. Most refreshingly, Mendes-Flohr grounds his storytelling in Buber's life and its passions at as many steps as possible. On occasion, the thematic focus of various chapters means that Mendes-Flohr does not narrate Buber's life in a linear fashion, but this is a minor cavil. Somewhat more seriously, the biography does not go into the depth that one might hope. For example, Mendes-Flohr limits his account of Buber's 1923 classic I and Thou to a few paragraphs covering not much more than two pages. Nevertheless, this too does not amount to a serious problem. Mendes-Flohr takes care to tell more, and more interesting, stories about Buber. To return to I and Thou , Mendes-Flohr's focus on its poetic qualities allows the reader to get a taste of Buber's influence on Jorge Luis Borges, which is sadly underanalyzed in Anglophone scholarship on Buber. It seems to me that there are three emphases in Mendes-Flohr's biography that might make it a better biography than Friedman's, not just because of its brevity. First, Mendes-Flohr regularly brings the narrative back to Buber's wife Paula, not just as an object of desire during their courtship (which is Friedman's focus), but as a novelist and a wise thinker in her own right, as well as an influence on her husband throughout their marriage. Second, the biography bears the fruit of recent research on Buber. Most notable in this case is the penultimate chapter, which spends significant time on the relationship between Buber and Martin Heidegger, focusing on their meeting in May 1957 at a castle near Lake Konstanz. (Readers with further interest should consult Mendes-Flohr's own article on this topic in a 2014 issue of Journal of Religion .) Lastly, although A Life of Faith and Dissent is a biography, it is also perhaps the clearest one-volume treatment of Buber's relationship to the Zionist idea throughout his lifetime. Mendes-Flohr gives a full treatment of what he persuasively describes as "Buber's own ambivalence about the Zionist project." It is certainly a contribution at the level of Buber's thoughts about Zionism and Arab-Jewish relations. Sometimes the nature of the contribution is surprising. On occasion, discussion among intellectuals of Buber and Arab-Jewish relationships raises the point that in 1942 (Mendes-Flohr claims it was 1944), Nabiha Said, the aunt of Edward Said...