Scripture, Sovereignty and National Self-Determination in Martin Buber’s Bein Am Le’Artzo (1944)

Abstract

Abstract This paper investigates Buber’s understanding of the relationship between the Jewish people and the Promised Land as it emerges from his biblical commentaries of the 1940s. It argues that Buber’s exegetical writings from the period should be read as an extension of his political pronouncements on Zionism, complementing his binational vision of Arab-Jewish coexistence in Palestine. Focusing on Buber’s 1944 lectures published under the title Bein Am Le’Artzo, I show how Buber questions the indigenous identification between the people and Land of Israel. Drawing on Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin’s theoretical concept of “exile within sovereignty,” I read Buber’s commentaries on the commandments of shmita and bikurim as an attempt to integrate the memory of exile within his vision of Zionism. The biblical resonance he attributes to the Jews’ resettlement in Palestine thus forms a pointed polemic against the ideal of Jewish nativism. In contrast to those who used the Bible in order to mythologize the Jews’ autochthonous relationship to the land of origins, Buber’s commentaries stress the diasporic consciousness preserved in the scriptures themselves.