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Martin Buber was an Austrian Jewish and Israeli philosopher best known for his particular philosophy, a form of existentialism centered on the distinction between the I–Thou relationship and the I–It relationship.
Born in Vienna, Buber came from a family of observant Jews and was connected to the Davidic line of descent, but a personal religious crisis led him to break with traditional Jewish religious customs. He began reading Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard, and Friedrich Nietzsche. The latter two, in particular, inspired him to pursue studies in philosophy. In 1896, Buber went to study in Vienna (philosophy, art history, German studies, philology).
1899, while studying in Zürich, Buber met his future wife, Paula Winkler, a “brilliant Catholic writer from a Bavarian peasant family” who in 1901 left the Catholic Church and in 1907 converted to Judaism.
Buber became a prolific writer. His evocative, sometimes poetic, writing style marked the major themes in his work: the retelling of Hasidic and Chinese tales, Biblical commentary, philosophical and metaphysical dialogue. Philosophy, existentialism, and Neo-Hasidism characterized his interests; however, he was eclectic and insisted upon dialogue as the ultimate reality.
1923, Buber wrote his famous essay on existence, Ich und Du (later translated into English as I and Thou), and in 1925, he began translating the Hebrew Bible into the German language reflecting the patterns of the Hebrew language. His influence extends across the humanities, particularly in the fields of social psychology, social philosophy, and religious existentialism.
A cultural Zionist, Buber was active in the Jewish and educational communities of Germany and later Israel. He produced writings about Zionism and worked with various bodies within the Zionist movement extensively over a nearly 50-year period spanning his time in Europe and the Near East.
In the early 1920s, Martin Buber started advocating a binational Jewish-Arab state, stating that the Jewish people should proclaim “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.” Buber rejected the idea of Zionism as just another national movement, and wanted instead to see the creation of an exemplary society; a society which would not be characterized by Jewish domination of the Arabs. It was necessary for the Zionist movement to reach a consensus with the Arabs even at the cost of the Jews remaining a minority in the country. In 1925, he was involved in the creation of the organization Brit Shalom (Covenant of Peace), which advocated the creation of a binational state, and throughout the rest of his life, he hoped and believed that Jews and Arabs one day would live in peace in a joint nation.
In 1930, Buber became an honorary professor at the University of Frankfurt am Main, but resigned from his professorship in protest immediately after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. He then founded the Central Office for Jewish Adult Education, which became an increasingly important body as the German government forbade Jews from public education. In 1938, Buber left Germany and settled in Jerusalem, Mandatory Palestine, receiving a professorship at Hebrew University and lecturing in anthropology and introductory sociology. After the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, Buber became the best-known Israeli philosopher.
He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature ten times, and the Nobel Peace Prize seven times.
Martin Buber died June 13, 1965 (aged 87) in Jerusalem.
