Martin Buber

Martin Buber was born on February 8, 1878, in Vienna, the son of agronomist Carl Buber and Elise Wurgast. After his parents separated when he was three, he was raised in Lwow (then in Austrian Galicia) by his paternal grandparents, the Hebrew scholar Solomon Buber and his wife Adele. In that household he absorbed both rabbinic learning and the Hasidic tales of the surrounding countryside, an exposure that shaped his life's work.

Buber studied philosophy and art history at universities in Vienna, Leipzig, Zurich, and Berlin, where he heard Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Simmel lecture. Drawn to Theodor Herzl's movement, he edited the Zionist weekly Die Welt in 1901 before breaking with Herzl over cultural priorities. He married Catholic-born Paula Winkler in 1899; she converted to Judaism and became his lifelong intellectual partner. From 1916 to 1924 he edited the influential monthly Der Jude.

His best-known book, Ich und Du (I and Thou), appeared in 1923 and argued that human existence alternates between objectifying I-It relations and the mutual presence of I-Thou encounter, a meeting in which God is glimpsed. He also produced a German translation of the Hebrew Bible with Franz Rosenzweig and the multi-volume Tales of the Hasidim. From 1924 to 1933 he taught Jewish religious philosophy at the University of Frankfurt; the Nazis revoked his right to teach in 1935.

In 1938 Buber emigrated to Mandate Palestine and accepted the chair of social philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, retiring in 1951. He advocated a binational Arab-Jewish state and continued writing on dialogue, politics, and biblical interpretation until his death on June 13, 1965.

The name Martin comes from the Latin Martinus, derived from Mars, the Roman god of war, with a sense of warlike or dedicated to Mars. It is a masculine name long borne by saints and reformers, fitting for a thinker whose dialogues confronted the warring impulses of the twentieth century.