Review by Choice Review
Mendes-Flohr (emer., Univ. of Chicago Divinity School and Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem) has devoted his entire academic career to studying Martin Buber (1878--1965). He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Buber nearly 50 years ago, is editing the 22-volume German edition of Buber's work, and has been involved in a variety of publication projects on Buber. The present study is undoubtedly his definitive work and also the definitive study of Buber. The volume opens with a chapter on Buber's difficult early years, and then deals with the philosophy of dialogue and other important aspects of Buber's work. Included are discussions of Buber's deep-rooted cultural Zionism, which included a commitment to a binational state; his heroic work for the German Jewish community prior to WW II; and his late years as professor of sociology at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His deep commitment to Buber notwithstanding, Mendes-Flohr points out, in the introduction, that "Buber had his foibles.... Buber was not a perfect human being although he was perfectly human." This is true, and the one major criticism that can be made of this volume is that it could have been more critical. However, this is now the authoritative work on Buber and the place that all students of Buber should begin. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Steven Theodore Katz, Boston University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
MARTIN BUBER VAULTED into prominence in German intellectual life in the first years of the 20 th century, when he was still in his early 20s. His fame and influence spread across Western Europe in the decades that followed, as well as to Palestine, where he was compelled to flee at the late date of 1938. Although his presence in the United States has somewhat diminished, during the years after World War II he was repeatedly a center of attention here. In the early 1950s, when he was past 70, he toured the country, giving dozens of lectures, often to packed audiences. In a reflection of those times, Saul Bellow in "Herzog" (1964) impishly chose to make Valentine Gersbach, the lover of Herzog's wife, an apostle of Buber's teaching, urging Herzog to read "I and Thou" and related books in the midst of energetically cuckolding him. Paul Mendes-Flohr, a distinguished scholar of German-Jewish intellectual life, has written a scrupulously researched, perceptive biography of Buber that evinces an authoritative command of all the contexts through which Buber moved. "Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent" is perhaps less a biography than an intellectual history of Buber, although the essential facts of his life are duly reported. Mendes-Flohr indulges in little psychological speculation, apart from the effect that Buber's abandonment by his mother when he was 3 (she ran off with a Russian officer) may have had on his later emphasizing the maternal element in spiritual life. After his mother's abrupt departure, Buber was sent to live with his observant and scholarly grandparents, who homeschooled him. He stayed with them until the age of 14, when his father remarried. But by adolescence Buber had permanently broken with Orthodoxy, though he remained in a peculiar sense, to which I shall return, a religious Jew. One reflection of his freedom from the constraints of Jewish tradition is that while a student at the University of Zurich, he fell in love with Paula Winkler, a young woman born in a pious Catholic home, and had two children out of wedlock with her. She later converted to Judaism and became his lifelong emotional and intellectual soul mate. Mendes-Flohr's account shows the breadth and depth of Buber's engagement in German culture. He studied with the eminent philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey and the famous sociologist Georg Simmel, both of whom significantly influenced him. He frequented social circles that included Max Weber, Edmund Husserl, Rainer Maria Rilke and other leading writers and thinkers. From the beginning, he was an advocate of a renewal of Judaism, first in the Zionist movement, with which he maintained a heterodox relationship that persisted over the years, and an interlocutor with the broader European world, including some prominent Christians. The primacy of dialogue in his thought was manifested in most of his cultural activities from early on. This idea would be embraced not only by liberal Jews but also by Christian theologians and secular thinkers. One must add that Buber was a powerfully charismatic presence early and late. He was already electrifying audiences as a 20-year-old at Zionist congresses. 1 heard him speak in Hebrew in Jerusalem to a student group in 1960, in the last decade of his life, and can attest that with his quietly reflective delivery, enhanced by a snowywhite "prophetic" beard, he projected an aura of spiritual authority. There was something both noble and quixotic about Buber as a spiritual guide and political critic. He constantly argued that political life had to be informed by spiritual purpose. There is surely an aspect of nobility in his repeated contention that all human interaction must register a full recognition of the authenticity and legitimacy of the other whom we address, the burden of his most famous book, "1 and Thou." After coming to Palestine, this view led him quite naturally to co-found fchud, the group of mostly German academics advocating the creation of a binational state. The idea, which would have averted violent conflict, was admirable, but unfortunately it had scant supporters in the Zionist community and even fewer among the Arabs of Palestine. Buber's commitment to the spiritual aim of political life brought him to espouse even odder political positions. When the Nazis rapidly deprived Jews of civil rights after 1933, Buber viewed "this initial assault on the dignity of German Jewry," in MendesFlohr's words, "as a trial testing the spiritual and moral resilience of both Jew and (non-Jewish) German." He thought that the most appropriate response to Nazi persecution was adult Jewish education, a lifelong cause for him, which would enable Jews, as Mendes-Flohr summarizes, to nurture "their inner, spiritual resources in order to brave the collapse of the world." Not urgent emigration or an underground movement but the nurturing of spiritual resources. A peculiar manifestation of Buber's adherence to dialogue in the face of murderous ideologies was his meeting at a German castle in 1957 with Martin Heidegger, the rector of the University of Freiburg who joined the Nazi Party, celebrated Hitler and rooted out all Jews from his faculty. The two elderly figures spent several hours together, Buber evidently seeking dialogue; Heidegger, some sort of public absolution from a distinguished Jewish thinker. Afterward, Heidegger, probably because he did not get what he had sought, claimed he knew Buber by name only. Surely the most embarrassing expression of Buber's insistence on spirituality in the realm of history was his promotion of the German war effort from 1914 to 1916. He imagined that the war offered Jews a grand opportunity, as he said in a Hanukkah address in 1914, to "feel responsible for the destiny of their own community." On the battlefields, "a new Jewry has taken shape." ft took him two years to realize that what was really going on in the trenches was not spiritual renewal but senseless mayhem, at which point he retracted his earlier view. The deeply felt sincerity with which Buber invoked the idea of God shouldn't be doubted, but it's not easy to know what he meant by it. He has been accurately called a religious anarchist. Despite his involvement in the Bible, he did not regard it or the tradition built on it as embodying divine prescriptions, and he resisted institutional religion. Gershom Scholem, his sometime friend but on occasion a severe critic, told a European audience not long after Buber's death in 1965 that, in Mendes-Flohr's formulation, this "consciously and defiantly 'heretical' vision of Jewish renewal proved to be exasperatingly utopian, given its nearly exclusive focus on spiritual sensibility and its lack of normative content." Scholem, the magisterial scholar of Jewish mysticism and heresies, was himself far from embracing any normative version of Judaism, but 1 think he aptly identified a core of vagueness, an elusiveness, underlying Buber's religious thought. He was an inspiring figure who in often poetic prose erected elegant bridges between Judaism and general philosophy and theology, but there were unbridgeable contradictions at the heart of his enterprise, as the subtitle of this fine biography suggests. Buber was a powerfully charismatic presence, already electrifying audiences at 20. ROBERT alter'S most recent book, "The Hebrew Bible: A Translation With Commentary," was published in December.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 12, 2019]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Mendes-Flohr (Gershom Scholem), professor emeritus at the University of Chicago Divinity School, showcases his expertise in this definitive but dense and jargon-filled biography of the Austrian-born Jewish philosopher and theologian Martin Buber (1878-1965). Mendes-Flohr begins with Buber's abandonment by his mother when he was four years old, and links that traumatic experience with Buber's development of a "philosophy of dialogue" that called for engagement with others while recognizing the difficulty of realizing that goal. After a difficult childhood in Poland, where he was reared by grandparents who limited his contact with his peers, Buber eventually settled in Israel. He went on to become a serious thinker about the relationship between ethics and politics in Judaism, which made him a controversial figure in the Zionist movement. While Mendes-Flohr's telling of Buber's life is comprehensive, his prose is often difficult to follow ("Kinesis... denotes for Buber the power actuating the longed-for realization of unity, albeit without a specific direction") and will be a barrier for any lay reader, even those with some familiarity with Buber's thinking. While the detail will be intimidating to the nonacademic, Mendes-Flohr's biography nicely maps out Buber's legacy for researchers to ponder. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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