Martin Buber's Formative Years · From German Culture to Jewish Renewal, 1897-1909

Martin Buber (1878-1965) was born into a world of two cultures--that of his Jewish family and of his Austrian fatherland. During his childhood with his grandparents in Galician Lvov, Jewish values and German aesthetics coexisted. But on reentering fin-de-si￩cle Viennese society, his grandparents believed their world had fallen apart. Nothing was as it should have been--Jewish hopes for full social integration were disappointed, Yiddish culture seemingly impoverished modern Jewish youth, and the Jewish religion had become ossified. In his personal confusion, Buber clearly grasped the essence of the problem--emancipation had failed, German culture was dying, Jews were on their own, and values were no longer based on tradition alone.

During the period from 1897 to 1909, Buber's keen sense of the crisis of humanity, his intimate knowledge of German culture and Jewish sources, and his fearlessness in the face of possible ridicule challenged him to behave in a manner so outrageous and so contrary to German-Jewish tradition that he actually achieved a transformation of himself and those close to him. Calling on spiritual giants of great historical periods in German, Christian, and Jewish history--such as Nicolas of Cusa, Jakob Boehme, Israel Baal Shem Tov, Rabbi Nachman of Brazlav, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Friedrich Nietzsche--Buber proceeded to subvert the existing order by turning his upside-down world of slave morality right side up once more.

If contemporary life was bankrupt, why lament? Did not God command humanity to act? Buber wholeheartedly immersed himself in the making of a new world of Zionist culture, of Hasidic spirituality, of Romantic individuality, of unity from diversity. By examining the multitude of disparate sources that Buber turned to for inspiration, this book elucidates Buber's creative genius and his contribution to turn-of-the-century Jewish renewal.

Schmidt's timely and comprehensive study concludes that Buber was successful in creating the German-Jewish symbiosis that emancipation was to have created for the two peoples but that this synthesis was tragic because it came too late for practical application by Jews in Germany. Those listening to Buber were about to leave voluntarily for the ancestral Jewish homeland, and the Jews who were not interested then were later forced to leave--or worse. The opportunity for the realization of a German-Jewish symbiosis had passed.