The German Bible translation that sought to carry the Hebrew original into another tongue
What the Work Is
Die Schriftwerke is the collective title under which the later volumes of Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig’s German translation of the Hebrew Bible — the Tanach — were gathered into a single book. The translation project itself began in 1925, when the publisher Lambert Schneider prompted Buber and Rosenzweig to undertake a new German rendering of the Hebrew Scriptures. The individual volumes appeared between 1926 and 1938, but the edition was left incomplete: of the twenty volumes originally planned, only fifteen were published before the project was interrupted. The remaining portions were issued after the Second World War, combined into one substantial volume, as Die Schriftwerke, within a four-volume complete edition of the Buber–Rosenzweig Bible published by the Jakob Hegner Verlag. The catalog metadata records the first publication of Die Schriftwerke as 1956.
What the Book Is About
The work is a translation of the Hebrew Bible into German, and its central aim is stated plainly in the sources: Buber and Rosenzweig sought a rendering that would be linguistically faithful to the Hebrew original while preserving its full richness of meaning. This was not a paraphrase or a modernizing adaptation but an attempt to let the distinctive character of the Hebrew — its sound, its structure, its layers of signification — register in German. The translation is therefore best understood as a work of interpretation as much as of rendering: every choice about how to carry a Hebrew word or construction into German embodies a judgment about what the text means and how it means it.
Key Ideas and Themes
The governing idea of the translation is fidelity to the Hebrew text in its full semantic range. The sources describe the translators’ purpose as a linguistically precise transmission of the Hebrew original that would preserve its complete wealth of meaning — a standard that distinguishes the project from translations content to convey sense alone while sacrificing the texture of the source language.
The work belongs to a broader current in Jewish translation. The Buber–Rosenzweig rendering is regarded alongside Moses Mendelssohn’s Torah translation as the most significant German-language Jewish Bible, and it is described as the most exact rendering of the Old Testament books. This standing reflects the translation’s method: rather than smoothing the Hebrew into idiomatic German, it holds close to the original’s wording and cadence.
The translation also had an afterlife beyond German. It served as a model for André Chouraqui’s literal French rendering of the Scriptures; Chouraqui aimed, in the same spirit, to produce a French-language Jewish Bible that would be broadly accepted, and his version appeared in the 1970s in twenty-two volumes and has been reprinted continuously since.
Structure and Approach
The translation was issued in individual volumes over more than a decade, beginning in 1926. Buber and Rosenzweig worked together until Rosenzweig’s death in 1929; at that point the rendering had reached Isaiah chapter 53, and Buber continued the work alone. A note to this effect was enclosed with the last volume the two had produced together, Jeschajahu. The final individual volume to appear was Gleichsprüche, published in 1938 by the Schocken Verlag. A completed volume of Job was not issued by Schocken’s exile press in New York, because Buber did not wish to enlarge what he regarded as a fragment by one more piece.
The missing portions were published only after the war, consolidated into a single large book as Die Schriftwerke, as part of a four-volume complete edition of the Buber–Rosenzweig Bible from the Jakob Hegner Verlag. The four volumes of that edition were Die fünf Bücher der Weisung (the Five Books of Instruction, in a revised edition of 1954, with a supplement titled Zu einer neuen Verdeutschung der Schrift), Bücher der Geschichte (Books of History, 1955), Bücher der Kündung (Books of Proclamation, 1958), and Das Buch der Preisungen (the Book of Praises, i.e. the Psalter, 1958, with a supplement titled Zur Verdeutschung der Preisungen).
Significance and Influence
The Buber–Rosenzweig translation holds a secure place in the history of German-Jewish letters. It is counted, together with Mendelssohn’s Torah rendering, as the most important German-language Jewish Bible, and it is characterized as the most precise transmission of the Old Testament books. Its influence extended beyond the German-speaking world through its role as the model for Chouraqui’s French translation, which sought to give French-speaking Jews a Bible of comparable authority and which has remained in print since its appearance in the 1970s.
Martin Mordechai Buber was born in Vienna on 8 February 1878 and died in Jerusalem on 13 June 1965. He was an Austrian-Israeli Jewish religious philosopher, known for his work on dialogical philosophy and on Hasidism, and he was also active in Zionism. His parents were Carl (Kalman Yekutiel) Buber, a successful businessman involved in grain, mineral oil, and phosphate mines who belonged to liberal Judaism, and Elise Buber (née Wurhaft), a Russian actress from Odessa. His parents separated in 1881, and from the age of four he grew up with his paternal grandparents in Lemberg in Galicia (today Lviv, Ukraine). His mother started a new family in Russia with an officer; this loss, which occurred without farewell and was never explained to him by his grandparents, occupied him his whole life. He saw his mother again only once, and learned the exact circumstances of her life only in 1913 through a letter from his half-sister.
Buber grew up trilingual. From 1888 to 1896 he attended the then Polish-language Catholic Kaiser-Franz-Joseph-Gymnasium in Lemberg, having previously received private instruction. His grandfather was the private scholar and midrash expert Salomon Buber, one of the most important researchers and collectors of his time in the field of the Hasidic tradition of Eastern European Jewry; with him Buber spoke Yiddish. His grandmother Adele spoke German, which she had taught herself by reading German literature, though for writing she mostly used Hebrew letters as in Yiddish. His mother tongue was therefore Yiddish, and only during his student years was he surrounded by people with German as their mother tongue. His multilingualism distinguished him throughout his life: he wrote in German, Hebrew, English, French, Italian, and Polish, and commanded Greek and Latin. Buber attributed a deep formative influence to his grandmother’s particular relationship to languages.
He studied in Vienna, Leipzig, Zurich, and Berlin, taking courses in national economics, philosophy, German studies, art history, psychiatry, and psychology, among others with Heinrich Herkner, Gustav Schmoller, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Georg Simmel. In 1903 he received his doctorate with the dissertation Zur Geschichte des Individuationsproblems. Nicolaus von Cues und Jakob Böhme. In 1899 he met the Catholic Paula Winkler, whom he officially married in 1907 after her conversion to Judaism. She worked intensively on his work and published her own literary work under the pseudonym Georg Munk. The couple had two children: son Rafael (1900–1990), married from 1922 to 1929 to Margarete Buber-Neumann, and daughter Eva (1901–1992), married to Ludwig Strauss.
In Vienna he met Theodor Herzl personally (first epistolary contact came in February 1900) and joined his Zionist movement. In September 1901 Herzl transferred to Buber the leadership of the Zionist party organ Die Welt as successor to Berthold Feiwel, who could not be persuaded to continue in the role. In 1902 Buber was a co-founder of the Jüdischer Verlag. From 1905 he worked for the publisher Rütten & Loening as an editor; there he initiated and oversaw, among other things, the large-scale project of a socio-psychological monograph series Die Gesellschaft. In 1908 he was involved in the founding of the Sozialistischer Bund (together with Gustav Landauer and Erich Mühsam, among others). From 1907 to 1916 he lived in a house in Berlin-Zehlendorf.
In 1916 he founded, together with Salman Schocken, the monthly journal Der Jude, of which he was editor. Buber initially received a small monthly honorarium from Schocken; later he worked without payment and financed himself through grants from his father and income from properties his grandparents had bequeathed to him. This work claimed a large part of his working time in the following years; his philosophical and Hasidic work had to take second place, which increasingly burdened him. In a letter in 1922 he wrote: “[…] by the way – this for now only in confidence – I intend to get rid of the Jüdischer Verlag and also Der Jude as soon as possible; […] I want to let my actual work determine the coming years for me […].”
From 1916 Buber lived with his family in Heppenheim an der Bergstraße, where in 1923 he published his philosophical main work Ich und Du and, together with Franz Rosenzweig, began a new rendering of the Hebrew Bible into German under the title Die Schrift. In 1924 he gave a Tao-te-jing course on Monte Verità. From 1924 to 1933 Martin Buber was first a lecturer and finally an honorary professor for Jewish religious doctrine and ethics at the University of Frankfurt am Main. He resigned this professorship in 1933 after Hitler’s seizure of power in order to preempt a revocation. He subsequently took part in building up the Mittelstelle für jüdische Erwachsenenbildung at the Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden. The Mittelstelle was a Jewish educational institution active from 1934 to 1938. “Its main goal was to give German Jews the possibility of strengthening their Jewish identity, especially as the Jewish world they knew collapsed around them. This is reflected in the slogan Buber coined for the center: ‘Armament for existence.'” On 21 February 1935 the Geheime Staatspolizei prohibited Buber “until further notice [from] any activity as a speaker in public events and in closed meetings of Jewish organizations.” In the same year he was excluded from the Reichsschrifttumskammer.
Buber’s house in Heppenheim was devastated during the November pogroms on 9 November 1938. He lived in it from 1916 to 1938 together with his wife and later his granddaughters, the daughters of Rafael Buber and Margarete Buber-Neumann. Barbara (married name Goldschmidt) became a painter, Judith a sociologist and women’s researcher. After serving as a motor vehicle registration office, the house was placed under monument protection in 1975/1976, and renovated and restored in 1978/1979. Since April 1979 the house has been the seat of the International Council of Christians and Jews (ICCJ). In the years 1938 to 1940 Paula Buber wrote the literary portrait of an era Muckensturm. Ein Jahr im Leben einer kleinen Stadt, published in 1953 under a pseudonym, with Muckensturm referring to Heppenheim.
In 1938 Buber was able to escape from the Nazi state to Jerusalem – he himself always spoke of his immigration. There he taught anthropology and sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 1938 to 1951. From this period Buber was close to some Zionist intellectuals, such as the philosopher Felix Weltsch, the writer Max Brod, and politicians such as Chaim Weizmann and Hugo Bergman. They were all acquaintances of Buber from the old Europe of the cities of Prague, Berlin, and Vienna; their friendship and mutual stimulation lasted into the 1960s.
Shortly after the November pogroms, at the end of 1938, an open letter by Mahatma Gandhi appeared under the heading Die Juden, in which he took a position on the persecution of Jews in National Socialist Germany, on Zionism, and on the Palestine conflict. Not only Martin Buber opposed this text. Gandhi emphasized his sympathies for the Jewish people but rejected Zionism as unjust toward the Arabs, to whom Palestine belonged just as England belonged to the English and France to the French. A war against Germany could be justified to prevent the “wicked persecution of an entire people.” However, the Jews could meet the persecution with nonviolent, organized, civil resistance. There were commonalities with the situation of the untouchables in India and the discrimination of Indians in South Africa. Buber contradicted in his sharp reply the comparison of antisemitic violence with the discrimination of Indians by the British and Boers. Gandhi knew the situation in the German concentration camps only insufficiently; the extent of National Socialist terror was not clear to him. Buber expressed his disappointment that Gandhi, whom he esteemed and revered, judged superficially, for the Indians in South Africa were discriminated against but were neither outlawed nor systematically robbed or even killed and made into “hostages for the desired behavior of foreign countries.” Years of nonviolent resistance by German Jews had not been able to prevent the National Socialists from their acts of injustice but had rather increased the violence. Gandhi’s claim that Palestine belonged exclusively to the Arabs was historically, legally, and morally false. Rather, Palestine belonged to both peoples, or to all peoples historically connected with this land. Only a shared nonviolent life together leads to peace and justice.
In 1953 Buber received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade; with its acceptance in the Frankfurt Paulskirche – highly controversial in Israel – he set a sign of willingness to understand. The Bergsträßer Anzeiger wrote of his acceptance speech on the occasion of the award: “Buber admonished the world in his words of thanks to regain trust. The crisis of human beings shows itself most clearly as a crisis of trust.” Neither he nor his wife ever returned to Heppenheim. In New York in 1955 Buber was involved, alongside Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem, and others, in the founding of the Leo Baeck Institute, an important documentation and research center for the history of German-speaking Jews. A large part of the holdings, which also exist in electronic form, can be viewed in the Jewish Museum Berlin. Buber also belonged – like Hannah Arendt – to the authors of Aufbau. Paula Buber died in 1958 in Venice while returning from a journey through the USA and Europe that she had undertaken together with her husband. Martin Buber died in 1965 in Jerusalem.
The Author’s Other Work
In his philosophical works, the theme of dialogue as an anthropological principle of the human being finds expression above all in Buber. His main work is titled Ich und Du (1923) and treats the human being’s relationship to God and to fellow human beings as existential, dialogical, and religious principles. His works influenced, among others, the physician Hans Trüb, later the pedagogue Hermann Röhrs, and the philosopher Amitai Etzioni, who elaborated communitarian thinking; the structuring triad I–you–we of dialogical learning developed by the didacticians Urs Ruf and Peter Gallin also appears to be shaped by Buber’s dialogical principle. In addition, Buber argued in texts such as Drei Sätze eines religiösen Sozialisten for a religious socialism.
Although Martin Buber himself belonged to none of these Jewish directions, he devoted himself to understanding the orthodox and ultra-orthodox mystical Jewish movement in the West. To this end he translated numerous narratives and traditions of Hasidism into German. His extensive collection Die Erzählungen der Chassidim (1949) in particular provides testimony to this. Throughout his life Buber was a mediator between the threatened traditional world of the Jews of Eastern Europe and the Western Haskalah.
Already at the beginning of the Zionist movement and of Jewish immigration to Palestine, Buber urgently warned of the need to build good relations with the Arabs. This earned him much opposition and enmity. He was active in the organizations Brit Schalom and Ihud.
Editions and Late Works
In the early 1960s Buber assembled his works in three collected volumes, ordered according to writings on philosophy, writings on the Bible, and writings on Hasidism. His house publisher Lambert Schneider published the three books together with the Kösel-Verlag. This edition is regarded, by its compilation and ordering principle, as the edition of the last hand and therefore retains its validity despite the new edition of works that has since begun. The last book by Buber in the proper sense is the volume Nachlese, whose proofs he still corrected himself but whose publication he did not live to see. Werner Kraft documented the late period of the religious philosopher in the volume Gespräche mit Martin Buber.
The complete edition of Martin Buber’s writings (Martin Buber Werkausgabe), published in 21 volumes between 2001 and 2019, was initially located as a project of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft at the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Since 2010 the edition has been published at the Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf from its own funds and with financial support from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. In 2020 a long-term project of the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur Mainz was approved under the title Buber Korrespondenzen Digital, which will deal with the letters from and to Martin Buber. For this purpose the roughly 40,000 surviving letters are to be digitized, transcribed, and partly annotated. The letters are archived in the Israel National Library and have not yet been made accessible to the public.
Selected Writings
The Martin Buber Werkausgabe (MBW), on behalf of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (until 2009), the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and the Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf (since 2010), edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr, Peter Schäfer, and Bernd Witte (since 2010), 21 vols., Gütersloher Verlagshaus, Gütersloh 2001–2019 (volumes at De Gruyter). Among his writings: Die Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman (1906); editor of the book series Die Gesellschaft (1906–1912, 40 vols.); Die fünfzigste Pforte (1907); Die Legende des Baalschem (1908); Ekstatische Konfessionen (1909); Reden und Gleichnisse des Tschuang Tse (1910, first German edition, important afterword); Drei Reden über das Judentum (1911); Daniel. Gespräche von der Verwirklichung (1913); Vom Geist des Judentums. Reden und Geleitworte (1916); Die jüdische Bewegung. Gesammelte Aufsätze und Ansprachen 1900–1915 (1916); Mein Weg zum Chassidismus. Erinnerungen von Martin Buber (1918); Der heilige Weg. Ein Wort an die Juden und an die Völker (1919); Ereignisse und Begegnungen (1920); Ich und Du (1923); Die Schrift (rendered into German by Martin Buber together with Franz Rosenzweig), 1926–1938; Die chassidischen Bücher (1928); Zwiesprache (first printing 1929, book edition 1932), among others in Das dialogische Prinzip; Königtum Gottes (1932); Kampf um Israel. Reden und Schriften 1921–1932 (1933); Die Frage an den Einzelnen (1936, in Das dialogische Prinzip); M.B., Judah L. Magnes, and Ernst Simon (eds.): Towards Union in Palestine. Essays on Zionism and Jewish-Arab cooperation, IHUD (Union) Association, Jerusalem 1947; Das Problem des Menschen (1948); Moses, Georg Müller, Munich 1948; Gog und Magog (1949; new edition 2009, Verlagshaus Gütersloh); Die Erzählungen der Chassidim (1949; new edition with index and glossary: Manesse, Zurich 2014); Zwei Glaubensweisen (1950); Pfade in Utopia. Über Gemeinschaft und deren Verwirklichung (1950, above all an engagement with the ideas of Gustav Landauer); Urdistanz und Beziehung (1951); Der utopische Sozialismus (1952 and 1967, supplement to the volume Pfade in Utopia); Das echte Gespräch und die Möglichkeit des Friedens, acceptance speech on the occasion of the award of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, 1953; Gottesfinsternis. Betrachtungen zur Beziehung zwischen Religion und Philosophie (1953); Elemente des Zwischenmenschlichen, in Das dialogische Prinzip (1953); Reden über Erziehung (1953, L. Schneider, now Gütersloher Verlagshaus; 10th ed., Heidelberg 2005); Die Legende des Baalschem, revised new edition, Manesse Verlag, Zurich 1955; Das Buch der Preisungen, rendered into German by Martin Buber, Verlag Lambert Schneider, newly revised edition Heidelberg 1958, 10th edition of the new edition Gerlingen 1992; Begegnung. Autobiographische Fragmente (1961); Juden, Palästina und Araber (1961, Ner-Tamid-Verlag); Werkausgabe in 3 volumes at Lambert Schneider / Heidelberg and Kösel / Munich: Schriften zur Philosophie (vol. 1, 1962), Schriften zur Bibel (vol. 2, 1964), Schriften zum Chassidismus (vol. 3, 1963); Der Jude und sein Judentum. Ergänzungsband zur dreibändigen Werkausgabe, Cologne, Melzer 1963; Nachlese, 2nd supplementary volume to the Werkausgabe, Heidelberg 1965; Das dialogische Prinzip, Heidelberg 1973; Ein Land und zwei Völker. Zur jüdisch-arabischen Frage, Jüdischer Vlg., Frankfurt, 1993; Nachlese, 1965, Heidelberg: L. Schneider, currently Gütersloher Verlagshaus; 3rd ed. (July 2002); Briefwechsel aus sieben Jahrzehnten, three volumes, edited and introduced by Grete Schaeder, Heidelberg 1972–1975; Des Baal-Schem-Tow Unterweisung im Umgang mit Gott. Des Rabbi Israel Ben Elieser genannt Baal-Schem-Tow, das ist Meister vom guten Namen, Unterweisung aus den Bruchstücken, assembled by Martin Buber, with afterword and commentary edited by Lothar Stiehm, Schneider, Heidelberg 1981; Die Kreatur, editors: Martin Buber, Joseph Wittig, Viktor von Weizsäcker, vol. 1 (1926), vol. 2 (1928), and vol. 3 (1930), Verlag Lambert Schneider (Heidelberg, Berlin); Elija. Ein Mysterienspiel, Martin Buber and Elie Wiesel; opera on it by Antal Doráti: Der Künder, in English: The Chosen, opera in 3 acts (1984), released in 2022 as a staged production by ORFEO International Music.
Honors and Commemoration
Buber received the Hansischer Goethe-Preis in 1951; the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels in 1953; the Goetheplakette der Stadt Frankfurt am Main in 1958; the Israel-Preis in 1958; the Kultureller Ehrenpreis der Landeshauptstadt München in 1960; membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1961; an honorary doctorate from the medical faculty of the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster in 1962; the Erasmus Prize in 1963; and an honorary doctorate from the University of Heidelberg in 1964. Martin Buber was nominated a total of ten times for the Nobel Prize in Literature and seven times for the Nobel Peace Prize in the 1950s and 1960s. The awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to the Jewish authors Samuel Agnon and Nelly Sachs in 1966 is seen in connection with Martin Buber, who had died a year earlier.
The second Judaistics institute in Germany, founded in 1966 at the University of Cologne, is called the Martin Buber-Institut für Judaistik. Since 1968 to the present, the Buber-Rosenzweig-Medaille has been awarded annually by the Koordinierungsrat der Gesellschaften für Christlich-Jüdische Zusammenarbeit to persons who are particularly committed to Christian-Jewish dialogue. In 1970, in Vienna-Floridsdorf (21st district), the Bubergasse was named after him. Numerous schools honor the pedagogue Buber in their names, and the Martin-Buber-Jugendherberge (1974) in Überlingen on Lake Constance is also named after him. On the occasion of his 100th birthday, Buber was honored in 1978 by the Bundespost with a 50-pfennig special stamp (design by Gerd Aretz). Through the Euriade, a Euregional cultural and scientific festival launched in 1982, the Martin-Buber-Plakette has been awarded annually since 2002 in the Abbey of Rolduc in Kerkrade. The festival takes place in the tri-border region between Belgium, the Netherlands, and North Rhine-Westphalia. At the Hebrew University, a foundation fund endowed with 20 million euros, the Martin-Buber-Gesellschaft der Forschungsstipendiaten in the humanities, cultural, and social sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (The Martin Buber Society of Fellows), has been established to support further work by graduates. On 16 October 2018, a Berlin memorial plaque was unveiled at his former residence, Berlin-Zehlendorf, Vopeliuspfad 12. At the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main, the Buber-Rosenzweig-Institut was founded in February 2021, which is to concern itself with research on Judaism in the modern era and the present.
The Martin-Buber-Gesellschaft, founded in 2000, seeks “to awaken and deepen knowledge and understanding of Martin Buber, to promote research into and presentation of his work, his person, and his time. Included in the illumination of Buber’s life circle are to be his origins, primarily Jewish intellectual and religious history, predominantly from the 18th century onward.” The society has a philosophical section, a pedagogical section, and a therapeutic section. Its first chairman is Wolfgang Krone, deputy chairwoman is Ursula Frost. Honorary chairman was Lothar Stiehm.
