A 1928 tribute volume marking the fiftieth birthday of the Jewish religious philosopher
What the Work Is
Zu Martin Bubers fünfzigstem Geburtstag is a German-language publication that first appeared in 1928, issued to mark the fiftieth birthday of Martin Buber, who was born in Vienna on 8 February 1878. Catalog metadata classifies the work under the subjects of Judaism and Zionism. It belongs to the genre of the commemorative or tribute volume — a collection of writings brought together in honour of a living figure — rather than being a work authored by Buber himself.
Buber was an Austrian-Israeli Jewish religious philosopher, known for his work in dialogical philosophy and on Hasidism, for his German translation of the Tanakh (undertaken with Franz Rosenzweig), and for his engagement with Zionism. By the time of his fiftieth birthday he was already an established figure in Jewish intellectual life: he had founded and edited the monthly journal Der Jude in 1916, had published his philosophical masterwork Ich und Du in 1923, and had begun, with Rosenzweig, the new German rendering of the Hebrew Bible.
What the Book Is About
The volume is a Festschrift — a celebratory collection of contributions published in honour of Buber on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday. Its subject is Buber himself: his person, his work, and his significance as they stood in 1928. The catalog metadata’s subject headings of Judaism and Zionism indicate the two broad fields in which the tribute situates him, corresponding to the two domains in which he was most active at that point in his life — Jewish religious and cultural thought, and the Zionist movement and Jewish national questions.
Because the work is a collective tribute rather than a single sustained argument, it does not advance a thesis of its own. Its purpose is commemorative: to recognise and honour Buber’s achievements at the midpoint of his life, gathering contributions that speak to the range of his activity.
Key Ideas and Themes
The themes of the volume are those of Buber’s own intellectual profile as it appeared in 1928, since a tribute volume of this kind reflects the concerns of the person it honours. The source material identifies the central strands of Buber’s work in this period.
The first is the philosophy of dialogue. In his philosophical writings, Buber developed the theme of dialogue as an anthropological principle of the human being. His major work, Ich und Du (1923), treats the human being’s relation to God and to fellow human beings as existential, dialogical, and religious principles. This dialogical thinking is the intellectual achievement for which Buber was, and remains, best known, and it stands at the centre of his reputation in 1928.
The second is Hasidism. Although Buber himself belonged to none of the Jewish directions he wrote about, he devoted himself to making the orthodox and ultra-orthodox mystical Jewish movement of Eastern Europe understood in the West. He translated numerous Hasidic tales and traditions into German. His large collection Die Erzählungen der Chassidim would appear later, in 1949, but the work of translation and interpretation was already well underway by 1928 — his Die Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman had appeared in 1906 and Die Legende des Baalschem in 1908. Throughout his life Buber served as a mediator between the threatened traditional world of Eastern European Jewry and the Western Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment.
The third is Zionism. From the early days of the Zionist movement and of Jewish immigration to Palestine, Buber urgently warned of the need to build good relations with the Arabs — a stance that brought him much opposition and enmity. He was active in the organisations Brit Schalom and Ihud. This insistence on Jewish-Arab cooperation, and the controversy it attracted, forms part of the context in which a 1928 tribute to Buber would have been received.
A fourth strand, closely related, is Buber’s advocacy of a religious socialism, set out in texts such as Drei Sätze eines religiösen Sozialisten.
Structure and Approach
The source material does not describe the internal organisation of this volume — its individual contributions, editors, or arrangement — and no such details are asserted here. What can be said is that it is a commemorative publication of 1928, in German, dedicated to Buber on his fiftieth birthday, and that its subject matter falls within the fields of Judaism and Zionism.
Significance and Influence
The volume’s significance lies in its documentary character: it records how Buber was regarded by his contemporaries at a particular moment — 1928, the year of his fiftieth birthday, five years after Ich und Du and in the middle of the period in which he was working on the Buber-Rosenzweig translation of the Hebrew Bible. It stands as a marker of his standing in Jewish intellectual and Zionist circles at that time.
The source material does not record the volume’s reception, its later editions, or any specific influence it exerted, and none is claimed here.
The year 1928, in which the tribute volume appeared, falls within a distinct phase of Buber’s life and work. Since 1916 he had lived with his family in Heppenheim an der Bergstraße, and it was there that he published his philosophical masterwork Ich und Du in 1923. In 1925, at the suggestion of the publisher Lambert Schneider, he had begun — together with the philosopher Franz Rosenzweig — the translation of the Holy Scriptures, the Tanakh, into German. The two scholars were concerned above all with a linguistically precise rendering of the Hebrew original that preserved its full richness of meaning. The volumes appeared initially from Lambert Schneider’s press.
Also belonging to this period is Die chassidischen Bücher, published in 1928 — the same year as the tribute volume. From 1924 to 1933 Buber served at the University of Frankfurt am Main, first as a lecturer (Lehrbeauftragter) and ultimately as an honorary professor (Honorarprofessor) for Jewish religious doctrine and ethics. In 1924 he also held a course on the Tao-te-jing at Monte Verità.
Biographical Background
Buber was born in Vienna in 1878 into prosperous circumstances. His father, Carl (Kalman Yekutiel) Buber, was a successful businessman active in the grain trade, mineral oil, and phosphate mines, and belonged to liberal Judaism. His mother, Elise Buber (née Wurhaft), was a Russian actress from Odessa. His parents separated in 1881, and from the age of four he grew up with his paternal grandparents in the Galician city of Lemberg (today Lviv, Ukraine). His mother established a new family in Russia with an officer. This loss, which occurred without a farewell and was never explained to him by his grandparents, occupied him throughout his life. He saw his mother only once more, and learned of her exact circumstances 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; before that he received private instruction. His grandfather was the private scholar and Midrash expert Salomon Buber, one of the most important researchers and collectors in the field of the Hasidic tradition of Eastern European Jewry; with him Martin spoke Yiddish. His grandmother Adele spoke German, which she had acquired through self-study 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 on himself 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 under 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 came to know Theodor Herzl personally — the first correspondence dates to 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 function. In 1902 Buber was a co-founder of the Jüdischer Verlag. From 1905 he worked as an editor for the publisher Rütten & Loening, where he initiated and oversaw, among other things, the large-scale project of a socio-psychological monograph series, Die Gesellschaft. In 1908 he participated 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.
Der Jude and the Mid-1920s
In 1916 he founded, together with Salman Schocken, the monthly journal Der Jude, of which he was editor. Buber initially received a modest monthly honorarium from Schocken; later he worked without payment and financed himself through grants from his father and income from properties bequeathed to him by his grandparents. 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 of 1922 he wrote that he intended to be rid of the Jüdischer Verlag and Der Jude as soon as possible, and that he wanted to let his actual work determine the coming years.
The Bible Translation
After Rosenzweig’s death in 1929, Buber continued the translation work alone. A slip was enclosed with the last jointly produced volume, Jeschajahu: “Als Franz Rosenzweig 1929 starb, war die Übertragung der Schrift bis Jesaja Kap. 53 gediehen. Sie ist dann von Martin Buber allein fortgeführt worden.” By 1938, of the twenty volumes envisaged, only fifteen had appeared. The volume Gleichsprüche, published in 1938 by the Schocken Verlag, remained the last of the individual editions. A planned publication of the already completed Job volume by the Schocken exile press, which had moved to New York, was not realized because Buber did not wish to “enlarge a torso by another piece.” The missing volumes appeared only after the war, gathered into a single voluminous book, as Schriftwerke within the framework of a four-volume complete edition of the Buber-Rosenzweig Bible from the publisher Jakob Hegner: Die fünf Bücher der Weisung (newly revised edition 1954, with the supplement Zu einer neuen Verdeutschung der Schrift), Bücher der Geschichte (1955), Bücher der Kündung (1958), and Das Buch der Preisungen (Psalter, with the supplement Zur Verdeutschung der Preisungen, 1958). The Buber-Rosenzweig translation is regarded, alongside Moses Mendelssohn’s Torah rendering, as the most significant German-language Jewish Bible and as the most exact rendering of the Old Testament books. It served as a model for André Chouraqui in his literal rendering of the Scriptures into French; he pursued the goal of creating a similarly generally accepted French-language Jewish Bible, which appeared in the 1970s in 22 volumes and has been continually reprinted since.
Later Editions and the Werkausgabe
In the early 1960s Buber assembled his works into three collected volumes, ordered according to Schriften zur Philosophie, Schriften zur Bibel, and Schriften zum Chassidismus. His house publisher Lambert Schneider issued the three books together with the Kösel-Verlag. This edition is regarded, by its compilation and ordering principle, as the Ausgabe letzter Hand and therefore retains its validity despite the new edition of the works that has since begun. The last book in the proper sense is the volume Nachlese, whose proofs he corrected himself but whose appearance 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 situated as a project of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft at the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. From 2010 the edition was 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 concern itself with the letters to and from 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.
The Nazi Period and Emigration
Buber resigned his professorship in 1933 after Hitler’s seizure of power, in order to pre-empt a revocation. He subsequently participated 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, above all as the Jewish world they knew collapsed around them; this is reflected in the slogan Buber coined for the centre: “Bewaffnung für die Existenz.” On 21 February 1935 the Geheime Staatspolizei prohibited Buber “bis auf weiteres jede Betätigung als Redner in öffentlichen Veranstaltungen und in geschlossenen Tagungen jüdischer Organisationen.” In the same year he was excluded from the Reichsschrifttumskammer.
Buber’s house in Heppenheim was devastated during the November pogroms of 9 November 1938. He had 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 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, in which Muckensturm refers 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 a number of Zionist intellectuals, such as the philosopher Felix Weltsch, the writer Max Brod, and politicians including 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.
The Gandhi Controversy
Shortly after the November pogroms, at the end of 1938, an open letter by Mahatma Gandhi appeared under the title 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 as a means of preventing 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 behaviour 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.
Recognition and Commemoration
In 1953 Buber received the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels; with its acceptance — highly controversial in Israel — in the Frankfurt Paulskirche, he set a sign of readiness for understanding. The Bergsträßer Anzeiger wrote of his acceptance speech on the occasion of the award: “Buber hat die Welt in seinen Dankesworten ermahnt, das Vertrauen zurückzugewinnen. Die Krise der Menschen zeigt sich am deutlichsten als eine Krise des Vertrauens.” Neither he nor his wife ever returned to Heppenheim.
In New York in 1955 Buber participated, alongside Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem, and others, in the founding of the Leo Baeck Institute, an important documentation and research centre 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, on the return from a journey through the USA and Europe that she had undertaken together with her husband. Martin Buber died in 1965 in Jerusalem.
His awards include the Hansischer Goethe-Preis (1951), the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (1953), the Goetheplakette der Stadt Frankfurt am Main (1958), the Israel-Preis (1958), the Kultureller Ehrenpreis der Landeshauptstadt München (1960), membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1961), an honorary doctorate from the medical faculty of the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster (1962), the Erasmuspreis (1963), and an honorary doctorate from the University of Heidelberg (1964). In the 1950s and 1960s Buber was nominated a total of ten times for the Nobel Prize in Literature and seven times for the Nobel Peace Prize. 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 named the Martin Buber-Institut für Judaistik. Since 1968 the Buber-Rosenzweig-Medaille has been awarded annually by the Koordinierungsrat der Gesellschaften für Christlich-Jüdische Zusammenarbeit to persons who work especially for Christian-Jewish dialogue. In 1970 the Bubergasse in Vienna-Floridsdorf (21st district) was named after him. Numerous schools honour the educator 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, in 1978, the Bundespost honoured Buber with a 50-pfennig commemorative stamp (design by Gerd Aretz). Through the euregional culture and science festival Euriade, 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 graduate students. On 16 October 2018 a Berlin memorial plaque was unveiled at his former residence, Vopeliuspfad 12, in Berlin-Zehlendorf. At the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main, the Buber-Rosenzweig-Institut was founded in February 2021, to concern itself with research on Judaism in the modern and contemporary period.
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 circle of life 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; the deputy chairwoman is Ursula Frost. Lothar Stiehm was honorary chairman.
