Martin Buber 1878 – 1965

Martin Buber was a 20th-century Austrian-born Israeli Jewish philosopher and one of the most influential figures of modern Jewish religious thought. His 1923 book Ich und Du, translated as I and Thou, distinguished two fundamental modes of human relation: the I-It relation in which the other is treated as an object, and the I-Thou relation in which the other is encountered as a subject in mutual presence. His thought drew on Hasidic Judaism, German Idealism, and the dialogical philosophy of Ferdinand Ebner, and shaped subsequent personalist, existentialist, and theological thought. He held a chair at the University of Frankfurt until removed by the Nazi regime in 1933, after which he taught Jewish adult education in Germany before emigrating to Palestine in 1938. He held the chair of social philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 1938 until his retirement.

Martin Buber (1878–1965) was an Austrian-Israeli Jewish philosopher whose work centers on the philosophical and religious analysis of human relationship. Born in Vienna, raised by his grandfather the rabbinic scholar Solomon Buber in Lemberg, he studied philosophy in Vienna, Leipzig, and Berlin and became one of the most prominent figures of European Jewish thought between the wars. He fled Germany for Mandate Palestine in 1938 and held a chair at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem until his retirement.

Buber's most influential single work, Ich und Du (1923, translated as I and Thou), develops the philosophical analysis of two fundamental modes of relation: the I-It of objectifying instrumental engagement and the I-Thou of mutual address that constitutes genuine encounter with another person, a work of art, or God. The book has shaped Jewish philosophy, Christian theology, philosophy of religion, dialogical ethics, and twentieth-century Continental philosophy more broadly.

Buber's other major works include Between Man and Man (1947), Eclipse of God (1952), and the recovery of Hasidic philosophy in Tales of the Hasidim and his philosophical writings on Hasidism. His translation of the Hebrew Bible into German, begun with Franz Rosenzweig in 1925 and completed by Buber alone in 1962, is one of the major literary-philosophical achievements of twentieth-century Jewish thought. He was an early advocate of Arab-Jewish reconciliation in Mandate Palestine and Israel and a public moral voice on these questions until his death in Jerusalem in 1965.