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Rosenzweig had experienced as a soldier some of what he considered
to be the ‘authenticity’ of the Jews of eastern Europe, and became
acutely aware of his own lack of knowledge of the Hebrew sources. So
after the war he established in Frankfurt the Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus
(‘Free Jewish House of Learning’) to enable an acculturated community
with insufficient Jewish education to come to grips with the classic Jew-
ish texts in a sympathetic environment which accepted their search for
a Jewish identity. The Lehrhaus turned out to be filling a very real need,
and not only for the most assimilated German Jews. Among those who
joined Rosenzweig in Frankfurt was Martin Buber, with whom he had
maintained a friendship since his time in Berlin, and the two of them
began together a new translation of the Bible into a strongly Hebraized
German which was intended to shock the readers into engaging with
the text. The project was unfinished on Rosenzweig’s death, and was
completed by Buber only in the 1950s.
Martin Buber, unlike Rosenzweig, had received a traditional Jewish
education in Lemberg with his grandfather Solomon Buber, a man of
independent means who combined an active business life with a dev-
otion to the scholarly publication of midrashic and medieval rabbinic
literature. Martin himself abandoned religious observance in his teens,
and, after a period immersed in Zionist politics from his early twenties,
by the age of twenty- six began the study of Hasidism which was to dis-
tinguish him within the Jewish community and be a central component
of his life’s work. His interest was, in origin, aesthetic, and he began in
1906 with an adaptation in German of the tales of R. Nachman, fol-
lowed in 1908 by Die Legende des Baalschem, but he came also to see
in Hasidism the concept of personal piety as the essence of Judaism.
There was a direct link from this interest in Hasidism, and his work
during the First World War through the Jewish National Committee in
Berlin on behalf of the Jews in eastern European countries, to his most
influential work Ich und Du (‘I and Thou’), which was published in
1923 just as he was becoming involved in the Frankfurt Lehrhaus with
Rosenzweig. This philosophy of dialogue, much influenced by his read-
ing as a youth of the works of the nineteenth- century Christian
philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, posited that man has two attitudes to
the world determined by two relations – ‘ I– Thou’ and ‘ I– It’. Modern
human relations have often sunk to the ‘ I– It’ relation, which is prag-
matic and utilitarian. In this relation, a subject dominates and uses an
object. New effort, then, is needed to restore the ‘ I– Thou’ relation in
which two individuals stand in existential encounter and dialogue with