114 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
kingship of God. The triumph of the monarchical faction is the triumph of the
one they ask for: the anointed one, the messiah, the usurper, against the anarcho-
theocratic ideal of unmediated rule by God. In this sense, it is the victory of
political theology over theopolitics—of Messiah over God.
Conclusion
Over the course of part 1 of this book, we have traced an arc following more than
three decades of Martin Buber’s life and work. At the turn of the twentieth cen-
tury, he was a young neo-romantic poet and Zionist activist. His initial meeting
and friendship with Gustav Landauer overlapped with a decade when he rose to
prominence as a Jewish thinker whose writings on mysticism and Hasidism ap-
pealed to a generation of acculturated Central European Jews. The peak of this
early activity came just before World War I, when Buber clashed with Landauer
and drastically reevaluated his philosophy and political priorities. In 1918’s The
Holy Way, he had already moved, under Landauer’s influence, from a fairly stan-
dard cultural Zionism, one that imagined the restoration of Jewish creativity and
vitality that would come with the restoration of the Jewish people’s contact with
the Land of Israel, to a rather more iconoclastic position: that it was not primar-
ily cultural creativity that was at stake, but faithfulness and obedience to God,
manifested through a principled rejection of any politics of statehood and sov-
ereignty. Over the course of the 1920s, Buber memorialized his martyred friend
while simultaneously pursuing the other projects for which he is better known.
It was also during this period that he tested and developed the thesis of The Holy
Way, both measuring it against challenges from intellectuals like Weber and
Schmitt and working to increase and improve his knowledge of the Bible itself.
By the late 1920s and early 1930s, Buber is ready to offer a sustained and detailed
book-length version of this thesis: Kingship of God.
Buber argues that some ancient Israelites imagined a unique theopolity,
echoes of which can be found in the layered strata of the Hebrew Bible. From the
Bible we also learn of the paradoxes in this theopolitical structure and of the ten-
sions that emerged during the periods of waiting that followed the death of each
successive charismatic leader. Eventually, the internal and external pressures on
the people, especially from military threats, led to the success of the monarchical
faction, the historical-political defeat of the anarcho-theocracy, and the institu-
tion of the human monarchy, justified by the claim that the king was the anointed
of God. Despite this victory, the conflict between the two factions continued in
the opposition of the various editors and redactors of what became our book
of Judges, between prophets and kings up until the Babylonian Exile, between
scholarly camps over the biblical evidence, and finally in the contest between
theopolitics on the one hand, and realpolitik and political theology on the other,
for the direction of contemporary life.