2 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
written, pertinent academic committees blocked Magnes’s recommendation
because Buber lacked a clear scholarly profile. “Was he a philosopher, a bibli-
cal scholar, a historian of Jewish mysticism and Hasidism? Or was he perhaps
a scholar of comparative religion (Religionswissenschaft)?”^2 At the University of
Frankfurt, where he taught from 1923 until 1933, when he was “vacationed” by
the Nazis, Buber was first an adjunct lecturer in Jewish science of religion and
ethics, before his promotion in 1930 to honorary professor of comparative reli-
gion. Nowhere among these titles is Buber considered a specialist in the field of
political thought. And yet Hans Kohn’s 1929 biography of him carried the subtitle
Ein Versuch über Religion und Politik [An Essay on Religion and Politics].^3 Kohn
understood Buber’s position, articulated three years later in his biblical study
Königtum Gottes [Kingship of God] (1932), that the Sinai covenant, the central
event in Jewish history, must be understood as “a theo-political act”—that for
Israel “there is no political sphere outside the theo-political.”^4 In 1939, just one year
after he fled Nazi Germany for Palestine, Buber raised with Kohn the possibility
of publishing his upcoming works in English. The proposed projects included
the following:
- Religion and Politics. For this book there is only a pile of schemes and
sketches. It shall contain 3 parts: a history of the relation between religion and
politics, from ancient China up to our time; a systematic disquisition with
examples; and practical conclusions for the main problems of actual society,
state and civilization.... [C]ertainly this will be the most voluminous of all
my books—and perhaps the most important too.^5
This work never came to fruition, but Buber’s expectation that it might become
his most important book shows how seriously he took the theme of religion and
politics.
Few scholars have focused on Buber’s politics, and those who do often com-
plain about their lack of company. Robert Weltsch, for example, writes of the
“fallacy” of seeing Buber solely as a “religious thinker” and “social philosopher”
rather than “a man of politics.”^6 Twenty years later, Steven Schwarzschild re-
ports the “striking exception” of politics from general scholarly interest in Bu-
ber. “In at least some instances,” Schwarzschild claims, “this exception is made
tendentiously: Buber’s reputation is to be used for institutional and political
self- advancement, but the nature of his political thought and programme would
resist such purposes.”^7 Whether scholars simply do not see Buber as a political
writer, or whether they find the topic dangerous, no definitive treatment of Bu-
ber’s politics exists.
Weltsch is correct that scholars have simply been more interested in other
aspects of Buber’s work. His fame is due primarily to Ich und Du [I and Thou]
(1923), a short but powerful book widely read as an existentialist manifesto, as
well as to his collections of Hasidic tales and his commentaries on them, which