Introduction | 9to that of traditional Jewish religious leaders, with a modern twist: instead of
at a yeshiva, Buber taught in the Frankfurt Lehrhaus established by his friend
and colleague, Franz Rosenzweig.^44 It was Rosenzweig who in 1923 convinced
Buber to advance his candidacy for the university lecturer position, arguing as
one man “free of silly academicism” to another that the position might serve as a
launching pad to transform university religious studies from within: “Your pres-
ence and your indubitably apikoros personality will give that faculty its character
and direction during the process of formation. This can be done only by one
who is wholly free of any deference for the existing university, and who, at the
same time, brings to the job the kind of personal reputation which will forbid
the university’s interfering with him.”^45 And together with Rosenzweig, in 1925
Buber embarked on his most extended engagement with the Hebrew Bible, a new
translation into German that their joint religious philosophies and hermeneutic
approaches would inform.^46
It would be the first major German translation of the Tanakh by Jewish phi-
losophers, and aimed at a primarily Jewish readership, since Moses Mendels-
sohn’s version in the eighteenth century. As Hannah Arendt pointed out, how-
ever, the linguistic purposes of the two translations were precisely inverse: “A
hundred and fifty years ago, at the beginning of the emancipation, Moses Men-
delssohn’s German translation of the Bible in Hebrew letters enabled the Jewish
youth of the ghetto to learn German and to enter, by this oddly circuitous path,
into the German and European life of the period. Similarly, in our own day, Bu-
ber’s marvelous undertaking is but a circuitous way of bringing the Jews back to
Hebrew, the language of the Bible; a way of bringing them back to the Jewish past,
its values and requirements.” 47
Wilhelm Stapel, a friend of Carl Schmitt and the editor of the conservative,
Protestant Deutsches Volkstum, well known for his antisemitic views, accused
Buber and Rosenzweig of having produced a “half-jargon,” a “Hebraic German”
that was “the strangest German that was ever written.”^48 Buber not only takes
this view of Stapel’s to be ignorant on the linguistic merits; he also sees Stapel’s
opposition as motivated by a sense of political threat: “He had seen clearly what
danger to his conception of a ‘Christian statesman’—i.e., a sham Christian offer-
ing religious sanction to all the violences of the state—would be entailed among
the German people by the dissemination of the actual Scriptures, which demand
the shaping of society on the basis of belief.”^49 This is why Buber calls Stapel “the
most perceptive of our antagonists.” Whether or not he is correct about Stapel’s
motivations, what matters is that Buber finds that “the dissemination of the ac-
tual Scriptures” works politically, against efforts to offer “religious sanction to all
the violences of the state.” Thus theopolitics is Buber’s telos not just as a biblical
scholar but as a popular teacher as well.^50
Much scholarship focuses on Buber’s interpretive approaches to the Bible.
This focus can be so strong that it excludes the possibility that Buber actually