This Pathless Hour | 283ever. Without absolving Buber of all responsibility for the failure of his politics,
one may ask how he could have pursued his own goals in a way that was more
Buberian—a more interesting approach, perhaps, than simply enumerating the
historical obstacles he faced.
The most common criticism of Buber’s Zionism among those who were sym-
pathetic to it was that he did not live up to his own creed. He did not move to
Palestine until forced to flee Germany. This criticism was repeated many times
by Scholem, once in 1961 at a celebration on the occasion of the completion of
Buber’s German translation of the Bible. At the event, Scholem remarked that the
translation served also as a commentary: “Time and again when we have encoun-
tered difficult sections of the Bible many of us have asked ourselves: What does
Buber have to say about this? Not so very different from our asking ourselves:
What does Rashi say?”^168 Of course, Scholem’s praise was not without a word of
criticism on its place in its historical context. The language of Buber’s translation
was not merely the German of the 1920s but a kind of utopian German, a Ger-
man “present potentially in the language.” The collaboration with Rosenzweig
made the translation a Gastgeschenk, a guest offering to the German people from
the Jews, represented by a Zionist and a non-Zionist. Yet Scholem felt compelled
to ask: “For whom is this translation now intended and whom will it influence?
Seen historically, it is no longer a Gastgeschenk of the Jews to the Germans but
rather—and it is not easy for me to say this—the tombstone of a relationship that
was extinguished in unspeakable horror. The Jews for whom you translated are
no more. Their children, who have escaped from this horror, will no longer read
Germa n.”^169 There is a criticism implicit in this question: Buber was too deeply in-
vested in Germany to honor his own Zionist convictions by coming to Palestine
and treating Palestine as the future center of Jewry. Instead, he gave the Germans
a utopian Bible—a gift they had not requested and now could not accept.
Scholem has a point. Most of Buber’s Prague disciples preceded him to Pal-
estine by many years. Hugo Bergmann arrived in 1920; Hans Kohn in 1925 (al-
though he left again in 1934); Ernst Simon in 1928. Only Robert Weltsch waited
as long as Buber, before moving to London in 1945, and only Max Brod arrived
later, in 1939. What kept Buber in Germany? Perhaps simply his personality: he
was a Central European intellectual, not a Levantine activist. Or he may have felt
called on to engage the political-theological problematics of Germany, through
his translation work with Rosenzweig, his editorship of Die Kreatur, and the
“spiritual resistance” of Jewish adult education in the Nazi period. One could
also accuse his Zionism of failing to meet his own standards. He allowed himself
to indulge in certain Labor Zionist illusions about imaginary differences in at-
titudes between the Arab fellahin and the rich effendis supposedly inciting them
to anti-Zionism, and occasionally succumbed to the romantic notion of “mak-
ing the desert bloom.” But all these criticisms touch upon his personal failings
only as a politician. There is a bittersweet irony when one advocates practicing