10 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
came to conclusions because of these approaches. Scholars take Buber’s own re-
frain, “Ich habe keine Lehre,” or “I have no teaching,” too seriously when they
treat his approach to the Bible as nothing more than a tool available to any gen-
eration in order to “make the Bible relevant to our time.” While Buber was cer-
tainly interested in making the Bible relevant, he does have a teaching as well
as a method, and part 2 of this book is dedicated to elaborating it. From the
beginnings of his work in Kingship of God and its unfinished sequel, Der Gesal-
bte [The Anointed] (the subject of chapter 4), in Germany, to its continuation in
Moshe (1946) (chapter 5) and Torat Ha-Nevi’ im [Torah of the Prophets, translated
into English as The Prophetic Faith] (1944) (chapter 6) after moving to Palestine,
Buber’s biblical writings sketch out a theopolitical history of Israel, from exodus
to exile. They emerge from the context of Weimar political theology and address
themselves to the political project with which Buber was most concerned, Zion-
ism. Part 3 of the book (chapters 7–8) thus deals with applications of theopolitics,
both in Buber’s own time and in ours.
Theopolitics and Zionism
Buber wrote about migrations of Jewish people to the Land of Israel, and their
construction of polities there, in many registers. One of these was in his Zionist
writing; another was in his biblical scholarship. Buber’s argument was that the
Jews had been elected by God, freed from bondage, and brought to the land, but
not to create a state that resembled those around it, with their political theologies
of kingship (in the ancient world) and their unequal distribution of life outcomes
based on nation or race (in the modern one). Rather, Buber believed that in the
ancient world as in the modern, “the creation of a genuine and just community
on a voluntary basis... will show the world the possibility of basing social justice
on voluntary action.”^51 Buber’s Zionism is the subject of chapter 7, which pres-
ents it as an anarchistic modern translation of biblical prophecy, in which Jewish
life has a necessarily political component, albeit defined against the prevailing
understandings of politics. The typical adjectives for Buber’s Zionism, whether
cultural, or spiritual, or binationalist, fail to capture this essential element. Buber
never called his own Zionism “theopolitical” (he preferred the even more un-
wieldy Wirklichkeitzionismus, or “Zionism of reality”), but reading his Zionism
through the concept of theopolitics makes the best sense of it.
The famous term “binationalism” attempts to capture the most famous
public aspect of Buber’s Zionism, his insistent call for Jews and Arabs to share
power in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. “Bina-
tionalism” coheres with the usual picture of Buber as a philosopher—of course
the thinker of “dialogue” believed in negotiations with Arabs!—and as such is
rarely investigated closely for its political content. The sociologist and historian
Gershon Shafir has argued, following Baruch Kimmerling, that “whereas Israelis