12 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
- KG 136.
- Buber to Kohn, October 4, 1939, Talbiyeh, Jerusalem. I discovered this letter, composed
in Buber’s hand and in English, in Kohn’s papers at the Klau Library of Hebrew Union College
in Cincinnati. A version of the letter found in the Adolph Oko papers of the American Jew-
ish Archives was previously published in Frederic Krome, “Correspondence between Martin
Buber, Hans Kohn, Abraham Joshua Heschel and Adolph Oko, 1939–44,” Jewish Culture and
History 5.1 (Summer 2002): 121–134. Krome consulted Oko’s copy of the letter, which was tran-
scribed and likely “cleaned up” by Kohn before forwarding, removing text Buber had crossed
out and omitting personal references to his relationship with Kohn. Buber also wrote a very
similar letter to Oko himself, two weeks later, in which he intriguingly refers to his religion
and politics manuscript as “drafted”; I thank Dr. Krome for making that letter available to me.
See the appendix for the full text of the original letter to Kohn, including crossed-out portions
represented in strikethrough. - Robert Weltsch, ““Buber’s Political Philosophy,” in The Philosophy of Martin Buber, ed.
Paul Arthur Schilpp and Maurice Friedman (La Salle, IL: Open Court Press, 1967), 435–449. - Steven Schwarzschild, “A Critique of Martin Buber’s Political Philosophy: An Affec-
tionate Reappraisal,” in The Pursuit of the Ideal: Jewish Writings of Steven Schwarzschild, ed.
Menachem Kellner (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1990), 185–207. - Mendes-Flohr, “The Desert within and Social Renewal—Martin Buber’s Vision of Uto-
pia,” in NPMB 219–230. - Bernard Susser, “The Anarcho-Federalism of Martin Buber,” Publius 9.4 (Autumn
1979): 103–116. - This method assumes that much can be said on Buber’s politics without having recourse
to his “philosophy,” not ruling out the prospect of reintroducing the philosophy later. - Vincent W. Lloyd has delineated three uses of the term “political theology”: (1) a narrow
sense, referring to Schmitt’s account of the role of religious concepts in political theory; (2) a
broad sense, interchangeable with almost any form of the conjunction “religion and politics”;
(3) a “sectarian” sense, indicating a branch of theology (usually Christian) that deals with
politics. I deal with the first sense, the context in which it emerged and was originally received.
Lloyd, introduction to Race and Political Theology, ed. Vincent W. Lloyd (Stanford, CA: Stan-
ford University Press, 2012), 1–21. - Christoph Schmidt, “Die theopolitische Stunde: Martin Bubers Begriff der Theopoli-
tik, seine prophetischen Ursprünge, seine Aktualität und Bedeutung für die Definition Zi-
onistischer Politik,” in Die theopolitische Stunde: Zwölf Perspektiven auf das eschatologische
Problem der Moderne (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2009), 205–225; cf. Schmidt, “The Theopolitical
Hour,” trans. Samuel Hayim Brody, in Makers of Jewish Modernity: Thinkers, Artists, Leaders,
and the World They Made, ed. Jacques Picard et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2016), 187–203. Besides Buber’s own use of the term, Schmidt’s article is the primary source of
my choice of the term “theopolitical” to describe Buber’s attitude toward the nexus of religion
and politics. - This is still a source of liberal criticism of Buber; Uri Ram, The Return of Martin Buber:
National and Social Thought in Israel from Buber to Neo-Buberism (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2015) (in
Hebrew). - Potsdam State Archives Pr. Br. Rep. 30, Berlin C Polizei Präs. 16346 Der Schriftsteller
Gustav Landauer 1892-1902: “Landauer ist in ganz Deutschland der bedeutendest Agitator der
radical-revolutionären Bewegung.” Cited in Ruth Link-Salinger (Hyman), Gustav Landauer:
Philosopher of Utopia (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1977), 46. - “Impractical romantic anarchism,” James Joll, The Second International, 1899–1914
(New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 64; “excessively romantic,” George Woodcock, Anarchism: