14 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
- Emanuel Hirsch, “Demokratie und Christentum,” Der Geisteskampf der Gegenwart 54
(1918): 57–60, cited in Klaus Tanner, “Protestant Revolt against Modernity,” in The Weimar
Moment, 8. - Anson Rabinbach, “Between Apocalypse and Enlightenment: Benjamin, Bloch, and
Modern German-Jewish Messianism,” In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals be-
tween Apocalypse and Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 27–65;
Michael Jennings, “Walter Benjamin, Religion, and a Theological Politics, ca. 1922,” in The
Weimar Moment, 109–121. - A “left-Schmittianism” existed already in the 1960s and bore some responsibility for
rehabilitating Schmitt’s reputation as a thinker after he refused denazification. More recent-
ly: Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (London: Verso,
2000); Chantal Mouffe, ed., The Challenge of Carl Schmitt (London: Verso, 1999). - Scholars have noted the prevalence of “romantic” orientation across political lines. Paul
Breines, “A Völkisch Left?,” Reviews in European History 1.1 (June 1974): 133–138; George Mosse,
“The Influence of the Völkisch Idea on German Jewry,” Studies of the Leo Baeck Institute, ed.
Max Kreutzberger (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1967), 81–114. - Yossef Schwartz, “The Politicization of the Mystical in Buber and His Contemporaries,”
in NPMB 205–218. - Kavka cites Zank, “Buber and Religionswissenschaft,” as a previous iteration of the
claim. Martin Kavka, “Verification (Bewährung) in Martin Buber,” Journal of Jewish Thought
and Philosophy 20.1 (2012): 71–98. - Paradigmatic is the prolific Buber scholar Maurice Friedman, whose three-volume bi-
ography of Buber is replete with expressions such as “however long it would take Buber to
reach the life of dialogue in its fullness, here is already one of the important milestones on the
way.” MBEY 114. - KG 19–20. My emphasis.
- Or at least, it “seems to have been intended as a Habilitationsschrift.” Mendes-Flohr,
“Buber’s Rhetoric,” 2. Mendes-Flohr also describes Buber’s eventual symbolic acceptance by
the Israeli academy on February 28, 1960, when he was unanimously named president of the
Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Such acceptance did not guarantee subsequent
scholarly reputation. Scholem’s major attack on Buber’s interpretation of Hasidism was pub-
lished the same year, as if to place Buber’s new status in question as soon as it was granted.
(Thanks to Moshe Idel for this point.) - Letter to S. H. Bergmann, September 1929, cited in Mendes-Flohr, “Kingdom of God,”
- The context relates to KG as Buber states that he “has no idea” whether or when that work
will be “recognized by official [sic] scholarship despite its ideas and methods.” Mendes-Flohr
cites another letter to Bergmann, in which Buber flatly states: “Ich bin kein Universitäts-
mensch.” - Buber’s interest in the topics and approaches of the science of religion was genuine. He
kept a notebook listing the more than six thousand volumes in his library that touched on
“Religionskunde, Religionsphilosophie und verwandte Gebiete.” Furthermore, he constructed
his lectures at the University of Frankfurt around such topics as “Wie ist Religionswissen-
schaft möglich?” (1924) and “Probleme der Religionssoziologie” (1933); Stroumsa, “Presence,
Not Gnosis,” 27, 31. - Rivka Horwitz, Buber’s Way to I and Thou: The Development of Martin Buber’s Thought
and His “Religion as Presence” Lectures (New York: Jewish Publication Society, 1988). - Ibid. Stroumsa provides two of these plans. In both, I and Thou appears as the first vol-
ume, followed by entries on such topics as “Primary Forms of Religious Life” and “Magic,” and
concluding with “Religious Power and Our Time (The Power and the Kingdom).”