36 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
is to recover the essence of the tales, to make them available for contemporary
use.^104 By presenting Hasidic sources as part of a broader effort to renew Judaism,
Buber avoids the destructive effects of a purely negative revolutionary attitude.
He is seeking to create a new community of positive alliances, “through life” and
not through contemplation. Landauer recognized this fact in his glowing review
of Legend of the Baal Shem in 1910, which marked a turning point for him in
terms of a positive view of his own Judaism.^105 The effects of this renewed inter-
est in Judaism could be seen nearly immediately, in the 1911 work Aufruf zum
Sozialismus, wherein Landauer interprets the Mosaic institution of the Jubilee as
a command for permanent revolution: “Revolt as constitution; transformation
and revolution as a rule established once and for all; order through the spirit as
intention; that was the great and sacred heart of the Mosaic social order. We need
that again: a new rule and transformation by the spirit, which will not establish
things and institutions in a final form, but will declare itself as permanently at
work in them.”^106 This is not to say that he moved closer to religious Judaism,
only that he came to a more favorable understanding of Judaism as something he
could claim as his own tradition. Whereas other religions feature gods helping
their nation and protecting its heroes, in Judaism “God is eternally opposed to
servility; he is, therefore, the insurrectionary [Aufrührer], the arouser [Aufrüt-
tler], the admonisher [Mahner].’”^107 As Michael Löwy has noted, for Landauer
the Jewish religion became a manifestation of “the people’s holy dissatisfaction
with itself.”^108
Revolution marked Landauer’s return to public political activity. He an-
nounced this intention at the end of the work: “Our aim is that all those who
understand the conditions we live in and who feel incapable of supporting them
any longer unite in alliances and work for their own, immediate consumption: in
settlements, in cooperatives, and so forth.”^109 In May and June 1908 he gave the
lectures that would become the Aufruf; it was at those meetings that he collected
the first signatures for the founding of the Sozialist Bund, an effort to realize
at last his own vision of anarchism through a network of independent groups
committed to “replacing” rather than overthrowing capitalism and the state.
He supported this vision through the revival of Der Sozialist in 1909, this time
truly as his own paper, for propagating the views of the Bund; in other venues he
published essays such as “Thirty Socialist Theses” and “The Twelve Articles of
the Socialist Bund.”^110 Bund groups formed throughout Germany and in other
countries, reaching a total of about eight hundred members. Buber joined, as
did Erich Mühsam, a young anarchist bohemian Landauer had met at the Neue
Gemeinschaft who would later be Landauer’s closest collaborator in the Bavar-
ian Revolution.^111 For several years, Landauer relished the project of helping the
Sozialist Bund to grow, as well as the opportunity to develop and debate his ideas
in conversation with the wider socialist and anarchist movements. By September
1911, however, he was filled with foreboding over an imminent European war