Martin Buber's Theopolitics

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52 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics



  1. Ibid., 87.

  2. PC 122; cf. Kuhn and Wolf, introduction to Revolution and Other Writings, 26.

  3. Kuhn and Wolf, introduction to Revolution and Other Writings, 27; FMD 54.

  4. FMD 55–57; Paul Flohr and Bernard Susser, “Alte und Neue Gemeinschaft: An Unpub-
    lished Buber Manuscript,” Association for Jewish Studies Review 1 (1976): 41–56.

  5. MBEY 37. The characterization of salon culture is Friedman’s.

  6. MBEY 8.

  7. MBEY 31. Buber learned that a well-known Polish author was working on this project
    and abandoned the translation.

  8. Cited in Schmidt, Martin Buber’s Formative Years, 24–25.

  9. FMD 15–16; Martina Urban, Aesthetics of Renewal: Martin Buber’s Early Representation
    of Hasidism as Kulturkritik (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

  10. Schmidt, Martin Buber’s Formative Years, 56 – 5 7.

  11. Ibid., 19.

  12. Gilya G. Schmidt, ed. and trans., The First Buber: Youthful Zionist Writings of Martin
    Buber (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999).

  13. “Thus, Buber’s early Zionism, which envisioned the redemption of the Jew to lie in a
    ‘renaissance’ of the Jewish spirit and ‘primordial’ sensibilities, is perhaps best understood as a
    species of Kulturpolitik.” FMD 16; cf. MBEY 54–55.

  14. Landauer, Skepsis und Mystik: Ausgewählte Schriften, Band 7, ed. Siegbert Wolf (Hessen:
    Verlag Edition AV, 2010), 131–147.

  15. Flohr and Susser, “Alte und neue Gemeinschaft,” 4 4.

  16. Landauer, “Through Separation to Community,” in Revolution and Other Writings, 95.

  17. Ibid., 92.

  18. Ibid., 97–99. I differ here from Mendes-Flohr, who reads Landauer as referring to a
    popular exaggeration of Wilhelm Dilthey’s epistemology, which distinguishes Erfahrung (or-
    dinary cognitive experience of sense data that passes through the a priori categories of under-
    standing) from Erlebnis (intuitive, inner experience that makes direct contact with things in
    themselves). Although Landauer uses Erlebnis language, I take him to be making a point si-
    multaneously expressible in mystical and materialist vocabularies (skepticism and mysticism,
    like his book title). From a materialist standpoint, this emphasizes the possibility of gaining
    knowledge from the study of the self, recognized as continuous with all other phenomena. This
    would not be “noumenal” knowledge, however, because in Landauer’s understanding there is
    nothing “behind” or “above” the totality of phenomena. Individuation may be mere appear-
    ance, but recognizing this does not reveal a noumenal world—only the truth of the phenom-
    enal world (“dem wahren Wesen der Welt”). The difference is subtle enough that many in
    Landauer’s circles, including Buber himself, likely missed it.

  19. Ibid., 101–102.

  20. Ibid., 104.

  21. The first letter from Buber to Landauer in Buber’s correspondence is from February 10,

  22. Martin Buber, Briefwechsel aus sieben Jahrzenten Band I:1897–1918 (Heidelberg: Lambert
    Schneider Verlag, 1972), 186. The first letter from Landauer to Buber in Landauer’s correspon-
    dence is from April 9, 1907. Landauer, Sein Lebensgang in Briefen I, 165.

  23. Flohr and Susser, “Alte und Neue Gemeinschaft,” 53; Landauer, “Durch Absonderung
    zur Gemeinschaft,” 133. Cf. Schmidt, Martin Buber’s Formative Years, 11–16.

  24. Flohr and Susser, “Alte und Neue Gemeinschaft,” 47, 53.

  25. Landauer is arguing against abstract, philosophical contemplation: “We do not want
    to perceive the community which I advocate... we want to be and live it.” But he also stresses
    that “any understanding of individuality based upon our individual memory is superficial,

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