54 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
- Selected volumes of Buber’s Die Gesellschaft are being republished by Marburg’s Me-
tropolis Verlag, including those by Simmel, Sombart, Ular, and Bernstein. - FMD 83–85.
- For a complete list of the volumes in the series, see ibid., 88–89.
- Sombart had not yet developed his “Jewish thesis” identifying capitalism with the
Jewish spirit. Reiner Grundmann and Nico Stehr, “Why Is Werner Sombart Not Part of
the Core of Classical Sociology?” Journal of Classical Sociology 1.2 (2001): 257–287; cf. Paul
Mendes-Flohr, “Werner Sombart’s The Jews and Modern Capitalism: An Analysis of Its Ideo-
logical Premises,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book XXI (London: Secker & Warburg, 1976),
87–107. - Von Gerlach (1866–1935) was a former civil servant and journalist. A well-known lib-
eral, he edited the Berlin weekly Die Welt am Montag. Oppenheimer (1864–1943) and Landauer
were members of the German Garden City Society, a group dedicated to socially conscious
urban planning (cf. Kuhn and Wolf, introduction to Revolution and Other Writings, 29; GLPU
115n111; PC 148–149). Oppenheimer later became known as an economic adviser to the World
Zionist Organization and transferred to the Palestinian context his plans for “internal coloni-
zation” of Germany by means of Siedlungsgenossenschaft (cooperative settlement), becoming
the principal architect of the moshav of Merhavia. In Der Staat, Oppenheimer argued that the
social contract was a myth and that the state could arise only through the domination of one
class by another. He opposed private ownership of land and capital, and corresponded with
Kropotkin, but considered himself a “liberal socialist” rather than an anarchist. - Buber to Landauer, July 26, 1906, Briefwechsel I, 245.
- Landauer, Revolution, in Revolution and Other Writings, 110–185.
- Ibid., 112.
- Ibid., 135.
- Ibid., 179n32.
- Ibid., 130.
- Ibid., 135.
- Ibid., 123.
- Ibid., 142.
- Ibid., 144. Emphasis Landauer’s: “I cannot emphasize this enough.”
- Ibid., 142–145.
- James B. Atkinson, introduction to Etienne de La Boétie, Discourse on Voluntary Servi-
tude (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2012), xxxiii–xxxv. - Landauer, Revolution, 15 7. Buber echoes this point, without attribution, in his accounts
of the emerging Israelite monarchy, Kingship of God and The Anointed (see chapters 3 and 4 of
this volume). The “outside attack” in the ancient Israelite context comes from the Philistines;
the “internal corruption” comes from Samuel’s introduction of the dynastic principle, encour-
aging a tendency to prefer the safety of life under a human monarch to freedom under God’s
rule. - Cited by Landauer, Revolution, 158–159.
- Ibid.
- “Anyone who had heard those speeches by Buber has not forgotten them and cannot
forget them to his dying day.” Hugo Bergmann, cited in Aharon Kedar, “Brith Shalom,” Jeru-
salem Quarterly 18 (Winter 1981): 58. - Buber had written about “Jüdische Renaissance” in 1901, but from 1909 he seems to
explicitly prefer “renewal”; Buber, “Renewal of Judaism,” 53. - “I have not translated the tales of Rabbi Nachman, but retold them. I have done so for my
purpose is not philological.” In the 1916 edition the sentence is: “I have done so in full freedom,
yet out of his spirit as it is present to me.” Translation from Urban, Aesthetics of Renewal, 16.