Martin Buber

Martin Buber was born in Vienna in 1878 and brought up in Lemberg (now Lviv) by his grandfather Solomon Buber, a scholar of rabbinic literature. He studied philosophy and art history in Vienna, Leipzig, Zurich and Berlin, and as a young man was active in the Zionist movement, championing a cultural and spiritual renewal of Judaism.

In the early 1900s he turned to Hasidism, publishing retellings of the tales of Rabbi Naḥman of Bratslav and of the Baal Shem Tov, which brought Hasidic stories to a wide European readership. In 1923 he published I and Thou, the classic statement of his philosophy of dialogue. With Franz Rosenzweig he began a new German translation of the Hebrew Bible, which he completed decades later.

He taught at Frankfurt until the Nazis forced him out, and in 1938 he left Germany for Jerusalem, where he taught social philosophy at the Hebrew University. He argued for Jewish–Arab understanding and a binational state. He died in Jerusalem in 1965. Gershom Scholem criticized his reading of Hasidism as too selective; it nonetheless shaped the modern image of Hasidism.