Buber’s Theopolitics as an Act of Resistance

Abstract

This study claims that only by revisiting Buber’s entire oeuvre does one fully grasp his position on the relation between politics, religion, and ethics. I argue that Buber’s writings in the thirties are an act of resistance against national socialism and that his consistent political resistance before, in, and after this period appears in many of his writings. Buber was as a political thinker, not only in his exegesis, but also in his dialogical philosophy, in his view on Judaism and Zionism, in his translation project with Rosenzweig, and in his creative reinterpretation of Hasidism. Rereading these interrelated writings allows us to rediscover Buber as a political thinker whose humanist and social concept of religion allowed him to resist a politics disconnected from a dialogical ethics.

1. Introduction

This paper understands Buber’s political philosophy as resistance. Although this is not new in the past and present Buber research which focuses on the political in some of Buber’s writings, I argue that the political is everywhere in his oeuvre. In this way, the article aims to contribute to present-day Buberian scholarship. Its novelty lies in presenting Buber as an explicit political thinker in all of his works. I illustrate this thesis by exemplarily analyzing different genres of his oeuvre as products of his Hebrew or biblical humanism that combines politics and ethics in view of sanctifying the entire, everyday existence. In discussion with contemporary Buber scholars, I show that Buber’s philosophy of dialogue as well as other parts of his work are not to be bracketed but to be read in connection to his theopolitics.

It has been acknowledged that Buber’s writings of the 1930s are an act of resistance against authoritarianism and ultra-nationalism. This article generalizes this positioning of Buber and presents him as a political resister before and after this period. It broadens the perspective to earlier and later texts that implicitly or explicitly testify to Buber’s political activism. Time and again, Buber reminded his Zionist fellows of the necessity of the moral and dialogical character of Zionism. Before I start my analysis, I offer a chronological overview of how Buber’s political thinking developed over the years.

2. A Critical Participant in Zionism

In 1898, Buber joined the Zionist movement. At the Third Zionist Congress in 1899, he emphasized the importance of education as opposed to a program of propaganda. Two years later he became editor of Die Welt, in which he envisioned a Zionism that would renew Jewish culture. As a member of the Democratic Faction, he opposed Herzl’s mere political plans. He understood the renewal of Jewish culture as a spiritual reality in the sense of Ahad Ha’am. This implied much more than the renewal of the Hebrew language, Hebrew literature, and art. He envisioned the possible renaissance of the Jewish people in Zion and gradually distanced himself from Herzl’s mere political Zionism. With time, he realized that spirituality was not enough. Mainly under the influence of Gustav Landauer, he developed a Zionism as religious socialism or Hebrew humanism that combined spirituality and action. For Buber, it was catastrophic to confine God to a specific time and place, as does religion. One had to overcome the gap between the inner and the outer, between ethics and politics. One had to work in the concrete, messy reality of everyday (Mendes-Flohr 1991, pp. 181–87). In returning to Zion, Israel could remember its early vocation as a people who bridge the sacred and the profane in everyday life. A Gesellschaft, based upon interests, had to be transformed into a Gemeinschaft, in which there was shared life (ibid., pp. 189–90).

In his famous 1916 dispute with Hermann Cohen, Buber defended a Zionism that looks for its topical realization (Meir 2020, pp. 86–89). The state, also the Jewish state, was not an aim in itself. The goal was rather to bring morality and politics together in a Zionism defined by Mendes-Flohr as “a new form of ethical nationalism with a mission to the peoples of the world” (Mendes-Flohr 1991, p. 174). At the Zionist Congress in Karlsbad in 1921, Buber criticized a nationalism and a sovereignty that fails to submit to the King of kings. He maintained that criterion for a sound nationalism was its morality (Morgan and Guilherme 2010, pp. 9–10). In Berit Shalom (1925–1933), he pled for the coexistence of Jews and Arabs in Palestine.

Buber’s Koenigtum Gottes (Kingship of God; Buber 1990a), published in 1932 (Buber 1964c), criticized a political theology that sanctified political power, making an idol of the state. He opposed a political theology that favored a messianic politics. Paul Mendes-Flohr notes that Buber’s “monograph on the Kingship of God and his novel Gog and Magog may both be traced back to his own struggle to overcome the emotional lure of messianic politics. He was therefore alarmed by Ben-Gurion’s view of Zionism as the fulfillment of the prophets’ messianic vision” (Mendes-Flohr 2019, p. 259).

Buber was an admirer of Gandhi, but he also criticized him in 1939 for his lack of understanding of the spiritual and humanitarian goals of Zion. He wrote to the Mahatma that both Arabs and Jews have to “serve” the land (Meir 2024, p. 52). In his Torat ha-nevi’im, published in 1942 (Buber 1975), he describes how the faith of the prophets came to expression in a life under God’s rule; their faith was realized in deeds. The powerless reminded those in power of their responsibility.

With Yehuda Magnes, Buber founded the political association Ichud, which defended a binational state with equal rights for Jews and Arabs. In November 1946, he appeared before the Anglo-American Inquiry Committee and opposed a partition of the land. He advocated the union between Jews and Arabs who did not have to live next to each other but with each other (Mendes-Flohr 2019, pp. 246–48). In 1948, he accepted the State of Israel, but remained critical of a politics that did not strive for a coexistence and cooperation between Jews and Arabs. He was concerned that Israel would become like all other nations. Zionism could only be an ethical Zionism that avoided pure, idealistic ethics as well as Realpolitik.

Towards the end of his life, Buber was asked again and again if civil disobedience is legitimate. He defended civil disobedience. He appreciated Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience.” In 1962 he published an article in which he expressed his strong feeling that Thoreau’s tract immediately concerned him: “Thoreau did not formulate a general principle as such; he set forth and grounded his attitude in a particular historical–biographical situation. He spoke to this reader in the realm of his situation common to them so that the reader not only learned why Thoreau at that time acted as he acted but also […] that he, the reader, must have acted, should the occasion present itself, in just such a way if he was seriously concerned about making his human existence real” (Buber 1967a, p. 191). In the follow-up article “More on ‘Civil Disobedience’” published a year later (ibid., pp. 192–93), Buber specifies that disobedience is legitimate if it is “obedience to a higher authority.” There were limits to human power: every “Caesar […], every historically consistent power, poses to its subjects as existing through the grace of God […]” (ibid., p. 192). To frequent questions concerning the legitimacy of civil disobedience, he answered that in a human crisis one must set one’s face “against the power that has gone astray […] in order to save dialogue” (ibid., p. 193). For Buber, one had to obey a higher law if the power of the state was abused in an ultra-nationalism (Mendes-Flohr 2019, pp. 212–13). In his Hebrew humanism, the Jewish–Arab reconciliation was focal. He endeavored to create a “Zwischenmensch”, a between-person, who was linked to people of his own group and to humankind. He avoided a subjectivism as well as an objectivism, an individualism as well as a collectivism (Buber 1948, p. 168). Buber was a life-long participant in Zionism, a lover of Zion, and a critic of Zionist politics, pleading again and again for the rights of the Palestinian Arabs. One of the sources of his cooperative model was Moses Hess’s “Rome and Jerusalem” in which he found a synthesis of socialism and the Jewish national rebirth (Friedman 1991, p. 22; Buber [1950] 1968, pp. 115–27). His nationalism was profoundly humanistic.

3. Buber’s Resistance in the 1930s

During his entire life, Buber resisted unethical politics and favored coexistence and cooperation. In the thirties of the preceding century, he witnessed the brutality of German fascist and racist politics. Shortly after Hitler’s takeover of power, Buber writes to his publisher Lambert Schneider that publishers and writers will have to learn to live in catacombs. Writers will have to write in such a way that the rulers do not immediately perceive their resistance. Buber had to write in a way that reached many readers, before being caught (Schravesande 2009, p. 265).

From 1933 until his arrival in Jerusalem in March 1938, Buber had to cope with the harsh reality of Hitler’s politics. His engagement in Jewish adult education was already an act of resistance. His literary production of that period is a protest and a cry for an alternative society and politics. Readers had to be attentive to the hints, the allusions, and the hidden opposition in his work. Buber’s texts between 1933 and March 1938 reflect his reaction to the völkisch ideology of Germany. His literature of resistance objected an exclusivist identity politics and a political theology. It aimed at the elimination of a pathological hyper-nationalism and an anti-democratic authoritarianism that destroyed the equality of all.

Buber’s writings in the thirties are an act of resistance. In a broader sense, his consistent political resistance before, in, and after this period appears in many of his writings that belong to different scholarly disciplines. A holistic reading of these interrelated writings allows us to rediscover Buber as an eminent political thinker who resists a politics disconnected from ethics.

4. Recent Scholarship on Buber’s Theopolitics

Although there has been some early attention to Buber’s prophetic politics, for instance and foremost in Paul Mendes-Flohr’s oeuvre (Weltsch 1967; Mendes-Flohr 1985), research on Buber’s theopolitical thinking has been rather restricted to his explicit political writings. Only recently publications appear that give due attention to Buber as a consistent political thinker who also protests a political theology in works other than his political writings (Mendes-Flohr 2019, pp. 202–60; Morgan and Guilherme 2010, pp. 3, 9–12; Brody 2015, 2018a, 2018b; Schmidt 2016; Lesch 2019). Scholars such as Sam Brody, Christoph Schmidt, and Charles Lesch focus on Buber’s critique of Carl Schmitt’s political theology and on Buber’s theopolitics in Koenigtum Gottes (Schmitt 1922, 1927).1 This exegetical work indeed challenges Schmitt’s friend–foe politics. Just as Levinas’s political theory was discovered in his Talmudic readings rather than in his philosophy, one discovered Buber’s political stance in his exegetical work (Herzog 2020, pp. 14–44). It has been argued that Buber retained the nomadic ethos of pre-monarchic Israel against Schmitt as the crown jurist of the Third Reich who divinized the earthly dictator and secularized theological concepts in the service of politics. In protest against the instrumentalization of religion in function of the authoritarian state, Buber followed the anti-monarchic position of the judges Gideon and Samuel and of the prophets. The land belonged to God. Kings were anointed by God, and they should act “in a theopolitical spirit” (Lesch 2019, p. 16). Sam Brody aptly remarks that Buber’s “an-archistic theopolitics” contests a fascist political theology that puts the divine in service of political power. He further notes that Buber has been received mostly as a philosopher or theologian (Brody 2018b, p. 85). In his view, Buber’s theopolitics “is better accounted for through a combined reading of his writings on the Bible, together with his explicit political thinking in Paths in Utopia and his occasional writings on Zionism” (Brody 2018b, p. 86).

5. Buber’s Concept of Religiosity

Brody utters his suspicion that reading Buber’s politics in terms of his dialogical philosophy explains why he is relatively absent from political conversations today (Brody 2018b, pp. 86, 94). I suggest that what prevented scholars from discovering Buber’s political thinking in his entire oeuvre is that he was classified as an unrealistic, mere religious thinker. However, Buber never understood religion as a series of daily prayers and rites, but rather as a non-cultic, ethical, anarchic, spiritual, and prophetic reality that mended the world. In opposition to a privatized religion, he favored a deed-centered religion that acts in the world.2 Religion, or better religiosity, was primarily an exemplary dialogical life, which had to be realized in the concrete, complex reality. Genuine religiosity consisted of acting (Buber 1995, p. 93). In Buber’s Hebrew humanism, religion as humanism penetrated all spheres of life. The entire life had to be hallowed, including its political dimension. Buber opposed the privatization of religion and its instrumentalization in the service of politics. With his humanist and social concept of religion, he became an active resister, swimming against the tide. A close reading of the broad range of his writings reveals that Buber, who was the first President of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, was also a prominently political thinker in creating a theopolitics.

6. “The Holy Way” and Kingship of God

The new scholarship discovers Buber’s counterculture and resistance in Koenigtum Gottes that was published in 1932 (Brody 2018a). It is mentioned that the essay “The Holy Way” (“Der heilige Weg”) (Buber 1967b), published in 1919, already signals Buber’s theopolitical turn, although Buber did not use the term theopolitics there (Brody 2018a, p. 43).3 In this essay, service to God meant a rebellion against powers (ibid., p. 40). The prophets did not “fight the state as state,” but wanted “to permeate it with spirit.” Against a European dualism that split spirit and life, Buber called for the creation of a “true community with God and true community with human beings, both in one” (ibid., pp. 42–43).

In Koenigtum Gottes, divine kingship was not theocracy or a divine Kingdom, but a unified reality in which the religious and the political were interlaced (Buber 1964c). Buber’s Jewish messianism aims at the realization of the relation between God and the world through the insertion of unity in the world. Gideon did not seek power; he refused the power offered by the people: “I will not rule over you, neither shall my son rule you. The Lord shall rule over you” (Judges 8:23). In his foreword to the first edition, Buber writes that, in its “gläubige Erinnering,” Israel proclaimed JHWH “zu einem unmittelbaren und ausschliesslichen Volkskönig” (Buber 1936, p. IX). This proclamation, he notes, is not merely religious, it impinges on Israel’s political existence. Opposing Schmitt’s political theology, he wrote about a theopolitics that was present in the Bible and constituted for him politics tout court.

Buber’s biblical writing was never purely religious, since he did not rigorously separate the holy from the profane: there was a tension, not a separation. In his commentary of the book of Judges, the utopian, anarchic, dialogical kingship of God had to be realized in this concrete, topic world within dialogical communities. Brody writes that Buber’s “anarchistic covenant theology” forbade “all permanently institutionalized, coercive human authority” (Brody 2018b, p. 96). He agrees with Michael Walzer that the biblical antipolitics is a kind of politics (Brody 2018a, p. 1; 2018b, p. 87).4

7. “The Question to the Single One”

It has also been remarked that Carl Schmitt is not mentioned in Koenigtum Gottes, but when one reads the book in light of Buber’s (1936) article “The Question to the Single One” (Buber 1956), Schmitt’s “fingerprints are all over the text” (Lesch 2019, p. 13). Indeed, this essay sheds retrospective light on Königtum Gottes. The article attacks Schmitt’s anti-liberal authoritarian politics of power and is a courageous act of resistance.5 It offers Buber’s view on the single one as a responsible human being in an an-archic community. This is the only place where Buber openly refers to Schmitt, who became famous in the 1920s and 1930s.

Christoph Schmidt offers an analysis of the essay, where Buber relates to the Single One in Søren Kierkegaard and Max Stirner, as well as to Carl Schmitt and Friedrich Gogarten (Schmidt 2016, p. 3). Carl Schmitt continues Stirner’s absolute individualism of power on the political level and notoriously defines politics as the “decision on friend and enemy” (ibid., pp. 8–9). Gogarten continues the theological individual of Kierkegaard and justifies the political as the domination of the evil of man, combining an individualistic theology and an authoritarian politics (ibid., pp. 10–11). Buber agreed with the anthropological view of the evil nature of man but refused his absolute sinfulness. The authority of the state was justified against evil but was itself in need of being redeemed from evil (ibid., pp. 9, 12–13). Biblical authority (Vollmacht) was given by God, as a temporal task (Aufgabe). Sadly, with Carl Schmitt who claimed that the essence of politics was the capacity to define the friend and the enemy, Jews quickly became a scapegoat as threatening the German cohesion (Morgan and Guilherme 2010, pp. 1–4).

8. I and Thou

“The Question to the Single One” certainly sheds light on Königtum Gottes and clearly shows Buber as a political thinker who spurred people in Germany to become unique in resisting Hitler. Yet, already in his philosophical masterpiece I and Thou, Buber deems that politics is subservient to the spirit and linked to human relations: “Man’s communal life cannot dispense any more than he himself with the it-world -over which the presence of the You floats like the spirit over the face of the waters. Man’s will to profit and will to power are natural and legitimate as long as they are tied to the will to human relations and carried by it. […] The economy as the house of the will to profit and the state as the house of the will to power participate in life as long as they participate in the spirit” (Buber 1970, pp. 97–98). In this passage, Buber clearly designs a dialogical community characterized by equality and a lack of domination and exploitation. Asaf Ziderman rightly defines Buber’s dialogical thought as a philosophy of action (Ziderman 2021, p. 372). He further notes that one cannot bracket the dialogical principle to explicate Buber’s theopolitics (ibid., p. 373).6

Buber is indeed a “hedgehog” in Isaiah Berlin’s terminology: interconnectedness and dialogue characterize his entire oeuvre.7 Buber’s political philosophy is dialogical in that it responds to a given situation starting from one’s whole, undivided being. At the end of his book on Buber’s theopolitics, Brody briefly suggests that a reintegrating of Buber’s philosophical anthropology and his theopolitics “will certainly bear fruit for the future” (Brody 2018a, p. 295). By his own bracketing of Buber’s philosophy of dialogue to elaborate his theopolitics, he leaves me some work to do. I argue that Buber’s dialogical philosophy and his theopolitics cannot be separated, and that is exactly what I want to show.

9. Moral Zionism

Against dichotomist thinking, characteristic for populists with their rhetoric of alternative facts, Buber’s transformational thought reflects his profound belief in dialogue between people and in a true community that does not pursue domination and power politics. To create a “new we” (Kalsky 2014), he opposes a politics that distinguishes between friends and foes. In dialogical communities, individualism as an I without a you and collectivism as a you without an I could be overcome (Morgan and Guilherme 2010, pp. 7–8). Against an ethnic nationalism, Buber developed an inclusive attitude that made coexistence and mutuality between the I and the you possible.8

Of course, Buber’s writings on Zionism remain crucial in rediscovering Buber’s political thought. In what is today a highly timely critique of nationalistic perspectives and of a politics that is based on the people’s fears, Buber represented a moral, dialogical Zionism that cares for the Arabs in the land. Zionism was a permanent ethical task and Israel’s election was ethical, in the service of others. Buber’s theology of the land is not a divinization of it, but in function of Israel’s ethical mission (Hadad 2019, p. 21). In his 1944 lectures that were published in “On Zion” (ben am le-artso), both the land and the people are put in the perspective of the realization of an ethical society: Their election was not a privilege, it was an ethical call. In all his writings on Zionism, Buber emphasizes that politics should not be severed from religion as ethics. He was a political, dialogical, and ethical thinker whose moral Zionism resisted a Zionism that separated ethics and politics.9

The focus in recent scholarly literature on Buber’s theopolitics in Koenigtum Gottes, in “The Question to the Single One”, and in his Zionist writings is certainly useful to draw the attention to Buber as a political thinker. However, theopolitics as the combination between politics and ethics are present in many other writings of Buber. Given the unity in Buber’s work, his philosophy, his translation project, his so-called religious writings, his Zionist thoughts, his exegetical work as well as his reimagination of Hasidism are all closely linked and offer a coherent, combined picture of Buber as a political resister. In many of his writings, not only in the period between 1933 and 1938, Buber resists an autonomous, autarchic politics devoid of ethics.10 In the following, I indicate how Buber’s political vision is present in his work on the Bible, in his understanding of the Jewish faith, in his view on Hasidism, and in his criticism of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s view on religion and politics in 1930. The texts which I will discuss exemplarily show that his theopolitics pervade his entire oeuvre.

10. Bible Translation and the Biblical Voice

With their formal-equivalent translation of the Bible, Buber and Rosenzweig strived to revive the Gesprochenheit of the biblical word. They wanted the biblical word to “speak” to Jews and Christians in Germany; they appealed to the conscience of all. Through their work on the Bible, they opposed Marcionite (anti Hebrew Bible) tendencies and decried anti-Judaism and antisemitism (Morgan and Guilherme 2010, p. 7). To their lights, the biblical word could and should have an impact on society. According to Buber, the political theologian Wilhelm Stapel opposed their translation, out of fear that “the mere dissemination of the ‘actual’ Scriptures undermines the effort to theologically legitimate state violence” (Buber 1994, p. 217; Brody 2018a, p. 72).

In his article “Biblischer Humanismus,” published in Der Morgen in October 1933 (Buber 1964a), Buber opposes the Greek concept of the word in the polis as above the problems of the day with the Hebrew understanding of the word which is to be listened to and made true in the community (‘eda). Responding to the biblical word was a therapy for the people of his time, who had forgotten interrelatedness and dialogue. Tanakh was not biblia/books, but miqra, a living word that can be listened to and must be answered by “returning” in hallowing daily life. Not catastrophic overturning and political revolution, but slowly and consistent ‘turning” was needed.

Whereas Plato approached the truth as a preconceived idea of an unfolding history that can be remembered, Buber maintained that the prophets criticized the existing society in view of improving it (Keren 1996, pp. 285–86; in reference to Buber [1957] 1990b, pp. 184–86).

With his criticism of politics from an ethico-religious viewpoint, Buber remained critical of religion when separated from ethics. This stance is central in his literature of resistance. Religion had become separated from reality itself. Above all, it had compromised itself with Nazi politics. It had forgotten to relate to this messy world, in which unity had to be realized, against the Marcionite rejection of the world. In an article from November 1926 entitled “Der Mensch von heute und die jüdische Bibel” (Buber 1964b) (“The Man of Today and the Hebrew Bible”; Buber 1958, pp. 239–50), Buber complains that the intellectuals of his day proclaim the rights of the spirit, formulating its laws, “but they enter only into books and discussions, not into our lives” (Buber 1958, p. 240). He pleads for a new union between spirit and life. Religion itself, he complains, has become “part of the detached spirit” (ibid.). It does not include the whole of life anymore. The Hebrew Bible became “religious writing,” something pious or scientific, not comprising the whole of life anymore.

To cure the chasm between the Scriptures and the human being of today, one had to start experiencing revelation (ibid., p. 242). Through the experience of revelation in the present moment of the relation, the biblical notions of creation and redemption could become clear as the experience of the uniqueness of the human being and the experience of an exterior hand that leads out of distress. At the end of his article, he writes: “Meinen wir, dass man lesen lernen soll? Wir meinen, dass man hören lernen soll. Kein andres Zurück, als das der Umkehr, die uns um die eigne Achse dreht, bis wir nicht etwas auf eine frühere Strecke unsres Wegs, sondern auf den Weg geraten, wo die Stimme zu hören ist! Zur Gesprochenheit wollen wir hindurch, zum Gesprochenwerden des Worts” (Buber 1964b, p. 869). Buber did not perceive the Bible as a book, which would place it in the I-it realm. A purely historical or esthetic approach to the Bible missed the goal. The biblical word was a voice, through which one becomes a metamorphized, dialogical being. Against the absolutization of politics, Buber maintained that spirit and concrete life, the holy and everyday life belonged together. In a prophetic perspective, the politics of the people of Israel was theopolitical (Buber [1957] 1990b, p. 136). One had to listen to and answer the divine voice which transforms the human being into a dialogical being.

11. Jewish Faith

For Buber as an ethico-religious thinker, the horrible events of the thirties were the result of revived Gnostic ideas. He felt that the unity between the spiritual and the worldly order was broken. In a clear act of resistance, he publishes his essay “The Faith of Judaism” in 1933 (Buber 1958, pp. 253–65).11 In the article, he analyses how in his days, the Old Testament was rejected as the result of a long process, starting with the evangelist John, who identified redemption with revelation. John substituted a dyad for the traditional triad creation–revelation–redemption. Marcion reduced this dyad further to a monad: Jesus redeemed humanity from a bad world, which was created by a demon. Adolf von Harnack, Buber concludes, continued this line of thought. In his Marcionizing thesis, this liberal theologian stamped the preservation of the Old Testament as “the consequence of religious and ecclesiastical paralysis” (Buber 1958, p. 263).

Safely arriving in Jerusalem in 1939, Buber blames Marcion’s dualistic thinking as destructive for Israel. Von Harnack, he now openly says, continued Marcion’s messianic thought that negated the world, preparing in this way the domain for Hitler’s actions against the Jews (Buber 1952, pp. 27–31). The Marcionite dichotomy between the world and redemption had changed hands. In Buber’s messianism, on the contrary, a person takes upon themselves responsibility in relating to a world that may be repaired and redeemed. Tiqqun ‘olam (mending the world) was possible and necessary. Furthermore, in Koenigtum Gottes, messianism is the restoration of God’s kingship after it had been lost (Schravesande 2009, p. 307).

12. Hasidism

Buber reveals himself as a political thinker not only in his dialogical philosophy, in his reflections on Judaism, and on the Jewish Bible, but also in his writings on Hasidism. Inspired by this popular movement, he desired to hallow everything, including the political sphere. Nothing was exempt from sanctification. In what Mendes-Flohr calls a “non-noetic conception of faith” (Mendes-Flohr 2001, p. 686), Buber frequently uses the term Bewährung, “putting to proof in action” (Green and Mayse 2019, p. 61; Shonkoff 2018, p. 276). Spirituality as the realization of unity had to be verified in daily life, including in the political realm.

Whereas Ratzabi and Brody focused on Buber’s theopolitics in biblical exegesis (Ratzabi 2011; Brody 2018b), Yemima Hadad extends their arguments towards Buber’s approach to Hasidism, by characterizing Buber’s approach to biblical and Hasidic myths as “myth-activism” (Hadad 2019, pp. 1, 27). Buber inserted ethics in the biblical and Hasidic myth. He restrained “the Volkish forces of myth to champion a nationalism whose universalist worldview echoed Hasidism’s ideal theopolitical community” (ibid., pp. 1–2). Whereas Nazi and völkisch ideologies rejected ethics as a “Jewish invention,” Buber resituated ethics in the mythical framework (ibid., p. 13).

13. Buber and Gandhi

In his writings on and to Gandhi, finally, Buber appears again as a religio-political thinker (Nelson 2021; Brody 2018a, pp. 231–32). Before 1933, Buber’s views on the relation between religion and politics differed substantially from those of Gandhi. Significantly, his article “Gandhi, die Politik und wir,” which first appeared in 1930,12 was reprinted as annex in “Die Frage an den Einzelnen” in 1936 (Buber 1965, pp. 40–82). Buber much appreciates Gandhi’s nonviolence but also criticizes him because Gandhi did not distinguish enough between religion as an orienting goal (Ziel) and politics, which remain a means (Zweck). For Buber, Gandhi wanted political successes and independence (Swaraj) as soon as possible against the British colonialists. Gandhi’s famous Salt-march in 1930 was a “pilgrimage with political intent.” Buber, for his part, retained the permanent tension between religion and politics. Neither of them was autonomous. “The political ‘serpent,’” he writes, “is not essentially evil, it is itself only misled; it, too, ultimately wants to be redeemed” (Buber [1957] 1990b, p. 137). Prophetic religion as orientation is never completely realized; it is an infinite goal. Religion means goal and way, whereas politics implies end and means.

Buber viewed Gandhi as a prophetic figure whose experiments made the Divine manifest. However, his mission had a “tragic character”: the “unconditionally” of his spirit and the “conditionally” of the masses clashed. Notwithstanding this criticism, Buber admired Gandhi’s ahimsa as the nonviolent promotion of life. His own refusal of the Schmittian political theology of sovereignty and his shaping of a dialogical society were not far from the experiments of Gandhi, who also recognized his own failures. Both Buber and Gandhi strived for an egalitarian, non-hierarchical, and non-violent society. They both fought against imperialism and domination.

Nine years later, reacting to Gandhi’s letter from 26 November 1938 on the Jews, Buber writes that Gandhi again wrestles with the serpent (Buber [1957] 1990b, p. 145). Reacting to Gandhi’s unfamous letter to the Jews, he refuses Gandhi’s advice to the Jews to become satyagrahis. Gandhi did not consider enough the exceptional position of the Jews in Germany. In reference to the Bhagavad Gita, Buber opts to “fight for justice,” but to fight “lovingly.”13 Armed resistance was required.

Further in his letter, Buber tried to convince the Mahatma, who did not favor the Jewish emigration to Palestine, that Jews and Arabs could live together, in “service” of the land. With his thoughts on the renewal of Judaism, on a utopian socialism, and on freedom and non-coercion under the divine kingship, cooperation between Jews and Arabs was possible and necessary.

Before and after WWII, Buber and Gandhi wanted a state that intervened as little as possible in the lives of people. They resisted politics that did not serve the people. In their active non-violent resistance, they were critical of the abuse of power by the state.

14. Conclusions

In the period from 1933 until 1938, Buber developed a resistance literature. Yet, in many of his writings before, in, and after that period, he resisted an autonomic politics, unlinked to a dialogical ethics. He refused to separate politics and religion in all his writings (Buber [1957] 1990b, pp. 121–24). The prophetic religious–political voice promoted alliances between people in small anarchist ethical communities. In the kingdom of God, all spheres of life, including the political one, had to be hallowed. Buber listened to an elevated, transcendent voice that had to resonate in this world; one had to live in this world with a kind of otherworldliness. A mere Realpolitik was a wrong, violent way that did not serve the goal. In the phrasing of Selma Lagerlöf’s novel The Miracles of the Antichrist: the real statue, whose Kingdom is “not of this world” cannot be replaced by the fake statue, whose Kingdom is “only of this world.”14 In his humanistic, unromantic, and non-mystic religiosity, Buber wrote in I and Thou: “‘World here, God there’—that is It-talk; and ‘God in the world’- that too, is It-talk; but leaving out nothing, leaving nothing behind, to comprehend all -all the world- in comprehending the You, giving the world its due and truth, to have nothing besides God but to grasp everything in him, that is the perfect relationship” (Buber 1970, p. 127). Politics, too, had to contribute to the birth of the Zwischenmensch. Against domination, exploitation, and sovereignty, the relation to Arabs as equal to Jews in a land that was commonly owned was part and parcel of Buber’s egalitarian, socialist, and moral Zionism.

Buber manifested himself as a political thinker, a resister to unethical, totalitarian, and authoritarian forces. He was a fighter for equality and human rights, not only in his exegesis, but also in his dialogical philosophy, in his view on Christianity and Judaism, in his translation project with Rosenzweig, and in his creative reinterpretation of Hasidism. He opposed the Augustinian-like separation between the City of God and the City of man and the Lutheran zwei-Reiche-Lehre. Religion and life were inseparable. In his utopian, transcendent vision, there was no separation between the holy and the profane, but a tension always remained. I deem that only by revisiting Buber’s entire oeuvre in a holistic reading may one fully grasp his position on the relation between politics and ethics and his sustainable and coherent resistance to an autarchic politics.