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THE CANADIAN JEWISH BEVIBW
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MARTIN BUBRR'S VIEWS ON HUMAN AND DIVINE RELATIONSHIPS HAD DEEP EFFECT ON THE CHRISTIAN WORLD WHICH GAVE HIM HONORARY DEGREES
An Impartial Medium for the Dlssemtaatlon of Jewish News and Views MEMBER AUDIT BUREAU OF CIRCULATIONS PUBLISHED BY THE CANADIAN JEWISH REVIEW LIMITED
George W. Cohen, Founder
Scattered in the African underbrush amid the wreckage of the plane in which Dag Hammarskjold died in 1961, were two copies of one book belonging to the light effects of the Secretary-General of the United Nations. One was a German volume called "Ich und Du," by Martin Buber, and the other its English translation, "I and Thou." Nearby were twelve typewritten pages, the beginning of Dag Hammarskjold's translation into Swedish of the master work of the venerable Jew, says M. C. Blackman, in the New York Herald Tribune, whom he revered not only as a philosopher-theologian but as a humanist.
Dr. Buber was the most widely read Jewish thinker of the century, but lie was a political maverick who clung to the notion that Arabs were people, too, and that Jews could live with them. Although profoundly religious, he also was a heretic as far as the observance of Jewish customs was concerned.
Because of these unorthodox attitudes, Dr. Buber clashed frequently and violently with the political and religious leaders of Israel, where he had lived since 1938. But to the ill-fated Secretary-General he remained primarily a humanist-author and a hero.
One of Mr. Hammarskjold's last acts was to recommend that Dr. Buber receive the Nobel Prize for Literature for 1961.
The Secretary-General was a member of the Swedish Academy for Literature, which bestows the Nobel Prizes, and previous recommendations by him had resulted in the winning of the Prize for Literature by Boris Pasternak, Russian author, and St. John Perse, the French poet whose work he had translated into Swedish.
Because of this and because of the great sense of personal tragedy-felt throughout Sweden at the untimely death of the Secretary-General, many believed that Dr. Buber would be the leading contender for the 1961 award.
The unpredictable Swedish Academy for Literature, however, bestowed the $48,300 cash prize upon ho Andric, author of a trilogy of novels, whose name was practical-ly unknown outside his native Yugoslavia, says the New York Herald Tribune. There were reports that Mr. Hammarskjold's recommendation had come too late.
Dr. Buber's career was not without awards, however. Two weeks before he died at 87 in his home in Jerusalem, Israeli Sector, he received the Freedom of Jerusalem Award as one of the greatest Jewish thinkers and humanists.
He had suffered from a protracted kidney ailment and had been confined to his bed since undergoing surgery in April Tor a leg fracture.
Immediately after hearing of his death President Zalman Shazar, of Israel, drove to Dr. Buber's book-cluttered house on Lovers of Zion Street. He had lived and worked there since his retirement in 1951 after 13 years of teaching at Jerusalem's Hebrew University.
Two years ago Dr. Buber, a frail, white-bearded 85, flew from Israel to Amsterdam to accept one of Europe's highest intellectual prizes ranking in prestige if not monetary value with the Nobel Prize: the $28,000 Erasmus Award, presented to one or more persons who have contributed to the, spiritual unity of Europe.
Previous winners included existentialist philosopher, Karl Jaspres; Roman Catholic theologian, Romano Guardini; and pointers, Marc Chagall and Oscar Kokoschka.
Nine years' earlier the Vienna-born author and philosopher had received another prestigious award, the Peace Prize of the West German Bookdeakrs Federation, at a five-day fntenutioBiJ book fair in Frankfort Prevfoos winners of this $2,380 mn) also fododed theol-ogbfl GsfnHai of Italy and Dr. Albert Scai "
The book, "I and Thou," which Mr. Hammarskjold was beginning to translate into Swedish, is not even included in the '15 books Dr. Buber lists as his in his biographical sketch in "Who's Who In America." That list begins in 1946, many years after he began writing, says the New York Herald Tribune, with "Moses," and concludes- with "The Origin and Meaning of Ilasidism," published in 1960.
There has been another since then, "Daniel: Dialogues on Realization," translated by Maurice Friedman and published in the U.S., by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston last January.
There also is no mention in "Who's Who" of the fact that Dr. Buber, one of the master stylists of modern German prose, translated into that language the Old Testament. It was recognized by scholars as one of history's most successful efforts to re-create the oral quality and poetry of the Hebrew Bible in another language.
In a similar vein, he was responsible in the novels and folk tales he wrote before leaving Germany for re-creating the legend and lore of the Hasidim � the sect of joyfully pious Jews who flourished in the ghettos of Eastern Europe during the 18th and 19th Centuries.
The Erasmus Award was properly in the field of theology, for it cited him for "enriching the spiritual life of Europe with his versatile gifts for more than half a century."
His works on the lore of mystic Hasidim not only had influence upon Jewish religious thought, but also affected scores of Christian thinkers -�. among them Roman Catholic, Jacques Maritain; the personalist philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev; and Protestants, Karl Barth and Paul Tillich. Reinhold Niebuhr regarded him as both a theologian and "the greatest living Jewish philosopher."
Dr. Buber held the chair of the science of religion at the University of Frankfurt for several vears before 1933.
The religious aspect of the Erasmus Award was further emphasized in the citation accompanying it by giving him credit for freeing from "misconceptions and prejudice the contact between Judaism and Christianity on one hand and belief in the Bible and modern culture on the other."
So much for Martin Buber the theologian. Martin Buber, the philosopher, was something else again, and his concepts were something not to be tossed around lightly at highbrow cocktail parties, says the New York Herald Tribune. Those who tried reduced his philosophy to a couple of terms vying with Freud's id and superego: I-Thou and lit.
Reduced to the simplest meanings a non-philosopher can manage, IIt describes the relation of a subject to an object � the casual conversation of a diner with a waitress; the way a man treats a chair or typewriter. Snch relations, according to the Buber concept, are essential to the maintenance of life.
But he further believed that man's authentic existence comes into being only when a personal I meets a personal Thou � a direct meeting or dialogue in which two people accept each other, in love or hate, as truly human and unique. He held that the I-Thoa relation is also found in the world of faith, expressing the kind of personal encounter the Psalmists and ancient prophets had with the Lord of Israel.
More understandable to the layman is an experience the philosopher had in a New York City barbershop on a visit in 1956. He sat in the chair and closed his eyes, deep in thought. Before he realized what was happening, most of his thick, long beard (it was black then) was gone. He went back to
Israel, a shorn philosopher until his beatd grew back to its full splendor, and he once more looked like a modern Jewish patriarch.
Almost more understandable, but puzzling to many and controversial, was his reaction to the execution of the notorious Adolf Eich-mann, the former SS (elite guard) colonel who was convicted by an Israeli court of having arranged the transportation of millions of Jews to Nazi death camps.
In an interview in his home in Jerusalem in June, 1962, Dr. Buber called Eichmann's execution "a mistake of historical dimension." He justified this appraisal by the contention that the act of taking the Nazi's life, says the New York Herald Tribune, might have served to expiate the guilt felt by many young persons in Germany as a result of the actions of their elders in the years the Nazis were in power.
While he would not talk about it, he was known to have talked to Premier David Ben-Gurion in an attempt to persuade the Israeli leader to oppose the execution of Eichmann.
He was no more successful then than he had been before Israel became a sovereign state in 1948, when he clashed with Ben Gurion, then head of the Jewish Agency executive body, in advocating the establishment of a bi-national Arab-Jewish State in Palestine.
Until his death, he advocated a greater understanding with the Arabs, and won the enmity of political leaders who believed no such understanding, or even peace, with the Arabs was possible.
Although born in Vienna, he grew up, after the divorce of his parents, in the home of his grandfather in Austrian Galicia. He gave up Jewish religious practice at 13, and came under the influence of German idealism as a student of philosophy at Vienna University.
He became an active Zionist and for several years worked closely with Chaim Weizmann. In 1904, he came across a testament of Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, who founded Ilasidism, and spent five years studying Hasidic texts.
The first 10 books he wrote were devoted to retelling the legends of the Hasidic rabbis, and in the early 1930's, he and the late Rabbi Leo Baeck were the unquestioned leaders of Germany's Jewish community.
Then came the rise of the Nazis, and a rescue committee at Jerusalem's Hebrew University helped him flee and gave him a job on the university's faculty. He taught and wrote, his philosophical works being influenced by Hasi-dism, which rejected excessive emphasis on law and scholarship, and by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Dostoievsky.
Since he had not followed the detailed rules of the Halakah in his daily life since he was 13 and scorned the narrow legalism of the Talmudic law, he had been mercilessly criticized by Orthodox rabbis as a heretic, says the New York Herald Tribune. Even some of the Reform Jews who accepted the principles of his "life of dialogue" were shocked that onetime Zionist leader Martin Buber had spent moTe than forty years working for the improvement of Arab-Israel relations.
Although he was recognized as the most widely read of Jewish thinkers, many Catholics and Protestants were more enthusiastic about his work than some of his fellow Jews were.
The "doctor" in his name derived from several honorary degrees: Doctor of Hebrew Law, Doctor of Divinity, Doctor of Literature, and Doctor of Philosophy, from such rastrtutions as Sorbon-ne University in Paris, the University of Aberdeen, the University of Jerusalem.
He received other doctorates in the VJS., to which he came as a lecturer after his retirement front Jerusalem's Hebrew University. Among the institutions conferring
honorary degrees upon him were the New School for Social Research in Nety York City; and the Hebrew Union College, in Cincinnati. It was during one of bis lecture trips that he unintentionally lost his beard in a barber shop.
He received his academic degrees in philosophy and art at the Universities of Vienna, Zurich and Berlin, says the New York Herald Tribune. Surviving are two children; and several grandchildren. His wife died in 1958.
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/ wholly disapprove of what you eay and wUl defend to the death your right to say it. � Voltaire to Helvetius.
JUNE 25, 1965
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VOL XLVTJ. No. 39
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ISRAEL OBJECTS TO GERMAN CHOICE OF ENVOY
(Continued from Page One)
Dr. Erhard said he had picked nis man for the Tel Aviv assignment but would not announce his name until Israel's acceptance was received.
Diplomatic sources said that both Governments had made their
choice and matters were stalled while Israel tried to move the West Germans to second thoughts. Foreign Ministry officials are privately annoyed by what some regard as an attempt by Israel to obtain a "soft touch" as Bonn's first envoy there.
Dr. Pauls, now on assignment in the Foreign Ministry, was selected, after unusually careful weighing of a sensitive appointment as a first-rate career diplomat who had an absolutely clean political record during the Nazi era.
Bonn   officials   are   persuaded
that Israeli political quarters have nothing against Dr. Pauls except that he is a career diplomat. They believe that Israel would prefer a personality such as the 70-year old Deputy Prof. Frans Bohm, says the New York Times, who has been personally instrumental in bringing about German-Jewish reconciliation.
Officials Baid Dr. Erhard believed Bonn should not make it appear that West Germany and Israel had a special relationship differing from Jhe normal ties of friendly states.
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