Martin Buber

Martin Buber was born in 1878 in Vienna

Buber was born in Vienna in 1878 to an Orthodox Jewish family. After his parents divorced, he was raised by his grandfather Solomon Buber, a scholar of Midrash, in Lemberg. At home he spoke Yiddish and German, and as a young man he stopped living a religious life.

In 1896 he went to Vienna to study philosophy, art history, German studies and philology. While studying in Zürich he met Paula Winkler, a writer who later converted to Judaism and became his wife. He wrote his doctoral thesis on Jakob Böhme and Nikolaus Cusanus.

He joined the Zionist movement in 1898 and edited the weekly Die Welt from 1902. He later turned to Hasidism, retelling Hasidic tales in German, and edited the monthly Der Jude until 1924. In 1923 he published I and Thou, and in 1925 he began translating the Hebrew Bible into German with Franz Rosenzweig.

He became an honorary professor in Frankfurt in 1930 and resigned in protest when Hitler came to power in 1933. In 1938 he settled in Jerusalem and taught at the Hebrew University. He supported a binational state for Jews and Arabs and was a member of Ihud and Brit Shalom.

During the Eichmann trial in 1961 he asked President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi to prevent the execution. He received the Israel Prize in 1958. He died at his home in Talbiya, Jerusalem, in 1965.