Martin Buber

Martin Buber (1878 – 1965) was a renaissance scholar, sociologist, theologian, philosopher, and poet. According to Schocken, the value that Buber added to Schocken’s culture mission in Nazi Germany was greater than the entire turnover of his department store empire.

Schocken first came across Buber’s work in 1909, when he read Buber’s Tales of Rabbi Nachman. Devouring the book with growing admiration, Schocken was impressed how Buber turned Eastern European Jewish folklore into modern prose, attractive to contemporary sensibilities. Tales of Rabbi Nachman turned him, Schocken said, into a “living Jew.”

Through the books that Schocken published in the 1930s under the Nazi regime, Buber emerged as the bravest publicist left in the country. His Question to the Single One was a masterpiece of political subversion. He famously wrote that “No program, no tactical decision, no order can tell me how I should decide to properly serve … before the face of God.”

Buber’s Tales of Hasidim continues to be published today in Hebrew and in English, by the Schocken Publishing House in Israel and Schocken Books in New York.