Review - American Jewish Archives

Book Reviews 255
Schmidt, Gilya Gerda.
Martin Buber's Formative Years:
From German Culture to Jewish Renewal, 1897-1909.
Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. 1995.177 pages.
When Martin Buber arrived in Vienna in 1897, an overtly anti-Semitic
city government was in power. The city of Mozart was now the city
of Karl Lueger and would later become the city of Hitler. Thus the
life of this Galician-born Jew from Lvov, raised by a grandfather who
prayed among Hasidim and edited the definitive scholarly edition
of the Midrash Lekach Tov, was to traverse varied yet intersecting
paths, in the tragic destiny of twentieth-century European Jewry. While
much is known about Buber's later years and his abundant writings,
the formation of his fundamental intellectual identity from the time
of university studies in Vienna is less familiar. It is to fill this gap that
Gilya Gerda Schmidt's carefully researched volume, Martin Buber's
Formative Years: From German Culture to Jewish Renewal, 1897-1907,
comes. Professor Schmidt's study is a valuable contribution to Buber
scholarship.
As is well known from his later writings, Buber consistently
maintained an anti-rabbinic attitude in regard to Judaism. This atti-
tude was tempered somewhat when his collaboration with Franz
Rosenzweig on the German translation of the Tanakh began. A fas-
cinating aspect of Schmidt's study is the tracing of the circuitous
route that eventually ended in Buber's becoming a significant rep-
resentative of twentieth-century Judaism despite, or perhaps be-
cause of, his anti-rabbinic propensities. What is clearly demonstrated
is how the young Buber left both traditional Jewish practice and
learning, immersed himself in Nietzsche, Nicolas of Cusa, Jakob
Boehme, Schopenhauer, Kant, Schiller, and Scheiermacher, and
through them returned to reconfigure and transvalue (to adopt Niet-
zsche's term) the tradition of his ancestors. That Buber "discovers" in
Hasidism concepts, which are in early rabbinic sources, is thus ex-
plainable. Simply put, Buber understood the rabbinic tradition as a
heteronomous, constricting religious code. His lack of expertise in
rabbinic texts, as well as personal proclivities, led him to look al-