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256 <strong>American</strong> <strong>Jewish</strong> <strong>Archives</strong><br />
most exclusively to German philosophy and Christian mysticism<br />
as the guideposts for his religious searchings. Only then, influ-<br />
enced both by the nascent Zionist movement and certain Hasidic<br />
writings, as well as by the increasingly antiseptic ambiance of Ger-<br />
man culture, did he return to his <strong>Jewish</strong> roots, especially the Hebrew<br />
Bible, and call for <strong>Jewish</strong> renewal. It is a prescient sign of the mod-<br />
ern <strong>Jewish</strong> predicament that Buber comes to speak for a tragically<br />
endangered post-emancipation Diaspora Jewry through the influ-<br />
ences of Christian mysticism, and perhaps the greatest Enlighten-<br />
ment critic of Judaism, Imrnanuel Kant.<br />
Let us take a look at Schmidt's illuminating discussion of Buber<br />
and Nietzsche. When Buber arrived in Vienna in 1897, he already was<br />
enamored of Nietzsche's writings, especially Thus Spoke Zarathustra.<br />
Nietzsche's emphasis upon aesthetics as the basis for morality, and<br />
the proclamation of the death of God as the entree to a complete<br />
transvaluation of values, resonated deeply within Buber; he too was<br />
seeking new ways of understanding the conundrum of modernity.<br />
So taken with Nietzsche was Buber that at age seventeen he began<br />
to translate Zarathustra into Polish. Even in the 1913 precursor of I<br />
and Thou, Daniel, the influence of Zarathustra is apparent. Buber<br />
saw Nietzsche almost as a modern-day Hebrew prophet, railing<br />
against the failures of metaphysics and morality in order to stem<br />
the decay of culture. In Buber's words, Nietzsche<br />
... "uncovered the feeble lies of our values and our<br />
truths. . . . Instead of happiness for the greatest number, he con-<br />
sidered the creation of great people and great ideas to be the<br />
purpose of humanity." (Buber, "Ein Wort uber Nietzsche; 13,<br />
quoted in Schmidt, 240.<br />
Nietzsche is clearly a source of Buber's wide-ranging notion of re-<br />
newal. In strange anomalous fashion, Nietzsche becomes through<br />
Buber a determining force in the transformation of "the ancient<br />
foundation to the twentieth century via his own, Dionysian dithy<br />
rambs"(26).<br />
Professor Schmidt's analysis of the influence upon Buber of the<br />
various strands of German philosophy is excellent, if brief. The dis-<br />
cussion of Hasidism, however, is problematic. As others have noted-
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