Between Political Theology and Theopolitics: Martin Buber’s Kingship of God

In 1932, Martin Buber published a study of biblical politics bearing the title the Kingship of God. He wrote in the preface that the book—the first volume of a planned trilogy—was dedicated to exploring “the origin of ‘messianism’ in Israel.”¹ The product of many years of research and biblical studies, especially of his translation of the Hebrew Bible with Franz Rosenzweig, Buber’s study was meant to demonstrate his scholarly pedigree and qualify him for a university appointment.² Despite its dense academic tone, however, the target of Buber’s study is unmistakable: it is a rejoinder to the writings of the German political and legal theorist Carl Schmitt, whose famous assertion that, “[a]ll significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts,” inaugurated an important debate in the Weimar Republic about the relationship between religion and politics.³

Much has been written in recent years about Weimar political theology, corresponding to renewed interest in Schmitt’s writings.⁴ Yet, surprisingly little has been written about Schmitt’s influence on Jewish political thought between the World Wars. This article is an attempt to address the dearth of scholarship on specifically Jewish political theologies.⁵ In particular, it explores Buber’s attempt to imagine a distinct conception of Jewish politics in response to the debate sparked by Schmitt’s writings. By situating Buber’s thought within the context of Weimar-era political–theological inquiries, this article seeks to illuminate an aspect of Buber’s political thought that has often been overlooked, both by many of his interpreters as well as by recent studies in political theology.⁶ It also points to the importance of Schmitt’s writings for understanding the political thought of Weimar Jewish intellectuals more broadly.

Schmitt’s political theology

“When the edifice of a world collapses,” Franz Rosenzweig observed after World War I, “then both the thoughts that imagined it and the dreams that were woven through it are buried under the debris.”⁷ Rosenzweig, who like so many Germans of his generation witnessed the war from the trenches, experienced it as the collapse not only of Western civilization but also of the ideas upon which it was built. For many Germans, the Great War shattered the optimistic faith in the underlying metaphysical and rational structure of the universe inherited from the nineteenth century. G. W. F. Hegel’s famous remark about the “slaughter-bench” of history had been tragically confirmed by the war’s unprecedented destruction and devastation,⁸ making a “mockery of the construction of immanence as endowed with meaning.”⁹ Reflecting the bleak spirit of the times, Max Weber described modernity as “disenchanted,” gesturing at the idea of a world devoid of meaning and inimical to human freedom.¹⁰ “Not summer’s bloom lies ahead of us,” he warned shortly after the war, “but rather a polar night of icy darkness.”¹¹

German thinkers emerged from World War I harboring deep skepticism about any attempt to found politics on principles of abstract reason.¹² This marked the end of the “Great Separation,” the liberal project of establishing politics on its own foundations, independent of divine revelation or cosmological speculation.¹³ The prominent historian Friedrich Meinecke typified the postwar disillusionment with the German political tradition. In his Cosmopolitanism and the Nation State (1907), he celebrated the ethical nature of the state. But in his first major work after the war, Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’Etat and Its Place in Modern History (1924), Meinecke decried the heritage of German political thought and its “false idealization of power politics.”¹⁴ The most publicized statement on this theme was Weber’s address devoted to the topic of “Politics as a Vocation,” delivered to the “Free Students Union” in Bavaria in January 1919. Weber asserted that “[t]he genius or demon of politics lives in an inner tension with the god of love,” leading to an “irreconcilable conflict” between politics and morality. “He who lets himself in for politics,” he warned, “contracts with diabolical powers.”¹⁵ The postwar discontent with liberalism would only...