The Resort to Geistpolitik: Two of Buber’s Early Theological-Political Debates

precis:

This essay aims to shed new light on major features of the early Zionist construction of a Jewish political space. Revisiting two early debates of Martin Buber (1878–1965) with Max Nordau (1849–1923) and Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), the essay points at the limitation of the Zionist political construction for a later articulation of the Jewish and Palestinian complexity in a shared or divided land. Theodor Herzl’s understanding of Zionism as a strictly political and economic apparatus was brought to a historical and ideological debate at the Fifth Zionist Congress in 1901 between the young Buber and the faithful associate of Herzl, Nordau. Against Nordau’s prioritization of the productivization of Jews, Buber developed in his famous speech on “Jewish Art” the necessity of a cultural and spiritual elevation of Jews. In 1916, in the middle of World War I, Buber’s cultural notion of Jewish national regeneration in Eretz Israel set the backdrop for another debate and clash, this time with the German Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen.