_Martin Buber: His Intellectual and Scholarly Legacy_ is a unique volume on one of the most pivotal figures of modern Jewish thought. These essays by leading scholars explore Buber’s influential dialogues with Christianity, politics, philosophy, and Jewish sources.

It has become commonplace among scholars to map Martin Buber’s concepts of “I-It” and “I-Thou” onto Kant’s phenomenon and noumenon, respectively. However, this has resulted in significant misconceptions about Buber’s phenomenology of dialogue. In fact, his philosophy was decidedly post-Kantian in the dual sense of being both under the influence of Kant and in opposition to him, and attention to themes of embodiment (Leiblichkeit) in Buber’s writings helps to disentangle these aspects. Through close philological readings, this paper demonstrates how Buber (...) sought to circumvent the transcendental boundary between appearance and being, appropriated Kant’s language of “intuition” to describe a sensory encounter with the presence of a thing in itself, and affirmed that while being is not apprehended in terms of space and time, it is nonetheless spatial and temporal. Ultimately, these investigations elucidate what I term Buber’s dialogical monism, which in some ways anticipated insights of new materialism. (shrink)

Hasidism is hardly known for its openness to non-Hasidim, yet the story is more complex. When Hasidism first emerged in the late eighteenth century as a populist mystical movement for (primarily) male Jews in Eastern Europe, there were fairly strong traditions of engagement with “the other”—non-Jews, as well as Jews who were deemed peripheral due to their gender, education level, or heterodoxy. However, such perspectives in early Hasidism must be understood largely in terms of mystical paradigms, such as “worship in (...) corporeality.” Starting in the nineteenth century, as Hasidic communities assumed more defensive postures against perceived threats of secularism and assimilation, their reflections on otherness grew more antagonistic on the whole and were more likely to reference social concerns rather than mystical processes. This chapter will present sources that both exemplify and defy the above-mentioned trends. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 25, Issue 1, pp 131 - 161 Martin Buber denied consistently that he was a theologian because he repudiated abstract discourse about God. However, he did affirm that intersubjective events in the world express theological truth, even if that truth cannot be possessed or professed thereafter as noetic content. In this paper I introduce a concept of “embodied theology” to elucidate this nuance in Buber’s religious thought, and I show how his Ḥasidic writings shed unique light on (...) these matters. Through hermeneutical investigations of his Ḥasidic tales vis-à-vis the original sources, I illuminate Buber’s conviction that genuine sages convey theological meaning through the very spiritual-corporeal dynamics of their lives—or what Buber calls their “sacramental existence.”. (shrink)