GILGUL OF MEANING: MARTIN BUBER ON VATERLAND AND THE LAND OF THE FATHERS

The contemporary reader of Martin Buber’s work will be struck and bewil- dered by his use of seemingly Neo-romantic and even völkisch vocabulary. Scholars have often noted Buber’s uncomfortable vicinity to German nationalism and fault- ed him for teaching a Jewish version of blood-and-soil nativism. In this essay, I will explore the relationship between man (adam) and land (adama) in Buber’s thought, arguing that, rather than borrowing from German nationalism, Buber reclaimed Ger- man concepts by restoring their Biblical origins and by refurbishing their religious and ethical meaning. Buber himself viewed this strategy as an act of re-translation that refused to relinquish the language of German nationalism. Confronting Ger- man nationalism and ethnic supremacy with an alternate meaning of its catchwords, Buber offered a subtle, yet no less radical, critique of Volkism. By restoring the ethical and religious meanings to concepts such as fatherland (eretz ha-avot/Vaterland) and soil (adama/Boden), Buber intended (1) to protect the Hebrew Bible from völkisch attacks and from neo-Marcionite theologies (such as Harnack’s) that sought to sep- arate the New Testament from the Hebrew Bible; and (2) to shield Zionism against völkisch and nativist influences. Thus, Buber stressed anew the ethical message and obligations that lay at the core of his Zionism and which he most clearly articulated in terms of his ‘Biblical Humanism’.