The study of Martin Buber's work has long been divided into two distinct periods: an earlier mystical stage exemplified by his book Daniel (1913) and a later dialogical stage, which begins with his first book of dialogical philosophy, I and Thou (1923). In particular, Paul Mendes-Flohr sharpened this distinction in his book From Mysticism to Dialogue (English edition, 1989) with an examination of Buber's transition between stages. Emphasizing the influence of Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Simmel on Buber's intellectual development, Mendes-Flohr presented Buber's turn from mysticism to dialogue as a shift toward an interest in community and away from the individualistic experience of mysticism.
In Aesthetic of Renewal, based on a dissertation written under Mendes-Flohr's guidance, Martina Urban draws our attention to the earlier period of Buber's writings and, in particular, to the publication of Buber's first hasidic anthologies, The Tales of Rabbi Nachman (1906) and The Legend of the Baal-Shem (1908). Urban argues that we must understand the anthologies not only within two distinct overlapping intellectual contexts but also as significant contributions to each of these contexts. She also greatly expands Mendes-Flohr's discussion of Simmel's influence on Buber.
Anthologizing Jewish literature was regarded not only by Buber but many other cultural Zionists as a means of renewing Jewish culture. In the book's first five chapters, Urban painstakingly recounts Buber's efforts to find a coeditor for various potential anthologies and how different understandings of Jewish culture kept him from joining forces with other Zionist anthologists, including Mikhah Berdyczewski, Shmuel Agnon, and Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik. The contrast between Buber and Bialik in particular draws out the stakes of putting together an anthology of Jewish literature in the context of early twentieth-century cultural Zionism.
For Bialik, anthologizing was part of his larger program of kinnus, ingathering. His Sefer Ha-Aggadah (1908) gathered the literature of Aggadah for the sake of secularizing it; in his editing he sought to keep the Aggadah's most intellectual and rational elements as a foundation for a modern Hebrew literature. Though he acknowledged hasidic tales as a form of Jewish literature, Bialik viewed them with ambivalence toward their Yiddish language as well as their religious content.
Buber's positive evaluation of Hasidism as an expression of a “vital force” of Judaism put him at odds with Bialik. In his early anthologies (both The Tales of Rabbi Nachman and The Legend of the Baal-Shem, as well as other projects proposed but not completed), Buber's goal was to connect modern readers to Hasidism so that it might address their sense of alienation. Toward this end, he presented hasidic tales interwoven with his personal interpretations. As Steven KepnesFootnote 1 has demonstrated and Urban recognizes, Buber's “translations” were often interpretive retellings, though he always aimed to preserve what he took to be their original meaning. This attitude put Buber more in line with models of anthologizing found among Galician Zionists such as Berdyczewski, whose Sefer Hasidim (1900) predated Bialik's efforts.
Urban's discussion of different Zionist approaches to anthologizing and correspondingly on how to understand hasidic tales within a larger corpus of Jewish literature can feel at times both too detailed and too condensed. She might well have expanded this section of the volume into a book-length narrative of the history of Zionism and its attempts to define Jewish culture. The hurried pace of these chapters is an indication that Urban's central interests will be found in the book's second half.
Chapter 6, on Asher Ginsberg, serves as a transition. Buber considered himself a disciple of Ginsberg; however, in defining Jewish culture, Buber insisted that it include “abiding religious sensibilities, which, nurtured by primordial forces, were in essence independent of the objective expressions of culture” (71). This view separated him from Ginsberg, who sought to renew Jewish culture by secularizing its literature, customs, values, and language. The two split more definitively over language, with Ha'am insisting that revival of Hebrew be part of cultural renewal and Buber seeking a renewal that could be expressed through the languages Jews already spoke.
In line with this view, Buber's understanding of Zionism did not entail the end of Jewish life in the Diaspora, and the audience for his hasidic anthologies included both Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews as well as non-Jews. Urban's second context for understanding Buber's presentation of hasidic tales is German neo-Romanticism and the turn to aesthetics as a means of understanding reality. As it now emerges, the central argument of Urban's book is that Buber's calls for Jewish Renaissance as articulated through his presentation of hasidic tales constitute his contribution to larger conversations among German intellectuals about language, representation, and perception. In support of this argument, Urban reads Buber's anthologies through other thinkers, ranging from Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, to Buber's contemporaries such as Fritz Mauthner, Dilthey, and Simmel, to literary critics of the late twentieth century, such as Paul Ricoeur and Wolfgang Iser.
Chapter 7 focuses on language and the relationship between words and their representations. Urban reads Buber's presentation of a hasidic parable about a king who builds a palace with endless rooms as Buber's account of language. The palace is built of illusions but only those who are truly interested in reaching the king perceive this, while others merely comes to the palace's gates to collect gifts from the king. Urban argues that Buber understands this story to be about the power of the ecstatic mystic (the hasid, in this case) to permeate illusions (false representations) through the will rather than through sense experience, thus offering a different model of language: “The Hasidic masters avoided the fallacy of treating concepts as conveying epistemological truth claims by separating the concepts of ‘inwardness’ and ‘outwardness’ from sense perception and linking them to one's will. Guided by his will, the ecstatic mystic attains a consciousness of the unutterable, unthinkable, suprarational meaning of existence that is disclosed experientially” (85).
Chapter 8 considers Buber's definition of culture as a rejection of historicism. Urban describes how, for Buber, Hasidism was one expression of an eternal religiosity: it could serve as a source for national renewal through Zionism specifically because it was an expression of an Urjudentum. In the Excursus on Ecstasy and Temporality that appears at the end of this chapter, Urban introduces literary expressionism as another important element of the cultural context in which Buber's hasidic anthologies appear.
In Chapter 9, Urban explains more fully how Buber's presentation of Hasidism as a mystical experience that overcomes the limitations of language is linked to cultural renewal. She does so through a reading of Buber's essay “The Life of the Hassidim,” which appears at the beginning of the Legend of the Baal-Shem. It is here that Urban is most critical of Buber; she demonstrates how his discussions consistently condense and simplify the hasidic concepts. Some evaluation of his choice to reshape these concepts strengthen her analysis. That said, her explanation of the connection between the mystic's inner experience and connection to community provides a satisfying final piece to the picture she has drawn of Buber's aesthetics.
The Aesthetic of Renewal is a significant contribution not only to our understanding of Buber's early period but also to our grasp of twentieth-century German intellectual history. In the book's very last paragraph, Urban comments that had Buber not abandoned his interest in mysticism and turned to dialogue, he might very well have invented a new type of anthology. This “what if?” point is striking because it reminds us that Buber did in fact continue to engage with Hasidism throughout his life, even if his mode of discussing it changed. Urban's discussion of Buber's use of Hasidism as a means of contributing to early twentieth-century German intellectual conversations left this reader hungry for a consideration of Hasidism in his later period.
