Martin Buber by Paul Mendes-Flohr

Author:Paul Mendes-Flohr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2019-04-11T16:00:00+00:00

Arendt and others may have felt certain about Buber’s significance, but Buber himself was not so sure. When at the end of March 1938, Buber finally emigrated to Palestine to assume a professorship at Hebrew University, he did so with a “heavy heart,” uncertain whether at the age of sixty he could acquire in Hebrew the rhetorical and pedagogical skills to be an effective guide in the linguistic and political culture of his new home.74

9

Professor and Political Activist

ON SATURDAY, March 19, 1938, Martin and Paula Buber and their two granddaughters boarded in Naples the Italian passenger ship the S.S. Esperia for the six-day voyage to Haifa. As they landed on March 24, Buber was filled with anxiety about his inaugural lecture at the Hebrew University, which he was scheduled to deliver just five weeks later, on April 25. It would be his first public lecture in Hebrew, which, as a modern spoken and literary language, he had yet to master—and given his age, he assumed he never would. He expressed this fear in a letter to Ernst Simon, noting that he had engaged an editor versed in modern Hebrew to polish the texts he had prepared:

I would draft my lectures in German and then prepare a Hebrew version, whereupon [my editor] puts them into good Hebrew. But as I was working, I began to have doubts. When I compared my Hebrew version with [the editor’s corrections], I became increasingly convinced that I shall never be able to write like [him]—in fact, there is an unbridgeable gap between my crude mode of expression (to say nothing of its faultiness) and [the editor’s] cultivated one. … Should I ever get to the point where I write and speak a halfway decent Hebrew, it will of necessity be a relatively untalmudic [i.e., unlearned] one.1

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