Summary
Young philosopher in Brenner’s Chapter 2 who combined Zionism with ardent German patriotism during the First World War and gave German Zionism its mystical blood doctrine, drawn from the Wandervogel volkism of the pre-1914 German campuses (Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, PDF p.18).
Details
- In Drei Reden ueber das Judentum (1911) Buber spoke of a youth who senses in the immortality of the generations a community of blood, and taught that “the deepest layers of our being are determined by blood” (PDF p.18).
- In 1916 he wrote that the Jew, driven out of his land and dispersed throughout the Occident, “has remained an Oriental”, and that the immortal Jewish unitary drive would come into being only after continuity of life in Palestine, in contact with its maternal soil (PDF p.18).
- Brenner judges Buber’s voelkisch Zionism, with its strands of mystical enthusiasm, too spiritual to appeal to a wide following; the popular version was supplied by Ignatz Zollschan’s social Darwinism (PDF p.18).
Related pages
Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, Zionism, Racism