Martin Buber's Open Letter

Martin Buber's Open Letterto Gandhi Regarding Palestine
(February 24, 1939)
The following is excerpted from an open letter the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber wrote in response to criticisms of the Jews in Palestine.
You, Mahatma Gandhi, who know of the connection between tradition and future, should not associate yourself with those who pass over our cause without understanding or sympathy.
But you say — and I consider it to be the most significant of all the things you tell us — that Palestine belongs to the Arabs and that it is therefore "wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs."
Here I must add a personal note in order to make clear to you on what premises I desire to consider your thesis.
I belong to a group of people who from the time Britain conquered Palestine have not ceased to strive for the concluding of a genuine peace between Jew and Arab.
By a genuine peace we inferred and still infer that both peoples together should develop the land without the one imposing its will on the other. In view of the international usages of our generation, this appeared to us to be very difficult but not impossible. We were and still are well aware that in this unusual — yes, unprecedented — case it is a question of seeking new ways of understanding and cordial agreement between the nations. Here again we stood and still stand under the sway of a commandment.
We considered it a fundamental point that in this case two vital claims are opposed to each other, two claims of a different nature and a different origin which cannot objectively be pitted against one another and between which no objective decision can be made as to which is just, which unjust. We considered and still consider it our duty to understand and to honor the claim which is opposed to ours and to endeavor to reconcile both claims. We could not and cannot renounce the Jewish claim; something even higher than the life of our people is bound up with this land, namely its work, its divine mission. But we have been and still are convinced that it must be possible to find some compromise between this claim and the other, for we love this land and we believe in its future; since such love and such faith are surely present on the other side as well, a union in the common service of the land must be within the range of possibility. Where there is faith and love, a solution may be found even to what appears to be a tragic opposition.
In order to carry out a task of such extreme difficulty-in the recognition of which we have had to overcome an internal resistance on the Jewish side too, as foolish as it is natural-we have been in need of the support of well-meaning persons of all nations, and have hoped to receive it. But now you come and settle the whole existential dilemma with the simple formula: "Palestine belongs to the Arabs."
What do you mean by saying a land belongs to a population? Evidently you do not intend only to describe a state of affairs by your formula, but to declare a certain right. You obviously mean to say that a people, being settled on the land, has so absolute a claim to that land that whoever settles on it without the permission of this people has committed a robbery. But by what means did the Arabs attain the right of ownership in Palestine? Surely by conquest, and in fact a conquest with intent to settle. You therefore admit that as a result their settlement gives them exclusive right of possession; whereas the subsequent conquests of the Mamelukes and the Turks, which were conquests with a view to domination, not to settlement, do not constitute such a right in your opinion, but leave the earlier conquerors in rightful ownership. Thus settlement by conquest justifies for you, a right of ownership of Palestine; whereas a settlement such as the Jewish — the methods of which, it is true, though not always doing full justice to Arab ways of life, were even in the most objectionable cases far removed from those of conquest — does not justify in your opinion any participation in this right of possession. These are the consequences which result from your axiomatic statement that a land belongs to its population. In an epoch when nations are migrating you would first support the right of ownership of the nation that is threatened with dispossession or extermination; but were this once achieved, you would be compelled, not at once, but after a suitable number of generations had elapsed, to admit that the land "belongs" to the usurper. . . .
It seems to me that God does not give any one portion of the earth away, so that the owner may say as God says in the Bible: "For all the earth is Mine" (Exodus 19:5). The conquered land is, in my opinion, only lent even to the conqueror who has settled on it-and God waits to see what he will make of it.
I am told, however, I should not respect the cultivated soil and despise the desert. I am told, the desert is willing to wait for the work of her children: she no longer recognizes us, burdened with civilization, as her children. The desert inspires me with awe; but I do not believe in her absolute resistance, for I believe in the great marriage between man (adam) and earth (adamah). This land recognizes us, for it is fruitful through us: and precisely because it bears fruit for us, it recognizes us. Our settlers do not come here as do the colonists from the Occident to have natives do their work for them; they themselves set their shoulders to the plow and they spend their strength and their blood to make the land fruitful. But it is not only for ourselves that we desire its fertility. The Jewish farmers have begun to teach their brothers, the Arab farmers, to cultivate the land more intensively; we desire to teach them further: together with them we want to cultivate the land — to "serve" it, as the Hebrew has it. The more fertile this soil becomes, the more space there will be for us and for them. We have no desire to dispossess them: we want to live with them. We do not want to dominate them: we want to serve with them. . . .

MARTIN BUBER AND JEWISH-ARAB PEACE

MARTIN BUBER AND JEWISH-ARAB PEACEby Dan Leon
The road to peace between Arabs and Jews, as Buber knew, is not paved by power.
DAN LEON, who lives in Jerusalem, is co-managing editor of the Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics, and Culture, the first joint quarterly, now in its fifth year.
The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi and the establishment of the state of Israel were separated by about half a year (January and May 1949). Writing in 1938, Gandhi had not been sympathetic to the Jewish national home in Palestine since he thought that "Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. Why should [the Jews] not, like other peoples of the earth, make that country their home where they are born and earn their livelihood"?
He urged German Jews "to claim Germany as their home" and to follow the example of civil resistance. "The Jews of Germany can offer Satyagraha under infinitely better auspices than the Indians of South Africa." "The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of Jews (but) to the God-fearing, death has no terror" (1938).
Buber's Response
It is doubtful whether the great Indian exponent of nonviolence, whose life has inspired generations of disciples all over the world, ever saw a reply sent to him in February 1939 by the distinguished Jewish philosopher and theologian of dialogue, Professor Martin Buber (1878-1965). Buber, who came from Germany to live in Palestine in 1938 at the age of sixty, writes of Gandhi's voice as one "which he has long known and honored." But he asked Gandhi: "Do you know, or not know, Mahatma, what a concentration camp is like and what does on there? Do you know of the torments in the concentration camp, of its methods of slow and quick torture? I cannot assume that you know of this." Among Jews in Germany Buber had "observed many instances of genuine Satyagraha" but "a diabolic universal steam-roller cannot thus be withstood. . . . [it is] ineffective, unobserved martyrdom [and] no maxim for suitable behavior can be deduced therefrom."
But the main thrust of Buber's letter concerned Jewish rights in Palestine. He wrote that Jews and Arabs must
develop the land together without one imposing his will on the other. We considered it a fundamental point that in this case two vital claims are opposed to each other, two claims of a different origin, which cannot be pitted one against the other and between which no objective decision can be made as to which is just and which is unjust.
We considered and still consider it our duty to understand and to honor the claim which is opposed to ours and to endeavor to reconcile both claims. We have been and still are convinced that it must be possible to find some form of agreement between this claim and the other; for we love this land and believe in it future; and seeing that such love and faith are surely present also on the other side, a union in the common service of the land must be within the range of the possible.
What Sort of Peace?
Buber had been a Zionist since 1888, but as far back as 1918 (soon after in the Balfour Declaration the British recognized a Jewish National Home in Palestine) he rejected what he called the concept of "a Jewish state with cannons, flags and military decorations." He and his colleagues worked for a bi-national Palestine based not on a colonial alliance but on cooperation and parity between Jews and Arabs.
A year after official Zionist policy achieved its aim of Jewish statehood in 1949, Buber expressed his fears that after the war peace, when it comes, will not be peace, a real peace which is constructive, creative (but) a stunted peace, no more than nonbelligerence, which at any moment, when any new constellation of forces arises, is liable to turn into war.
And when this hollow peace is achieved, how then do you think you'll be able to combat "the spirit of militarism" when the leaders of the extreme nationalism will find it easy to convince the young that this kind of spirit is essential for the survival of the country? The battles will cease -- but will suspicions cease? Will there be an end to the thirst for vengeance? Won't we be compelled, and I mean really compelled, to maintain a posture of vigilance for ever, without being able to breathe? Won't this unceasing effort occupy the most talented members of our society"? (1949).
Buber died two years before the Six Day War of June 1967 -- and this article is being written twenty-five years after the Yom Kippur War of 1977, when Israel suffered 2,697 dead. Israeli survival since 1948 has cost six wars and the Intifada, with terrible casualties on both sides. Buber, it seems, understood the nature of the conflict more deeply than many of the political pragmatists who scorned him as being merely an unrealistic visionary.
Hope from Oslo
Five years ago the Oslo Accords signed in Washington by Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat for the Government of the State of Israel and the PLO team agreed "to put an end to decades of confrontation and conflict" and to "recognize their mutual political and legitimate rights, and strive to live in peaceful coexistence and mutual dignity and security and achieve a just, lasting and comprehensive peace settlement and historic reconciliation through the agreed peace process."
Following the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by an extremist religious Jewish student, we witnessed the unexpected victory in the summer of 1995 of the young rightist Benjamin Netanyahu over Shimon Peres, after a spate of monstrous terror attacks against Israel. For the last two years the rightist-religious coalition, while outwardly reluctantly accepting Oslo, set about the systematic destruction of its spirit and its content.
Netanyahu's warning at the UN in September 1998 against the establishment of a Palestinian State is a good expression of that contempt for the Arabs which he expressed in 1993 in his book, A Place among the Nation. Nevertheless, on October 23, 1998, Netanyahu joined Yasser Arafat and President Clinton in signing the Wye River Memorandum, which broke the deadlock in the peace process imposed by Netanyahu himself, and defined "steps to facilitate implementation of the (Oslo) Interim Agreement," including Israeli territorial concessions an the West Bank.
Labor leader Ehud Barak welcomed Wye as a continuation of Rabin's legacy but noted that "for no good reason Israel lost 19 months in which the spirit of the process was eradicated, trust between the sides was lost, and Israel wasted international and economic assets" (Ha'aretz, October 25, 1998). The lost trust will not easily be restored. On the other side of the political spectrum, rightist parliamentarian Ruby Rivlin said that Wye has been presented as a tremendous achievement; in fact almost half of Judea and Samaria [the West Bank -DL] will be handed over to Yasser Arafat, who is well on the way to establishing his state. How sad and ironic that this is taking place under the auspices of a Likud (rightist) -- National Religious Party government" (Jerusalem Post, November 22, 1998).
Why Wye?
In the opinion of Uri Elitzur, a West Bank settler leader who heads the prime minister's Bureau, Netanyahu faced unprecedented American pressure but his final decision was made out of pragmatic domestic considerations. Above all, the two powerful and influential forces in Israel are "the ideological left and the ideological right." "After 30 years of struggle, the contours of the outcome are emerging: we [the right] were victorious in the sphere of settlement [there are some 750,000 Jewish settlers in the territories occupied by Israel in 1967 -DL] and the left won the battle for [recognizing] the existence of the Palestinian people." Netanyahu barely won the confidence of the middle third of the public, which does not want the annulment of the Oslo accords or a huge falling-out with the United States and is interested in a settlement with the Arabs (Ha'aretz, November 5, 1998).
Many political observers see Wye as expressing the final collapse of the rightist-religious "Greater Israel" ideology and a victory for realism and pragmatism,
But in a piece called "An Uncertain Future," Henry Siegman, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, praises Clinton's accomplishment at Wye but expresses a view frequently heard on the Israeli left -- namely that had Netanyahu wanted to implement the Oslo Accords, he could have done so earlier to the extent that Netanyahu entertains a 'strategic objective,' that objective has been, and continues to be, the nonimplementation of the Oslo agreements in a manner that allows him to escape blame and to point an accusing finger at the Palestinians and the USA" (Jerusalem Post, October 27, 1998).
While welcoming Wye, prominent Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab in an article called "Nothing New" writes that the implementation of Wye "will certainly not solve the Palestinian problem." The Palestinians strive for a comprehensive peace which "must start with the recognition of the Palestinian right to self-determination, including their rights to live in peace and tranquility in their own state. All are therefore in agreement that Wye is an important station in the negotiating process but only events in the political life and among the populations of the three signators to Wye will show whether the road will be opened up for the benefit of peace or blocked again to its detriment.
Independence and Nakba
Thus, fifty years after the birth of Israel, negotiations are at least under way, even if the genuine "historic reconciliation" foreseen at Oslo has not yet been guaranteed.
The real problem lies even deeper since the establishment of Israel corresponded with the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe), in which 750,000 Palestinians became refugees from their own homeland. Only a small minority of Israelis is prepared to accept at least moral responsibility for the events of 1948; most blame the Palestinian leadership for rejecting the 1947 UN partition proposal and initiating the 1949 war, with its tragic consequences.
In terms of international legitimacy, conventional thinking and education in Israel consider the birth of Israel as vindicated both by the United Nations and by subsequent developments. Its historical justification as a shelter for Jews in distress from holocaust survivors, from Arab lands and from the former USSR, is seen in Israel's Jewish population growth from 650,000 in 1948 to some five million today, along with a million Israeli Arabs. Militarily, Israel is the strongest power in the region, and this was and is seen as the only guarantee for its future.
As for the official Zionist leadership, its moral ambiguity in the Jewish-Arab conflict is evident. Professor Chaim Weizmann, who led tho Zionist movement between the world wars and was to become Israel's first president, was considered a moderate. He declared in 1947 that "there must not be one law for the Jews and another for the Arabs. . . . the world will judge the Jewish state by what it will do for the Arabs." Yet he saw the Arab exodus of 1948 as a miracle.
Israel's 1949 Declaration of Independence promised "full and equal citizenship" to the Israeli Arabs, yet in 1962 in a protest to David Ben-Gurion, Buber noted that Israel "has committed acts which have engendered in the Arab inhabitants of the State a feeling that they are but second-class citizens." Some thirty-five years later, this is still true. Unhappily, it is equally true that most official representatives of the Jewish religion in Israel have failed to take a stand in the name of Judaism over the great moral questions of our times, including Jewish-Arab rapprochement. The present coalition government in Israel depends on religious support while for the last quarter of a century national religious circles have sanctified territory ("a Greater Israel") over other political and human values. If and how they will adapt to the option of mutual Israeli-Palestinian recognition, which involves what they see as "surrendering parts of the historical Jewish Homeland," remains to be seen. It is worth noting that ultra-orthodox Judaism, which is gaining strength in Israel, is less attracted to this nationalist-territorial form of religion.
Building and Destroying
Chaim Weizmann, for all his innumerable faults, was both a renowned scientist and a man of the world who had a deep understanding of the Jewish people. In 1951, a year before his death, he talked of "all the mistakes that are being made in this country. The Jews are a very small people quantitatively, but also a great people qualitatively. An ugly people, but also a beautiful people, a people that builds and destroys. A people of genius and at the same time a people of incredible stupidity."
In a speech in 1958 Buber, aged eighty, while affirming the factual reality of the State of Israel, referred to "the most pernicious of all false teachings, that according to which the way of history is determined by power alone. . . . while faith in the spirit is retained only as mere phraseology." Buber maintained that "he who will truly serve the spirit must seek to make good all that was once missed: he must seek to free once again the blocked path to an understanding with the Arab peoples [in] a peace of genuine cooperation." Surely, a good message for Israel in her jubilee year.
Copyright of Cross Currents is the property of Association for Religion & Intellectual Life and its content may not be copied without the copyright holder's express written permission except for the print or download capabilities of the retrieval software used for access. This content is intended solely for the use of the individual user.Source: Cross Currents, Winter 1998-99, Vol. 49 Issue 1.

Martin Buber on education

Martin buber on education
Buber's focus on dialogue and community would alone mark him out as an important thinker for educators. But when this is added to his fundamental concern with encounter and how we are with each other (and the world) his contribution is unique and yet often unrecognized.

I do not accept any absolute formulas for living. No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen in a man's life. As we live, we grow and our beliefs change. They must change. So I think we should live with this constant discovery. We should be open to this adventure in heightened awareness of living. We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience. Martin Buber (in Hodes 1972)
Today, when the word 'dialogue' is spoken in educational circles, it is often linked to Paulo Freire. The same is true of 'subject' and 'object'. Yet, in the twentieth century, it is really in the work of Martin Buber that the pedagogical worth of dialogue was realized - and the significance of relation revealed. He wrote - 'All real living is meeting' (Buber 1958: 25) and looked to how, in relation, we can fully open ourselves to the world, to others, and to God.
Life
Martin Mordechai Buber was born February 8, 1878 in Vienna. Following the breakdown of his parents' marriage when he was aged three, he went to live with his grandparents in Lvov, Salomon Buber, a respected scholar of Jewish tradition and literature, and Adlele Buber an enthusiastic reader of literature. At 14 Martin Buber went back to live with his father (and his new wife) in Lemberg. By this time he was already reading Kant and was soon into Nietzsche. Martin Buber went onto study in Vienna, Leipzig, Berlin (under Simmel and Dilthey) and Zurich. In Vienna he became involved in Zionism (more for cultural than political reasons) and became the editor of Die Welt, the official Zionist organ in 1901. In Zurich he met Paula Winkler who was later to become his wife (and who wrote under the name Georg Munk).
Sometime in late 1903, Martin Buber encountered the work of the Ba'al Shem Tov (1700-60), the founder of Hasidism. He began to engage with the religiousness of Judaism and the belief that man is made in the image of God (Vermes 1988: 8). There followed a period of intense study (five years). One result was a number of publications: The Tales of Rabbi Nachman (1906); The Legend of the Ba'al-Shem (1908); and Ecstatic Confessions (1909). In 1909-11 in Prague, Martin Buber delivered what were to become famous lectures on Judaism to the Jewish student organization Bar Kochba. These lectures (published in 1911 as Three Addresses on Judaism) stand in contrast to Orthodox Judaism with their emphasis on essence rather than observance. From 1916 to 1924 he edited Der Jude, an influential journal (and was working on his path breaking book I and Thou - published in 1923).
From 1924 to 1933, Martin Buber lectured in Jewish religion and philosophy at the University of Frankfurt. At this time he was also working with Franz Rosenzweig on a new German translation of the Hebrew Bible (Verdeutschung der Schrift). Under Hitler, he had to curtail his university teaching (he resigned his professorship immediately after Hitler's seizure of power) - but he continued to organize adult bible courses. In 1938 he finally left Germany to join the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Thus far, we can see that Buber's theoretical focus can be split into two stages (Avnon 1998: 33 - 45):
Mysticism (1897-1923) - where his interest lay in people's ability to transcend profane conceptions of reality.
Dialogue (1923- 1938) - that reflects Buber's move away from the supremacy of the ecstatic moment to the unity of being and a focus on relationship and the dialogical nature of existence (perhaps most strongly linked to his book I and Thou).
With the move to Israel, it can be argued that he moved into a third:
Attentive silence (1938 - 1965) - wherein dialogue remains central, but there is a deepening recognition of 'the eternal, "silent" background of being and dialogue' (ibid.: 33)
Buber's emphasis on dialogue and Hebrew humanism made him unpopular with significant sections of the local Jewish population. He founded, with others Ichud (unity) and worked for the co-operation of Jews and Arabs and the establishment of a bi-national state. After the establishment of Israel he continued to work for Jewish-Arab understanding and the re-opening of dialogue with German thinkers and institutions. He also established the School for Adult Educators in Jerusalem in 1949 (influenced by Grundtvig's vision of the folk high school). His house in Talbyen, Jerusalem became the destination for seekers (like Aubrey Hodes and Maurice Friedman). He undertook many lecture tours, but with Paula's death in Venice in 1958, Martin Buber began to fall ill more frequently. He died at home on June 13, 1965 - and was buried in the cemetery Har-Hamenuchot in Jerusalem.
I-You, I-It
I and Thou, Buber's best known work, presents us with two fundamental orientations - relation and irrelation. We can either take our place, as Pamela Vermes (1988: 40-41) puts it, alongside whatever confronts us and address it as 'you'; or we 'can hold ourselves apart from it and view it as an object, an "it"'. So it is we engage in I-You (Thou) and I-It relationships. This basic distinction becomes complex - as we can see from the following extract. (Buber's poetic tendencies are also at full throttle in this piece!)
Exhibit 1: Martin Buber on I-You and I-It
I can look on (a tree) as a picture: stiff column in a shock of light, or splash of green shot with the delicate blue and silver of the background.
I can perceive it as movement: flowing veins on clinging, pressing pith, suck of the roots, breathing of the leaves, ceaseless commerce with earth and air - and the obscure growth itself.
I can classify it in a species and study it as a type in its structure and mode of life.
I can subdue its actual presence and form so sternly that I recognize it only as an expression of law...
I can dissipate it and perpetuate it in number...
In all this the tree remains my object, occupies space and time, and has its nature and constitution.
It can, however, also come about, if I have both will and grace, that in considering the tree I become bound up in relation to it. The tree is no longer It. I have been seized by the power of exclusiveness.
Martin Buber (1958) I and Thou, pages 19-20)
I-You involves a sense of being part of a whole. The "I" is not experienced or sensed as singular or separate; it is the "I" of being.
The primary word I-Thou can be spoken only with the whole being. Concentration and fusion into the whole being can never take place through my agency, not can it ever take place without me. I become through my relation to the Thou; and as I become the I, I say Thou.
All real living is meeting. (Buber 1958: 24-25)
The meeting involved isn't just between two people or between someone and the world. Buber believed that 'every particular Thou is a glimpse through to the eternal Thou' (ibid.: 99). In other words, each and every I-You relationship opens up a window to the ultimate Thou. As Aubrey Hodes (1972: 42) has noted, 'God has to be approached through an I-Thou relationship with people, animals, trees, even... a heap of stones'. Not surprisingly such moments can be fleeting. The I-You relation 'flows and ebbs and flows back again. Nothing exists that cannot become a you for me, but inevitably it will withdraw sooner or later to the separation of an it' (Vermes 1988: 41).
I-It involves distancing. Differences are accentuated, the uniqueness of "I" emphasized. Here the "I" is separated from the self it encounters. Buber believed that there had been a movement from relation to separation, that there was a growing crisis of being or existence in 'modern' society. He believed that the relationship between individuals and their selves (see selfhood), between people, and people and creation was increasingly that of I-It. As a result it was becoming more and more difficult to encounter God.
Encounter
For Buber encounter (Begegnung) has a significance beyond co-presence and individual growth (see encounter). He looked for ways in which people could engage with each other fully – to meet with themselves. The basic fact of human existence was not the individual or the collective as such, but ‘Man with Man’ (Buber 1947). As Aubrey Hodes puts it:
When a human being turns to another as another, as a particular and specific person to be addressed, and tries to communicate with him through language or silence, something takes place between them which is not found elsewhere in nature. Buber called this meeting between men the sphere of the between. (1973: 72)
Encounter (Begegnung) is an event or situation in which relation (Beziehung) occurs. We can only grow and develop, according to Buber, once we have learned to live in relation to others, to recognize the possibilities of the space between us. The fundamental means is dialogue. Encounter is what happens when two I's come into relation at the same time. This brings us back to Buber’s distinction between relation and irrelation. 'All real living is meeting' is sometimes translated as 'All real life is encounter'. This, as Pamela Vermes (1994: 198) has commented, could be taken as the perfect summary of Buber's teaching on encounter and relation. However, it seems unlikely that he would have agreed with the notion that where there is no encounter life is 'unreal'. It appears to be in encounter 'that the creative, redemptive, and revelatory processes take place which Buber associates with the dialogical life' (op cit.).
Dialogue
Dan Avnon (1998: 5) comments, 'the reality of "space" that is between persons is the focus of Buber's philosophy'. At its root is the idea that self-perfection is achievable only within relationship with others. Relationship exists in the form of dialogue. Furthermore, self-knowledge is possible only 'if the relation between man and creation is understood to be a dialogical relationship' (Buber quoted by Avnon op cit). Significantly, for Buber dialogue involves all kinds of relation: to self, to other(s) and to all forms of created being. Recognizing this allows us to see that it is 'the conceptual linchpin of his teachings' (Avnon 1998: 6).
Exhibit 2: Buber - three kinds of dialogue
There is genuine dialogue - no matter whether spoken or silent - where each of the participants really has in mind the other or others in their present and particular being and turns to them with the intention of establishing a living mutual relation between himself and them. There is technical dialogue, which is prompted solely by the need of objective understanding. And there is monologue disguised as dialogue, in which two or men, meeting in space, speak each with himself in strangely tortuous and circuitous ways and yet imagine they have escaped the torment of being thrown back on their own resources (Buber 1947: 19)

The meeting involved in genuine dialogue is rare, and is, in a real sense, a meeting of souls. ('The primary word I-Thou can be spoken only with the whole being', Buber 1958: 24). The life of dialogue involves 'the turning towards the other' (Buber 1947: 22). It is not found by seeking, but by grace. In a very real sense we are called to genuine dialogue, rather than actively searching for it. (In a slightly different context, Gadamer talks about us being led by conversation rather than us leading it - see dialogue and conversation).
Technical dialogue is driven by the need to understand something and need not engage the soul. Monologue, a distorted form of dialogue, is what happens most of the time. Words are said, but there is little or no connection.
In his mature work (and in his meetings with others), Buber looked to the role silence plays in dialogue. For example, Aubrey Hodes reports that all his conversations with Buber began in the same way.
He would meet me at the door and lead me into his study. Neither of us spent much time on the usual social preliminaries. Our minds were already on the coming talk. After sitting down there was always a silence - not a tense silence, uneasy as between two people who were not sure of each other, but a silence of expectation. This was not consciously agreed between us. It was a flow of peace and trust forming a prelude to speech. The silence was the silence of communication. (Hodes 1972: 22)
Silence, for Buber, plays a crucial part in dialogue. Indeed, it could be argued that 'attentive silence' is the basis of dialogue (Avnon 1998: 42-3). This is an idea that may seem strange at first sight, but is fundamental to the experience of groups such as the Quakers.
In silence which is active, the Inner Light begins to glow - a tiny spark. For the flame to be kindled and to grow, subtle argument and the clamour of our emotions must be stilled. It is by an attention full of love that we enable the Inner Light to blaze and illuminate our dwelling and to make of our whole being a source from which this Light may shine out.... Speech has no meaning unless there are attentive minds and silent hearts. Silence is the welcoming acceptance of the other. The word born of silence must be received in silence. (Lacourt 1970: 9, 26)
Dialogue, especially where people who are open to an I-You relation, is likely to involve both silence (stillness) and speech. In stillness there is communion. Where a person is able to release themselves to silence, 'unreserved communication streams from him, and the silence bears it to his neighbour' (Buber 1947: 4). In dialogue, a person is present to another (and the other), they are attentive and aware - listening and waiting. In the stillness of this 'in-between world' they may encounter what cannot yet be put into words. One of the significant features about this stillness is that it is generated in dialogue, when people are gathered. It has, therefore, a rather different quality to that which may be experienced through individual meditation. The experience of being out of time and space that this can involve helps to explain how Buber came to see that God could only be approached through an I-You relation. At such a time, as Lacourt notes (above), the (inner) light may begin to glow.
This leads us on to another key notion of Buber's (and not revealed in the 1957 translation of I and Thou) - lev or heart. For Buber, the heart 'is the point of unmediated impressions' (Avnon 1998: 58). Heart is the core, it involves our being, our moral sense and our spirit. To open the heart is allow oneself to see and experience that beyond the immediate. It brings to bear a form of 'silent knowing'. The light that glows is a form of understanding or appreciation that comes before mental interpretation. Buber argues that 'in dialogue as it truly is, the turning toward the other conversant occurs in all truthfulness; that is it is an address of the heart' (Buber quoted in Avnon 1998: 140). Each person participating in such a conversation, 'must be ready in his heart always to say that which is in his heart' (op cit).
Community
Buber recognized that the social and political implications of his thought were profound - and his courage in expressing these led to him be viewed by many within Israel as treacherous (it meant, for example, he looked to some form of reconciliation with Germans earlier than many of his peers, and he argued that Israel should not be an exclusively Jewish State - indeed, he looked to a time when the nation state might be obsolete). He saw political activity as a means of transforming the relationships of 'Man and Man'. However, this was not just a case of working for justice and economic advancement, it was also a way of bringing about spiritual transformation. He sought to create dialogical community - a third way between individualism and collectivism.
On the far side of the subjective, on this side of the objective, on the narrow ridge where I and Thou meet, there is the realm of 'between'. This reality, whose disclosure has begun in our time, shows the way, leading beyond individualism and collectivism and collectivism, for the life of future generations. Here the genuine third alternative is indicated, the knowledge of which will help to bring about the genuine person again and to establish genuine community. (Buber 1949)
Here I want to look at community as the realm of the 'between' (Beziehung - often translated into English as 'relation') and the institutional arrangements that flow from Buber's vision - community as association.
Relation or 'the between' is a result, at the personal level of 'of the opening of the person to dialogue' (Avnon 1998: 149). When 'man meets man', when one human being turns to another human being as another, the possibility of relation arises. Individuals will move between I-It and I-You relations (and back again). The quality of life in a community or society will depend on the extent to which I-You relations exist. The combination of open inter-subjective dialogue with 'a dialogue between man and man and man and God' allows a common discourse to develop and crystallize - and it is this that is essential for holding a society together and sustaining cultural creativity' (Eisenstadt 1992: 11).
Reading Buber, it seems that such processes do not appear spontaneously. True community does not just arise out of people having feelings for one another (although this may be involved). Rather, it comes about through:
first, their taking their stand in living mutual relation with a living Centre, and second, their being in living mutual relation with one another. The second has its source in the first, but is not given when the first alone is given. Living mutual relation includes feelings, but does not originate with them. The community is built up out of living mutual relation, but the builder is the living effective Centre. (Buber 1958: 65)
Buber appears to be arguing here that at the heart of communities are special people - the builders. They are the living, active centre. They live the dialogical life. Builders both express and symbolize relation, and in some sense animate community. There are some parallels here with the role of informal educators who are part of local networks. However, in contrast with that role, builders take on a significant leadership role.
Two important questions arise from this. First, when Buber talks about builders does he mean a single person as the active, living Centre, or a group of people? If it is the former then there is some tension with his emphasis on co-operative effort and 'pluralistic socialism', for example in Paths to Utopia. Over-reliance on the vision and activities of a single person can both problematic in practical terms (what happens when that person is unavailable or withdraws, for example), and be a threat to democratic activity. It can all too easily foster dependence and even a disposition towards authoritarianism. However, there are some counterbalances. This exemplary individual is only exemplary for as long as they live the dialogical life and, presumably Buber thought people would turn away from them as soon as they recognized a shift. (How realistic this is is a matter of some debate.) An alternative reading is that Buber would allow that more than one person could comprise the active, living Centre of community. This line would hold that community depends upon some sort of network or grouping of builders (perhaps expressed in terms of a church, or association, or a more informal set of connections).
A second question here may well be competing or contrasting models of leadership that people draw upon when interpreting Buber's work. Some, more traditional, understandings emphasize the vision and organizing abilities of the individual leader and the creation of a following - and are not desperately dialogical! Other understandings look to the educative and facilitating aspects of leadership. It is the latter, 'shared' view of leadership that would appear to be closest in spirit to Buber's writing - but there still appears to be some confusion here (see Avnon 1998: 155-170 for a discussion of the builder).
Community has to be nurtured. For it to take concrete form convivial institutions are required to sustain and express its presence. Communities characterized by dialogue and relation require particular types of institution. Such institutions need to be dialogical, just and allow room for growth and exploration. In Paths in Utopia we can see Buber drawn to a co-operative and associational organization. In his view a 'structurally rich' society is one in which comprises local communes and trade communes which in turn are part of democratic associations. He recognized that special care had to be taken around the question of ends and means.
Exhibit 3: Buber on ends and means
Kropotkin summed up the basic view of ends in a single sentence: the fullest development of individuality 'will combine with the highest development of voluntary association in all aspects, in all possible degrees and for all possible purposes; an association that is always changing, that bears on in itself the elements of its own duration, that takes on the forms which best correspond at any given moment to the manifold strivings of all'. This is precisely what Proudhon had wanted in the maturity of his thought. It may be contended that the Marxist objective is not essentially different in constitution; but at this point a yawning chasm opens up before us which can only be bridged by that special form of Marxist utopics, a chasm between, on the one side, the transformation to be consummated some time in the future - no one knows how long after the final victory of the Revolution - and, on the other, the road to the Revolution and beyond it, which road is characterized by a far-reaching centralization that permits no individual features and no individual initiative. Uniformity as a means is to change miraculously into multiplicity as an end; compulsion into freedom. As against this, the 'utopian' or non-Marxist socialist desires a means commensurate with his ends; he refuses to believe that in our reliance on the future 'leap' we have to have now the direct opposite of what we are striving for; he believes rather that we must create here and now the space now possible for the thing for which we are striving, so that it may come to fulfilment then; he does not believe in the post-revolutionary leap, but he does believe in revolutionary continuity. (Buber 1949)
Buber makes particular use of the work of his friend, the anarchist Gustav Landauer. He believed that people should learn by personal example how to live with each other (hence the significance of the builder). For Buber, authentic communities had to be communities of spirit. They involved commitment, work and dialogue. To be successful, they often arise out of practical needs rather than the application of theory. Furthermore, they make connections with other communities: 'For the real, the truly structural task of the new village communes begins with their federation, that is, their union under the same principle that operates under their internal structure' (quoted in Friedman 1993).
The educator on education
Buber was both a great teacher, and a significant thinker about education. Many of those who were his students or partners in conversation talk of his ability to stimulate engagement and reflection.
Exhibit 4: Buber as a teacher
He was basically a teacher - for me, the greatest teacher of our generation. He was an educator in the true sense of the word and within the limits of his own definition of it. He did not try to impose a self-evident formula upon his pupils, but posed questions which forced them to find their own answers. He did not want his pupils to follow him docilely, but to take their own individual paths, even if this meant rebelling against him. Because for him education meant freedom, a liberation of personality. Perhaps, too, it is as a great teacher, embracing a consideration of the whole of human existence in his approach to his pupils that his influence on our time will be most enduring.
The right way to teach, he said, was 'the personal example springing spontaneously and naturally from the whole man'. This meant that the teacher should constantly examine his conscience. Indeed, every man should do this; but a teacher most of all, as he could not teach others if his own example was flawed.
The purpose of education was to develop the character of the pupil, to show him how to live humanly in society. One of his basic principles was that 'genuine education of character is genuine education for community'….'For educating characters you do not need a moral genius,' Buber declared, 'but you do need a man who is wholly alive and able to communicate himself directly to his fellow beings. His aliveness streams out to them and affects them most strongly and purely when he has no thought of affecting them.'
The real teacher, he believed, teaches most successfully when he is not consciously trying to teach at all, but when he acts spontaneously out of his own life. Then he can gain the pupil's confidence; he can convince the adolescent that there is human truth, that existence has a meaning. And when the pupil's confidence has been won, 'his resistance against being educated gives way to a singular happening: he accepts the educator as a person. He feels he may trust this man, that this man is taking part in his life, accepting him before desiring to influence him. And so he learns to ask….
But his method was not pedagogical in the narrow sense. He was little concerned with the how of teaching, with such matters as syllabuses, methods and examinations. What concerned him was the why; how to give the pupil a sense of his identity, of his organic unity, how to show him the way to responsibility and love. This is what Buber looked for when judging the success of a teacher. And it was this emphasis which led teachers to come to him, slowly and then sometimes in groups, not to consult him about technical problems but to ask him what they should teach, how they should reconcile conscience and faith.
Aubrey Hodes (1972) Encounter with Martin Buber, pages 136 - 7, 140.
As well as his university teaching Buber played a significant role in the nurturing of adult education initiatives. While in Germany he founded the Centre for Jewish Adult Education (and working as its director until 1938) and helped to establish the School for Adult Educators in Jerusalem in 1949. The latter offered one of the first specialist training programmes for adult educators in the world.
Kalman Yaron (1994) argues that perhaps Buber's two most noteworthy contributions to educational thinking lay in the development of his work around dialogue (especially the notion of inclusion); and his conception of a demarcation line between 'heavenly' values and 'earthly' realities. We will examine each in turn.
On dialogue and inclusion
Buber believed that, 'the relation in [genuine] education is one of pure dialogue' (Buber 1947: 98). In order to help the realization of the best potentialities in the student's life,
[T]he teacher must really mean him as the definite person he is in his potentiality and his actuality; more precisely, he must not know him as a mere sum of qualities, strivings and inhibitions, he must be aware of him as a whole being and affirm him in this wholeness But he can only do this if he meets him again and again as his partner in a bipolar situation. And in order that this effect upon him may be a unified and significant one he must also live this situation, again and again, in all its moments not merely from his own end but also from that of his partner: he must practise the kind of realization which I call inclusion (Umfassung). (Buber 1958: 164 -5)
Inclusion, in this sense, means the capacity to develop a 'dual sensation' among those participating in dialogue. Yaron (1994: 137) describes this as 'experiencing oneself and simultaneously perceiving the 'other' in its singularity'. In this way one can come to know the other physically and spiritually. By this Buber does not mean empathy. Inclusion is not an entry into another, the ability to transpose oneself into another situation. This can all too easily entail the losing of oneself. Rather it is the extension of oneself. Its elements are relation; an event experienced in common; and the fact that 'this one person, without forfeiting anything of the felt reality of his activity, at the same time lives through the common event from the standpoint of the other' (1947: 97). A relation involving inclusion may be seen as a dialogical relation.
Buber is also at some pain to explain students' dependency on their teacher. He contrasted the education of children with that of adults - the latter involved full mutuality, the former on a more asymmetrical relationship. (Interestingly, he talks about adult education being founded on 'real questions', 'rather than on Socratic challenges or on preparation for examinations', Yaron 1994: 144). School classrooms are, in his view, charactized by a lack of mutuality and an emphasis on the authority of the teacher. This situation can be transcended, he argues, through 'one-sided inclusion' by the teacher.
[The teacher] experiences the pupil's being educated, but the pupil cannot experience the educating of the educator. The educator stands at both ends of the common situation, the pupil at only one end. In the moment when the pupil is able to throw himself across and experience from over there, the educative relationship would burst asunder, or change into friendship. (Buber 1947: 100-101)
This is a position that would be debated strongly by many other advocates of dialogic inquiry such as Vygotsky. The counter case may well be that all co-operate in the construction of an environment in which education can take place. They may well come to the encounter with different areas of knowledge and differing understandings of the process, but there can be a genuine sharing in the creation of a community of practice.
On ethical education and the person of the educator
'Education worthy of the name', Buber (1947: 104) wrote, 'is essentially the education of character'. He added, 'Genuine education of character is genuine education for community' (1947: 116). Such an education is not achieved through the direct teaching of ethics (although it will involve some reflection upon them), nor through the educator acting upon others. Rather, as we have seen, it entails educators engaging with others with their whole being.
Everything depends on the teacher as a man, as a person. He educates from himself, from his virtues and his faults, through personal example and according to circumstances and conditions. His task is to realize the truth in his personality and to convey this realization to the pupil. (Buber in Hodes 1972: 146)
Education for community builds on two key autonomous instincts that Buber believed all children have:
The originator instinct involves the drive to create and make things, to shape the world. It is aimed at doing (1947: 86).
The instinct for communion in contrast, involves 'the longing for the world to become present to us as a person, which goes out to us as we to it, which chooses and recognizes us as we do it, which is confirmed in us as we in it' (1947: 88).
The job of the educator is to attend to these instincts and to work to channel the creative forces of the first toward the second. Communion in education 'means being opened up and drawn in' (and freedom in education 'is the possibility of communion') (1947: 91).
Buber's notion of a demarcation line comes into play when making decisions about communal affairs.
[Buber] was aware of the fact that life is, by its very nature, inextricably bound with injustice, particularly in matters of communal affairs. In the face of this tragic reality the human being is forced to distinguish constantly between the minimum amount of wrong that his very survival demands, and the maximum good that he must perform in order to preserve his human image. In regard to the tension between the desirable and the actual the human being is asked repeatedly to draw a demarcation line between the imperative demands and relative possibilities of their fulfilment in daily life. Buber demands that in every hour of fateful decision we should consider how much wrong must be committed to preserve the community, and accept just so much and no more. (Yaron 1994: 142)
This runs very close to the concern for well-being and wisdom that lies at the heart of informal education (see informal education - living with values).
In conclusion
Buber's writings are not the easiest to approach, but his explorations of being, encounter, dialogue and community have profound implications for educators - at least for those who seek genuine relation. Such educators need to find and guard 'the narrow ridge'.
The narrow ridge is the meeting place of the We. This is where man can meet man in community. Any only men who are capable of truly saying 'Thou' to one another can truly say 'We' with one another. If each guards the narrow ridge within himself and keeps it intact, this meeting can take place. (Buber quoted in Hodes 1072: 70)
Through encountering each other as truly human we can both place ourselves in the world' and glimpse God.

Ber Borochov, Socialist Zionist leader

Borochov, Ber (1881-1917)!-->Ber Borochov, Socialist Zionist leader
I . His Life
Born in the Ukraine, Ber Borochov was educated in a Russian high school. A good student, he was attracted by the revolutionary socialist trends of the time. Like most Jewish high school graduates, he was denied the chance to study at a Russian university. He was largely self-educated and spoke several languages.
In 1901, his interests in Jewish problems led him to establish the Zionist Socialist Workers Union. Active in Jewish self-defense, the organization was opposed by both the Russian Social Democrats and some of the Zionist leaders who disapproved of the combination of Zionism and socialism.
During the controversy about the possibility of settling Jews in Uganda, Borochov joined with Menahem Ussishkin in opposing any territory other than Eretz Yisrael. At the Seventh Zionist Congress (1905), Borochov led a faction of the Poalei Zion delegates who opposed the Uganda option. At the Eighth Zionist Congress, two years later, he was instrumental in the withdrawal of Russian Poalei Zion from the Zionist Organization. From then until the beginning of World War I, he publicized the aims of the World Union of Poalei Zion in Western and Central Europe.
In 1914 Ber Borochov arrived in the United States, where he was the spokesman for the American Poalei Zion and for the World and American Jewish Congress movements. When the Russian Revolution began, he returned to Russia and helped formulate the demands of the Jewish people for the postwar world order. He was intensely involved in public activities leading up to the October Revolution. In August 1917, he addressed the Russian Poalei Zion Conference and called for socialist settlement in Eretz Yisrael.
Borochov was on a speaking tour on behalf of Poalei Zion when he contracted pneumonia and died in Kiev. In 1963, his remains were reinterred in the cemetery at Kibbutz Kinneret, alongside the other founders of Socialist Zionism.
II . His Accomplishments
A scholar of the Jewish people's history, economic structure, language and culture, Borochov - who was largely self-educated - was a brilliant analyst whose main theoretical contribution was the synthesis of class struggle and nationalism at a time when Marxist theory rejected all nationalism - particularly Jewish nationalism. He viewed the mass migration of Jews as the inevitable expression of the inner drive of the Jewish proletariat to solve the problems created by living in the Diaspora. He argued that only pioneering efforts in Eretz Yisrael could prevent the continuation of the Diaspora.
His outlook was universal at a time when others were dogmatic and parochial. He sought to determine the hidden roots of the Jewish problem which, he said, stemmed from the fact that the Jewish people were divorced from their homeland. His astute analysis of the effects of the Diaspora on the Jewish people included the effects of assimilation, dividing Jewish strength, and ultimately intensifying tension between Jews and non-Jews.
While aware of the threats of anti-Semitism, Borochov did not see anti-Semitism as the basis or motivation of Zionism. Rather, he saw the Diaspora as an aberration which made Jews economically inferior and politically helpless. He saw "auto-emancipation" or self-liberation as the only way to solve the Jewish problem. Specifically, by following the path of socialist internationalism, Jews would find their way out of the Diaspora.
For Borochov, Zionism and socialism were interrelated. He argued that they served the same purpose: to make Jewish life productive again. The first step was to enable Jewish migration to go to a "new territory" in Eretz Yisrael. He considered the Jewish worker as the pioneer of the Jewish future.
Borochov began writing in 1902 at the height of the Uganda debate. His political work concerned topics ranging from the role of the Jewish labor movement to the social implications of mass Jewish migration. He was also a contributor to the Russian Jewish Encyclopedia and compiled a bibliography of 400 years of Yiddish research.

Nahman Syrkin, Socialist Zionist leader

Syrkin, Nahman (1868-1924)!

Nahman Syrkin, Socialist Zionist leader
I . His Life
Born in Belorussia, Nahman Sykin's early Jewish education was provided by private tutors. When the family moved to Minsk in 1884, he went to a Russian high school. He joined the Hovevei Zion there, while also maintaining contact with Russian revolutionary circles. In 1888, he was arrested, after which he went to London and then Berlin, where he studied psychology and philosophy.
In Berlin, Syrkin became a founder of the Russian-Jewish Scientific Society, whose members included future Zionist leaders such as Shmaryahu Levin, Leo Motzkin and Chaim Weizmann.
At the age of 19, he began writing on both academic and Zionist subjects. Syrkin tried supporting himself and his family by writing, but eventually gave up and returned to philosophy, publishing his doctoral thesis in Bern in 1903.
A leader of the Socialist Zionists at the First Zionist Congress, Syrkin was also an early sponsor of the concept of the Jewish National Fund, and submitted a resolution to this effect at the Second Zionist Congress (1898).
Syrkin was banished from Germany in 1904, spent some time in Paris and, after the 1905 revolution, went to Russia where he continued to work with Zionist-Socialists, as they called themselves. He emigrated to the United States in 1907, eventually joining the Poalei Zion and returning to the Zionist Organization. He remained the leader of the American Poalei Zion until his death.
In 1919, Syrkin was a member of the American Jewish delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference which followed the end of World War I. The same year, he was the key figure in the World Poalei Zion Conference in Stockholm, which assigned him the task of heading a study commission to visit Palestine to draw up a plan for mass cooperative settlement.
Returning to the U.S., he intended to settle in Palestine, but died suddenly of a heart attack. In 1951, his remains were reinterred at Kibbutz Kinneret along with the other founders of Labor Zionism.
II . His Accomplishments
By the age of 20, Syrkin had conceived the idea which became his life’s work: the combination of socialism and Jewish nationalism. In 1897, he was a leader of the Socialist Zionists at the First Zionist Congress. The following year, two years after Herzl published "The Jewish State," Syrkin published an article in the Austrian Socialist monthly entitled, "the Jewish Question and the Socialist Jewish State." This was the first time he outlined his concept of Zionism based on cooperative settlement of the Jewish masses.
At Zionist Congresses, he became known for his attacks on the establishment which led to loud protests at Congress sessions. In the early years of the 20th century, he worked to establish Socialist Zionist groups in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, while continuing to write. Throughout his life, Syrkin was a prolific writer in Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, German and English.
During World War I, he worked to convene the Jewish Congress in America and supported the idea of a Jewish Legion to fight with the Allies to liberate Palestine.
Syrkin differed from many of the other Socialist Zionists in that he was not an orthodox Marxist. He viewed socialism more as a moral concept than the inevitable outcome of class struggle.
On different occasions, in speeches and in his writing, he attacked virtually every stream of Zionism. At an early Zionist Congress, he criticized the "bourgeois and clerical" elements in the Zionist Organization. He later attacked Ahad Ha'am for his concept of the "spiritual center" in Eretz Yisrael, claiming that it disregarded realities including anti-Semitism and mass migration. Within his own camp, he took issue with Ber Borochov's Marxist analysis of Zionism.
Despite his differences with many within the movement, Syrkin supported making Hebrew the sole Jewish national language and spoke Hebrew perfectly.
An independent spirit in every way, he was apparently a deeply religious individual, who was able to reconcile these feelings with his revolutionary political ideas.

Ahad Haam

Ahad Ha'am (1856-1927)

It has been said that the pen is mightier than the sword. In modern Jewish history one man who really accomplished great things with his pen was Ahad Ha'am. As a writer, he definitely changed the history of the Jewish people through the many essays and articles he wrote. Ahad Ha'am lived in Odessa in Russia where he worked for a tea company, and also in London. He travelled several times to Erez Israel, and finally settled in Tel Aviv in 1921. His numerous works are now collected in four volumes called Al Parashat ha-Derakhim, which means "at the crossroads." He felt that the Jewish people stood at a crossroad in its history and undertook to point out the way which he felt was the right one. "Ahad Ha'am" means "one of the people," and was not his real name. He was given the name Asher Hirsch Ginsberg at birth and took the pseudonym when he began to write. He wanted to show that he was really one with the Jewish people when he talked ahout matters that concerned the whole future of the nation.
When Ahad Ha'am was a young man, Jews were beginning to settle farms and villages in Palestine. An organization called Hovevei Zion ("Lovers of Zion") was urging Jews to leave Russia and establish a homeland in Erez Israel. Ahad Ha'am joined this organization because he too believed in the goal of Zionism --- establishing a Jewish homeland. He soon visited the young settlements and then wrote his first famous essay, Lo Zeh ha-Derekh, in which he claimed that the settlements were doing very poorly and would not draw many Jews to them. Ahad Ha'am held that the first task of Hovevei Zion must be to educate Jews so that they would want to live in Erez Israel. He felt that people would not become pioneers in a strange land where life was extremely hard if they were not especially inspired. They needed some special purpose if they were going to make that great sacrifice.
Ahad Ha'am believed that the reason for settling in Erez Israel and for being a loyal member of the Jewish people must come from Judaism itself. In many of his essays he tried to explain what he thought the meaning of Judaism really was. He taught that Judaism had contributed some great and unique ideas to the world, of which the most important was that complete justice should be everywhere, among all men, and that Jews must try to set an example to all men by living a just life and building a good society themselves. In Erez Israel Jews who were proud of this ideal would establish a society based on honesty and justice. In such a society new life would be given to Judaism. Jewish history and culture would be studied, and teachers would go out from Israel to all areas where Jews lived. In this sense, Erez Israel would be a spiritual center of a renewed Jewish life, and would breathe this life into all the communities of the Exile. This ideal of Ahad Ha'am was very powerful and many Zionists followed his teachings, although others opposed and fought his views.

Gordon Aharon

Gordon, Aharon David (1856-1922)

Born in Troyanov, Russia, this Hebrew writer and Zionist was a leader of the movement for settlement on the land (the halutzim).
For 23 years he managed the estate of his relative, Baron Joseph Guenzburg, but in 1903, when his village was sold to a new owner, he decided to emigrate to Erez Israel and set out alone the following year. Once in Erez Israel he determined to till the soil himself, although he had never before done such work and was then 48 years old. As a manual worker in Petah Tikvah, Rishon le-Zion and the Galilee villages, he endured all the troubles of the pioneer --- unemployment, insecurity, hunger and malaria. He spent his final years in Deganyah, where he died.
Strongly influenced by the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, Gordon believed that man's intelligence, though vital for survival, tended to isolate him from the Universe as a whole. He saw religion as the means by which man could restore his unity with nature. God could not be known to the intellect, but could be constantly experienced in His mystery by a life linked to the land.
Gordon saw the hope of restored Israel as a potentially vital example to humanity of his philosophy in action: "We were the first to proclaim that man was created in the image of God. We must go farther and say: the nation must be created in the image of God. Not because we are better than others but because we have borne upon our shoulders and suffered all which calls for this. It is by paying the price of torments the like of which the world has never known that we have won the right to be the first in this world of creation."
Believing as he did that Jewish salvation could only come about through individual effort, Gordon avoided politics, and was not enthusiastic about the Balfour Declaration or the setting up of a Jewish Legion. Through his personal example and his numerous writings on the "religion of labor," he exercised a profound influence on the Jewish labor movement all over the world. The Gordonia Youth movement, founded in 1925, was named after him and based on his ideas.

Moses Hess

Moses Hess (1812-1875)

Moses Hess, father of Zionist Socialism, 1812-1875
His LifeBorn in Bonn, Hess remained there to be educated by his orthodox grandfather, when his father moved to Cologne for business reasons. At age 14 he joined him in Cologne business. Hess studied philosophy at the University of Bonn, 1837-1939, but did not graduate.
Hess helped found the first socialist daily newspaper in Cologne, and became its Paris correspondent at the end of 1842, moving to Belgium in 1845 where he was active in communist activities, and returning to Paris in 1848-1849. In 1849, he took refuge in Switzerland. Two years later he moved back to Belgium, and in 1853, finally returned to Paris where he lived, off and on, until his death.
After his father's death in 1851, Hess' inheritance provided the basis for an independent lifestyle, including marriage to his Christian companion, Sybille Pesch. He lived in Germany from 1861-1863, where he published his most famous work, "Rome and Jerusalem," a classic of Zionist theory. At the end of 1863, he returned to Paris where he contributed to a number of Jewish and other publications. He was also the Paris correspondent for several socialist newspapers in the U.S. and Germany.
A Prussian subject, Hess was expelled from France at the beginning of the Franco-Prussian war. He moved to Belgium, but returned to Paris after the war, began another philosophical work, and died there. According to his wishes, he was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Deutz, near Cologne. In 1961, his remains were moved to Kibbutz Kinneret.
His AccomplishmentsWith the publication of his first book - a historical- philosophical work influenced by both Spinoza and the Bible - and especially his second book - which advocated the union of the three great powers (England, France and Germany) into a single, European state - Hess established himself as a serious writer and later as the first important German socialist. His most famous work was "Rome and Jerusalem", published in Germany in 1862.
Hess believed that free labor should replace the system based on exploitation. Although he was attacked by Marx and Engels in their Communist Manifesto, Hess was the first to recognize Marx's greatness, and found himself strongly influenced by Marx, 1846-1851, without becoming a Marxist.
Hess' attitudes toward Jews changed several times.
In his twenties, he felt himself thoroughly German, and believed that Jews should assimilate.
Later, reacting to current events, he occasionally expressed compassion for his fellow Jews.
"Rome and Jerusalem" is a classic Zionist book, in which he writes of his return to "his" people. After personally suffering from anti-Semitism, he turned to the Jewish national concept based on his idea of race, espousing the view that Jews should preserve their national identity in exile while striving for their political restoration in Palestine. The Jewish religion was the best means of preserving Jewish nationality, he felt, and should be left unchanged until the establishment of a Jewish entity in Palestine, where a Sanhedrin (supreme Jewish court) could be elected to modify Jewish law in accordance with the needs of the new society. The future Jewish state, he wrote, should be based on national land acquisition, creation of legal conditions to encourage work, and founding Jewish societies for agriculture, industry and trade.
Although his work was forgotten for some time, its importance was revived with the birth of the Zionist movement. Articles on Hess and early translations of his works began appearing in the 1880s. Selections of his works have been published in German, Polish and Hebrew (edited by Martin Buber).

Dialectics

Frederick EngelsSocialism: Utopian and Scientific
[Dialectics]

In the meantime, along with and after the French philosophy of the 18th century, had arisen the new German philosophy, culminating in Hegel.
Its greatest merit was the taking up again of dialectics as the highest form of reasoning. The old Greek philosophers were all born natural dialecticians, and Aristotle, the most encyclopaedic of them, had already analyzed the most essential forms of dialectic thought. The newer philosophy, on the other hand, although in it also dialectics had brilliant exponents (e.g. Descartes and Spinoza), had, especially through English influence, become more and more rigidly fixed in the so-called metaphysical mode of reasoning, by which also the French of the 18th century were almost wholly dominated, at all events in their special philosophical work. Outside philosophy in the restricted sense, the French nevertheless produced masterpieces of dialectic. We need only call to mind Diderot's Le Neveu de Rameau, and Rousseau's Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inegalite parmi less hommes. We give here, in brief, the essential character of these two modes of thought.
When we consider and reflect upon Nature at large, or the history of mankind, or our own intellectual activity, at first we see the picture of an endless entanglement of relations and reactions, permutations and combinations, in which nothing remains what, where and as it was, but everything moves, changes, comes into being and passes away. We see, therefore, at first the picture as a whole, with its individual parts still more or less kept in the background; we observe the movements, transitions, connections, rather than the things that move, combine, and are connected. This primitive, naive but intrinsically correct conception of the world is that of ancient Greek philosophy, and was first clearly formulated by Heraclitus: everything is and is not, for everything is fluid, is constantly changing, constantly coming into being and passing away.[A]
But this conception, correctly as it expresses the general character of the picture of appearances as a whole, does not suffice to explain the details of which this picture is made up, and so long as we do not understand these, we have not a clear idea of the whole picture. In order to understand these details, we must detach them from their natural, special causes, effects, etc. This is, primarily, the task of natural science and historical research: branches of science which the Greek of classical times, on very good grounds, relegated to a subordinate position, because they had first of all to collect materials for these sciences to work upon. A certain amount of natural and historical material must be collected before there can be any critical analysis, comparison, and arrangement in classes, orders, and species. The foundations of the exact natural sciences were, therefore, first worked out by the Greeks of the Alexandrian period [B], and later on, in the Middle Ages, by the Arabs. Real natural science dates from the second half of the 15th century, and thence onward it had advanced with constantly increasing rapidity. The analysis of Nature into its individual parts, the grouping of the different natural processes and objects in definite classes, the study of the internal anatomy of organized bodies in their manifold forms — these were the fundamental conditions of the gigantic strides in our knowledge of Nature that have been made during the last 400 years. But this method of work has also left us as legacy the habit of observing natural objects and processes in isolation, apart from their connection with the vast whole; of observing them in repose, not in motion; as constraints, not as essentially variables; in their death, not in their life. And when this way of looking at things was transferred by Bacon and Locke from natural science to philosophy, it begot the narrow, metaphysical mode of thought peculiar to the last century.
To the metaphysician, things and their mental reflexes, ideas, are isolated, are to be considered one after the other and apart from each other, are objects of investigation fixed, rigid, given once for all. He thinks in absolutely irreconcilable antitheses. His communication is 'yea, yea; nay, nay'; for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil." For him, a thing either exists or does not exist; a thing cannot at the same time be itself and something else. Positive and negative absolutely exclude one another; cause and effect stand in a rigid antithesis, one to the other.
At first sight, this mode of thinking seems to us very luminous, because it is that of so-called sound commonsense. Only sound commonsense, respectable fellow that he is, in the homely realm of his own four walls, has very wonderful adventures directly he ventures out into the wide world of research. And the metaphysical mode of thought, justifiable and necessary as it is in a number of domains whose extent varies according to the nature of the particular object of investigation, sooner or later reaches a limit, beyond which it becomes one-sided, restricted, abstract, lost in insoluble contradictions. In the contemplation of individual things, it forgets the connection between them; in the contemplation of their existence, it forgets the beginning and end of that existence; of their repose, it forgets their motion. It cannot see the woods for the trees.
For everyday purposes, we know and can say, e.g., whether an animal is alive or not. But, upon closer inquiry, we find that his is, in many cases, a very complex question, as the jurists know very well. They have cudgelled their brains in vain to discover a rational limit beyond which the killing of the child in its mother's womb is murder. It is just as impossible to determine absolutely the moment of death, for physiology proves that death is not an instantaneous, momentary phenomenon, but a very protracted process.
In like manner, every organized being is every moment the same and not the same; every moment, it assimilates matter supplied from without, and gets rid of other matter; every moment, some cells of its body die and others build themselves anew; in a longer or shorter time, the matter of its body is completely renewed, and is replaced by other molecules of matter, so that every organized being is always itself, and yet something other than itself.
Further, we find upon closer investigation that the two poles of an antithesis, positive and negative, e.g., are as inseparable as they are opposed, and that despite all their opposition, they mutually interpenetrate. And we find, in like manner, that cause and effect are conceptions which only hold good in their application to individual cases; but as soon as we consider the individual cases in their general connection with the universe as a whole, they run into each other, and they become confounded when we contemplate that universal action and reaction in which causes and effects are eternally changing places, so that what is effect here and now will be cause there and then, and vice versa.
None of these processes and modes of thought enters into the framework of metaphysical reasoning. Dialectics, on the other hand, comprehends things and their representations, ideas, in their essential connection, concatenation, motion, origin and ending. Such processes as those mentioned above are, therefore, so many corroborations of its own method of procedure.
Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for modern science that it has furnished this proof with very rich materials increasingly daily, and thus has shown that, in the last resort, Nature works dialectically and not metaphysically; that she does not move in the eternal oneness of a perpetually recurring circle, but goes through a real historical evolution. In this connection, Darwin must be named before all others. He dealt the metaphysical conception of Nature the heaviest blow by his proof that all organic beings, plants, animals, and man himself, are the products of a process of evolution going on through millions of years. But, the naturalists, who have learned to think dialectically, are few and far between, and this conflict of the results of discovery with preconceived modes of thinking, explains the endless confusion now reigning in theoretical natural science, the despair of teachers as well as learners, of authors and readers alike.
An exact representation of the universe, of its evolution, of the development of mankind, and of the reflection of this evolution in the minds of men, can therefore only be obtained by the methods of dialectics with its constant regard to the innumerable actions and reactions of life and death, of progressive or retrogressive changes. And in this spirit, the new German philosophy has worked. Kant began his career by resolving the stable Solar system of Newton and its eternal duration, after the famous initial impulse had once been given, into the result of a historical process, the formation of the Sun and all the planets out of a rotating, nebulous mass. From this, he at the same time drew the conclusion that, given this origin of the Solar system, its future death followed of necessity. His theory, half a century later, was established mathematically by Laplace, and half a century after that, the spectroscope proved the existence in space of such incandescent masses of gas in various stages of condensation.
This new German philosophy culminated in the Hegelian system. In this system — and herein is its great merit — for the first time the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process — i.e., as in constant motion, change, transformation, development; and the attempt is made to trace out the internal connection that makes a continuous whole of all this movement and development. From this point of view, the history of mankind no longer appeared as a wild whirl of senseless deeds of violence, all equally condemnable at the judgment seat of mature philosophic reason and which are best forgotten as quickly as possible, but as the process of evolution of man himself. It was now the task of the intellect to follow the gradual march of this process through all its devious ways, and to trace out the inner law running through all its apparently accidental phenomena.
That the Hegelian system did not solve the problem it propounded is here immaterial. Its epoch-making merit was that it propounded the problem. This problem is one that no single individual will ever be able to solve. Although Hegel was — with Saint-Simon — the most encyclopaedic mind of his time, yet he was limited, first, by the necessary limited extent of his own knowledge and, second, by the limited extent and depth of the knowledge and conceptions of his age. To these limits, a third must be added; Hegel was an idealist. To him, the thoughts within his brain were not the more or less abstract pictures of actual things and processes, but, conversely, things and their evolution were only the realized pictures of the "Idea", existing somewhere from eternity before the world was. This way of thinking turned everything upside down, and completely reversed the actual connection of things in the world. Correctly and ingeniously as many groups of facts were grasped by Hegel, yet, for the reasons just given, there is much that is botched, artificial, labored, in a word, wrong in point of detail. The Hegelian system, in itself, was a colossal miscarriage — but it was also the last of its kind.
It was suffering, in fact, from an internal and incurable contradiction. Upon the one hand, its essential proposition was the conception that human history is a process of evolution, which, by its very nature, cannot find its intellectual final term in the discovery of any so-called absolute truth. But, on the other hand, it laid claim to being the very essence of this absolute truth. A system of natural and historical knowledge, embracing everything, and final for all time, is a contradiction to the fundamental law of dialectic reasoning.
This law, indeed, by no means excludes, but, on the contrary, includes the idea that the systematic knowledge of the external universe can make giant strides from age to age.
The perception of the the fundamental contradiction in German idealism led necessarily back to materialism, but — nota bene — not to the simply metaphysical, exclusively mechanical materialism of the 18th century. Old materialism looked upon all previous history as a crude heap of irrationality and violence; modern materialism sees in it the process of evolution of humanity, and aims at discovering the laws thereof. With the French of the 18th century, and even with Hegel, the conception obtained of Nature as a whole — moving in narrow circles, and forever immutable, with its eternal celestial bodies, as Newton, and unalterable organic species, as Linnaeus, taught. Modern materialism embraces the more recent discoveries of natural science, according to which Nature also has its history in time, the celestial bodies, like the organic species that, under favorable conditions, people them, being born and perishing. And even if Nature, as a whole, must still be said to move in recurrent cycles, these cycles assume infinitely larger dimensions. In both aspects, modern materialism is essentially dialectic, and no longer requires the assistance of that sort of philosophy which, queen-like, pretended to rule the remaining mob of sciences. As soon as each special science is bound to make clear its position in the great totality of things and of our knowledge of things, a special science dealing with this totality is superfluous or unnecessary. That which still survives of all earlier philosophy is the science of thought and its law — formal logic and dialectics. Everything else is subsumed in the positive science of Nature and history.
Whilst, however, the revolution in the conception of Nature could only be made in proportion to the corresponding positive materials furnished by research, already much earlier certain historical facts had occurred which led to a decisive change in the conception of history. In 1831, the first working-class rising took place in Lyons; between 1838 and 1842, the first national working-class movement, that of the English Chartists, reached its height. The class struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie came to the front in the history of the most advanced countries in Europe, in proportion to the development, upon the one hand, of modern industry, upon the other, of the newly-acquired political supremacy of the bourgeoisie. facts more and more strenuously gave the lie to the teachings of bourgeois economy as to the identity of the interests of capital and labor, as to the universal harmony and universal prosperity that would be the consequence of unbridled competition. All these things could no longer be ignored, any more than the French and English Socialism, which was their theoretical, though very imperfect, expression. But the old idealist conception of history, which was not yet dislodged, knew nothing of class struggles based upon economic interests, knew nothing of economic interests; production and all economic relations appeared in it only as incidental, subordinate elements in the "history of civilization".
The new facts made imperative a new examination of all past history. Then it was seen that all past history, with the exception of its primitive stages, was the history of class struggles; that these warring classes of society are always the products of the modes of production and of exchange — in a word, of the economic conditions of their time; that the economic structure of society always furnishes the real basis, starting from which we can alone work out the ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure of juridical and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical, and other ideas of a given historical period. Hegel has freed history from metaphysics — he made it dialectic; but his conception of history was essentially idealistic. But now idealism was driven from its last refuge, the philosophy of history; now a materialistic treatment of history was propounded, and a method found of explaining man's "knowing" by his "being", instead of, as heretofore, his "being" by his "knowing".
From that time forward, Socialism was no longer an accidental discovery of this or that ingenious brain, but the necessary outcome of the struggle between two historically developed classes — the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Its task was no longer to manufacture a system of society as perfect as possible, but to examine the historico-economic succession of events from which these classes and their antagonism had of necessity sprung, and to discover in the economic conditions thus created the means of ending the conflict. But the Socialism of earlier days was as incompatible with this materialist conception as the conception of Nature of the French materialists was with dialectics and modern natural science. The Socialism of earlier days certainly criticized the existing capitalistic mode of production and its consequences. But it could not explain them, and, therefore, could not get the mastery of them. It could only simply reject them as bad. The more strongly this earlier Socialism denounced the exploitations of the working-class, inevitable under Capitalism, the less able was it clearly to show in what this exploitation consisted and how it arose. but for this it was necessary —
to present the capitalistic mode of production in its historical connection and its inevitableness during a particular historical period, and therefore, also, to present its inevitable downfall; and
to lay bare its essential character, which was still a secret. This was done by the discovery of surplus-value.
It was shown that the appropriation of unpaid labor is the basis of the capitalist mode of production and of the exploitation of the worker that occurs under it; that even if the capitalist buys the labor power of his laborer at its full value as a commodity on the market, he yet extracts more value from it than he paid for; and that in the ultimate analysis, this surplus-value forms those sums of value from which are heaped up constantly increasing masses of capital in the hands of the possessing classes. The genesis of capitalist production and the production of capital were both explained.
These two great discoveries, the materialistic conception of history and the revelation of the secret of capitalistic production through surplus-value, we owe to Marx. With these discoveries, Socialism became a science. The next thing was to work out all its details and relations.

Frederick Engels

Frederick Engels Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
1892 English Edition Introduction[General Introduction and the History of Materialism]

The present little book is, originally, part of a larger whole. About 1875, Dr. E. Dühring, privatdocent [university lecturer who formerly received fees from his students rather than a wage] at Berlin University, suddenly and rather clamorously announced his conversion to Socialism, and presented the German public not only with an elaborate Socialist theory, but also with a complete practical plan for the reorganization of society. As a matter of course, he fell foul of his predecessors; above all, he honored Marx by pouring out upon him the full vials of his wrath.
This took place about the same time when the two sections of the Socialist party in Germany — Eisenachers and Lasselleans — had just effected their fusion [at the Gotha Unification Congress], and thus obtained not only an immense increase of strength, but, was what more, the faculty of employing the whole of this strength against the common enemy. The Socialist party in Germany was fast becoming a power. But, to make it a power, the first condition was that the newly-conquered unity should not be imperilled. And Dr. Dühring openly proceeded to form around himself a sect, the nucleus of a future separate party. It, thus, became necessary to take up the gauntlet thrown down to us, and to fight out the struggle, whether we liked it or not.
This, however, though it might not be an over-difficult, was evidently a long-winded business. As is well-known, we Germans are of a terribly ponderous Grundlichkeit, radical profundity or profound radicality, whatever you may like to call it. Whenever anyone of us expounds what he considers a new doctrine, he has first to elaborate it into an all-comprising system. He has to prove that both the first principles of logic and the fundamental laws of the universe had existed from all eternity for no other purpose than to ultimately lead to this newly-discovered, crowning theory. And Dr. Dühring, in this respect, was quite up to the national mark. Nothing less than a complete "System of Philosophy", mental, moral, natural, and historical; a complete "System of Political Economy and Socialism"; and, finally, a "Critical History of Political Economy" — three big volumes in octavo, heavy extrinsically and intrinsically, three army-corps of arguments mobilized against all previous philosophers and economists in general, and against Marx in particular — in fact, an attempt at a complete "revolution in science" — these were what I should have to tackle. I had to treat of all and every possible subject, from concepts of time and space to Bimetallism; from the eternity of matter and motion, to the perishable nature of moral ideas; from Darwin's natural selection to the education of youth in a future society. Anyhow, the systematic comprehensiveness of my opponent gave me the opportunity of developing, in opposition to him, and in a more connected form than had previously been done, the views held by Marx and myself on this great variety of subjects. And that was the principal reason which made me undertake this otherwise ungrateful task.
My reply was first published in a series of articles in the Leipzig Vorwarts, the chief organ of the Socialist party [1], and later on as a book: "Herr Eugen Dührings Umwalzung der Wissenchaft" (Mr. E. Dühring's "Revolution in Science"), a second edition of which appeared in Zurich, 1886.
At the request of my friend, Paul Lafargue, now representative of Lille in the French Chamber of Deputies, I arranged three chapters of this book as a pamphlet, which he translated and published in 1880, under the title: "Socialisme utopique et Socialisme scientifique". From this French text, a Polish and a Spanish edition were prepared. In 1883, our German friends brought out the pamphlet in the original language. Italian, Russian, Danish, Dutch, and Roumanian translations, based upon the German text, have since been published. Thus, the present English edition, this little book circulates in 10 languages. I am not aware that any other Socialist work, not even our Communist Manifesto of 1848, or Marx's Capital, has been so often translated. In Germany, it has had four editions of about 20,000 copies in all.
The Appendix, "The Mark", was written with the intention of spreading among the German Socialist party some elementary knowledge of the history and development of landed property in Germany. This seemed all the more necessary at a time when the assimilation by that party of the working-people of the towns was in a fair way of completion, and when the agricultural laborers and peasant had to be taken in hand. This appendix has been included in the translation, as the original forms of tenure of land common to all Teutonic tribes, and the history of their decay, are even less known in England and in Germany. I have left the text as it stands in the original, without alluding to the hypothesis recently started by Maxim Kovalevsky, according to which the partition of the arable and meadow lands among the members of the Mark was preceded by their being cultivated for joint-account by a large patriarchal family community, embracing several generations (as exemplified by the still existing South Slavonian Zadruga), and that the partition, later on, took place when the community had increased, so as to become too unwieldy for joint-account management. Kovalevsky is probably quite right, but the matter is still sub judice [under consideration].
The economic terms used in this work, as afar as they are new, agree with those used in the English edition of Marx's Capital. We call "production of commodities" that economic phase where articles are produced not only for the use of the producers, but also for the purpose of exchange; that is, as commodities, not as use values. This phase extends from the first beginnings of production for exchange down to our present time; it attains its full development under capitalist production only, that is, under conditions where the capitalist, the owner of the means of production, employs, for wages, laborers, people deprived of all means of production except their own labor-power, and pockets the excess of the selling price of the products over his outlay. We divide the history of industrial production since the Middle Ages into three periods:
handicraft, small master craftsman with a few journeymen and apprentices, where each laborer produces a complete article;
manufacture, where greater numbers of workmen, grouped in one large establishment, produce the complete article on the principle of division of labor, each workman performing only one partial operation, so that the product is complete only after having passed successively through the hands of all;
modern industry, where the product is produced by machinery driven by power, and where the work of the laborer is limited to superintending and correcting the performance of the mechanical agent.
I am perfectly aware that the contents of this work will meet with objection from a considerable portion of the British public. But, if we Continentals had taken the slightest notice of the prejudices of British "respectability", we should be even worse off than we are. This book defends what we call "historical materialism", and the word materialism grates upon the ears of the immense majority of British readers. "Agnosticism" might be tolerated, but materialism is utterly inadmissible.
And, yet, the original home of all modern materialism, from the 17th century onwards, is England.
"Materialism is the natural-born son of Great Britain. Already the British schoolman, Duns Scotus, asked, 'whether it was impossible for the matter to think?'
"In order to effect this miracle, he took refuge in God's omnipotence — i.e., he made theology preach materialism. Moreover, he was a nominalist. Nominalism, the first form of materialism, is chiefly found among the English schoolmen.
"The real progenitor of English materialism is Bacon. To him, natural philosophy is the only true philosophy, and physics based upon the experience of the senses is the chiefest part of natural philosophy. Anaxagoras and his homoiomeriae, Democritus and his atoms, he often quotes as his authorities. According to him, the senses are infallible and the source of all knowledge. All science is based on experience, and consists in subjecting the data furnished by the senses to a rational method of investigation. Induction, analysis, comparison, observation, experiment, are the principal forms of such a rational method. Among the qualities inherent in matter, motion is the first and foremost, not only in the form of mechanical and mathematical motion, but chiefly in the form of an impulse, a vital spirit, a tension — or a 'qual', to use a term of Jakob Bohme's [2] — of matter.
"In Bacon, its first creator, materialism still occludes within itself the germs of a many-sided development. On the one hand, matter, surrounded by a sensuous, poetic glamor, seems to attract man's whole entity by winning smiles. On the other, the aphoristically formulated doctrine pullulates with inconsistencies imported from theology.
"In its further evolution, materialism becomes one-sided. Hobbes is the man who systematizes Baconian materialism. Knowledge based upon the senses loses its poetic blossom, it passes into the abstract experience of the mathematician; geometry is proclaimed as the queen of sciences. Materialism takes to misanthropy. If it is to overcome its opponent, misanthropic, flashless spiritualism, and that on the latter's own ground, materialism has to chastise its own flesh and turn ascetic. Thus, from a sensual, it passes into an intellectual, entity; but thus, too, it evolves all the consistency, regardless of consequences, characteristic of the intellect.
"Hobbes, as Bacon's continuator, argues thus: if all human knowledge is furnished by the senses, then our concepts and ideas are but the phantoms, divested of their sensual forms, of the real world. Philosophy can but give names to these phantoms. One name may be applied to more than one of them. There may even be names of names. It would imply a contradiction if, on the one hand, we maintained that all ideas had their origin in the world of sensation, and, on the other, that a word was more than a word; that, besides the beings known to us by our senses, beings which are one and all individuals, there existed also beings of a general, not individual, nature. An unbodily substance is the same absurdity as an unbodily body. Body, being, substance, are but different terms for the same reality. It is impossible to separate thought from matter that thinks. This matter is the substratum of all changes going on in the world. The word infinite is meaningless, unless it states that our mind is capable of performing an endless process of addition. Only material things being perceptible to us, we cannot know anything about the existence of God. My own existence alone is certain. Every human passion is a mechanical movement, which has a beginning and an end. The objects of impulse are what we call good. Man is subject to the same laws as nature. Power and freedom are identical.
"Hobbes had systematized Bacon, without, however, furnishing a proof for Bacon's fundamental principle, the origin of all human knowledge from the world of sensation. It was Locke who, in his Essay on the Human Understanding, supplied this proof.
"Hobbes had shattered the theistic prejudices of Baconian materialism; Collins, Dodwell, Coward, Hartley, Priestley, similarly shattered the last theological bars that still hemmed in Locke's sensationalism. At all events, for practical materialists, Deism is but an easy-going way of getting rid of religion."
Karl MarxThe Holy Familyp. 201 - 204
Thus Karl Marx wrote about the British origin of modern materialism. If Englishmen nowadays do not exactly relish the compliment he paid their ancestors, more's the pity. It is none the less undeniable that Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke are the fathers of that brilliant school of French materialism which made the 18th century, in spite of all battles on land and sea won over Frenchmen by Germans and Englishmen, a pre-eminently French century, even before that crowning French Revolution, the results of which we outsiders, in England as well as Germany, are still trying to acclimatize.
There is no denying it. About the middle of this century, what struck every cultivated foreigner who set up his residence in England, was what he was then bound to consider the religious bigotry and stupidity of the English respectable middle-class. We, at that time, were all materialists, or, at least, very advanced free-thinkers, and to us it appeared inconceivable that almost all educated people in England should believe in all sorts of impossible miracles, and that even geologists like Buckland and Mantell should contort the facts of their science so as not to clash too much with the myths of the book of Genesis; while, in order to find people who dared to use their own intellectual faculties with regard to religious matters, you had to go amongst the uneducated, the "great unwashed", as they were then called, the working people, especially the Owenite Socialists.
But England has been "civilized" since then. The exhibition of 1851 sounded the knell of English insular exclusiveness. England became gradually internationalized, in diet, in manners, in ideas; so much so that I begin to wish that some English manners and customs had made as much headway on the Continent as other Continental habits have made here. Anyhow, the introduction and spread of salad-oil (before 1851 known only to the aristocracy) has been accompanied by a fatal spread of Continental scepticism in matters religious, and it has come to this, that agnosticism, though not yet considered "the thing" quite as much as the Church of England, is yet very nearly on a par, as far as respectability goes, with Baptism, and decidedly ranks above the Salvation Army. And I cannot help believing that under those circumstances it will be consoling to many who sincerely regret and condemn this progress of infidelity to learn that these "new-fangled notions" are not of foreign origin, are not "made in Germany", like so many other articles of daily use, but are undoubtedly Old English, and that their British originators 200 years ago went a good deal further than their descendants now dare to venture.
What, indeed, is agnosticism but, to use an expressive Lancashire term, "shamefaced" materialism? The agnostic's conception of Nature is materialistic throughout. The entire natural world is governed by law, and absolutely excludes the intervention of action from without. But, he adds, we have no means either of ascertaining or of disproving the existence of some Supreme Being beyond the known universe. Now, this might hold good at the time when Laplace, to Napoleon's question, why, in the great astronomer's Treatise on Celestial Mechanics, the Creator was not even mentioned, proudly replied" "I had no need of this hypothesis." But, nowadays, in our evolutionary conception of the universe, there is absolutely no room for either a Creator or a Ruler; and to talk of a Supreme Being shut out from the whole existing world, implies a contradiction in terms, and, as it seems to me, a gratuitous insult to the feelings of religious people.
Again, our agnostic admits that all our knowledge is based upon the information imparted to us by our senses. But, he adds, how do we know that our senses give us correct representations of the objects we perceive through them? And he proceeds to inform us that, whenever we speak of objects, or their qualities, of which he cannot know anything for certain, but merely the impressions which they have produced on his senses. Now, this line of reasoning seems undoubtedly hard to beat by mere argumentation. But before there was argumentation, there was action. Im Anfang war die That. [from Goethe's Faust: "In the beginning was the deed."] And human action had solved the difficulty long before human ingenuity invented it. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. From the moment we turn to our own use these objects, according to the qualities we perceive in them, we put to an infallible test the correctness or otherwise of our sense-perception. If these perceptions have been wrong, then our estimate of the use to which an object can be turned must also be wrong, and our attempt must fail. But, if we succeed in accomplishing our aim, if we find that the object does agree with our idea of it, and does answer the purpose we intended it for, then that is proof positive that our perceptions of it and of its qualities, so far, agree with reality outside ourselves. And, whenever we find ourselves face-to-face with a failure, then we generally are not long in making out the cause that made us fail; we find that the perception upon which we acted was either incomplete and superficial, or combined with the results of other perceptions in a way not warranted by them — what we call defective reasoning. So long as we take care to train our senses properly, and to keep our action within the limits prescribed by perceptions properly made and properly used, so long as we shall find that the result of our action proves the conformity of our perceptions with the objective nature of the things perceived. Not in one single instance, so far, have we been led to the conclusion that our sense-perception, scientifically controlled, induce in our minds ideas respecting the outer world that are, by their very nature, at variance with reality, or that there is an inherent incompatibility between the outer world and our sense-perceptions of it.
But then come the Neo-Kantian agnostics and say: We may correctly perceive the qualities of a thing, but we cannot by any sensible or mental process grasp the thing-in-itself. This "thing-in-itself" is beyond our ken. To this Hegel, long since, has replied: If you know all the qualities of a thing, you know the thing itself; nothing remains but the fact that the said thing exists without us; and, when your senses have taught you that fact, you have grasped the last remnant of the thing-in-itself, Kant's celebrated unknowable Ding an sich. To which it may be added that in Kant's time our knowledge of natural objects was indeed so fragmentary that he might well suspect, behind the little we knew about each of them, a mysterious "thing-in-itself". But one after another these ungraspable things have been grasped, analyzed, and, what is more, reproduced by the giant progress of science; and what we can produce we certainly cannot consider as unknowable. To the chemistry of the first half of this century, organic substances were such mysterious object; now we learn to build them up one after another from their chemical elements without the aid of organic processes. Modern chemists declare that as soon as the chemical constitution of no-matter-what body is known, it can be built up from its elements. We are still far from knowing the constitution of the highest organic substances, the albuminous bodies; but there is no reason why we should not, if only after centuries, arrive at the knowledge and, armed with it, produce artificial albumen. But, if we arrive at that, we shall at the same time have produced organic life, for life, from its lowest to its highest forms, is but the normal mode of existence of albuminous bodies.
As soon, however, as our agnostic has made these formal mental reservations, he talks and acts as the rank materialist he at bottom is. He may say that, as far as we know, matter and motion, or as it is now called, energy, can neither be created nor destroyed, but that we have no proof of their not having been created at some time or other. But if you try to use this admission against him in any particular case, he will quickly put you out of court. If he admits the possibility of spiritualism in abstracto, he will have none of it in concreto. As far as we know and can know, he will tell you there is no creator and no Ruler of the universe; as far as we are concerned, matter and energy can neither be created nor annihilated; for us, mind is a mode of energy, a function of the brain; all we know is that the material world is governed by immutable laws, and so forth. Thus, as far as he is a scientific man, as far as he knows anything, he is a materialist; outside his science, in spheres about which he knows nothing, he translates his ignorance into Greek and calls it agnosticism.
At all events, one thing seems clear: even if I was an agnostic, it is evident that I could not describe the conception of history sketched out in this little book as "historical agnosticism". Religious people would laugh at me, agnostics would indignantly ask, was I making fun of them? And, thus, I hope even British respectability will not be overshocked if I use, in English as well as in so many other languages, the term "historical materialism", to designate that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all important historic events in the economic development of society, in the changes in the modes of production and exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes against one another.
This indulgence will, perhaps, be accorded to me all the sooner if I show that historical materialism may be of advantage even to British respectability. I have mentioned the fact that, about 40 or 50 years ago, any cultivated foreigner settling in England was struck by what he was then bound to consider the religious bigotry and stupidity of the English respectable middle-class. I am now going to prove that the respectable English middle-class of that time was not quite as stupid as it looked to the intelligent foreigner. Its religious leanings can be explained.

Notes
1. Vorwarts existed in Leipzig from 1876-78, after the Gotha Unification Congress.
2. "Qual" is a philosophical play upon words. Qual literally means torture, a pain which drives to action of some kind; at the same time, the mystic Bohme puts into the German word something of the meaning of the Latin qualitas; his "qual" was the activating principle arising from, and promoting in its turn, the spontaneous development of the thing, relation, or person subject to it, in contradistinction to a pain inflicted from without. [Note by Engels to the English Edition]