Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Martin Buber on Monotheism and Its Discontents,” in Ingrid Anderson and Michael Zank, eds., The Value of the Particular: A Festschrift for Steven T. Katz on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday (Leiden: Brill, 2015): 138-149 (original) (raw)
Martin Buber on Monotheism and Its Discontents
Paul Mendes-Flohr
Abstract
It has been argued that monotheism is inherently exclusionary and hence violent. I argue that Martin Buber was alert to this claim and addressed it, albeit implicitly, in his writings on biblical faith and Judaism. He sought to restrain the negative manifestations of monotheism and to enhance its universalistic promise by freeing theistic belief, and Judaism in particular, from supercessionist theological and metaphysical presuppositions. In place of doctrinal affirmations, Buber elaborated a phenomenology of theistic faith. In pursuing this end, he did not shy from enjoining insights from Asian religions, especially Buddhism and Daoism.
The Bane of Privileged Knowledge
In recent years, a series of monographs have been published in which monotheism is denounced as a principal source of religious conflict that continues to lacerate the social and political fabric of humanity. The “price of monotheism,” as Jan Assmann has argued, is a culture that inherently promotes intolerance. 1{ }^{1} The privileged knowledge, grounded in a concept of divine revelation, to which monotheism lays claim necessarily engenders an invidious notion of the Other. Those who do not share in the blessings of Sinai, Calvary, or Mecca are deemed benighted idolaters, Gentiles, and infidels. In upholding the doctrine of One true God, as the eighteenth century Scottish philosopher David Hume argued, monotheism is thus perforce less tolerant than polytheism:
By limiting the powers and functions of its deities, [polytheism] naturally admits the gods of other sects and nations to share of divinity and renders all the various deities, as well as rites, ceremonies, or traditions compatible with each other. Theism is opposite … While one sole object of devotion is acknowledged, the worship of other deities is regarded as
- This paper is dedicated to Steven Katz in gratitude for more than forty years of intellectual collaboration and friendship, which was initially grounded in our shared interest in the thought of Martin Buber.
1 Jan Assmann, The Price of Monotheism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). ↩︎
- This paper is dedicated to Steven Katz in gratitude for more than forty years of intellectual collaboration and friendship, which was initially grounded in our shared interest in the thought of Martin Buber.
absurd and impious. Nay, this unity of object seems naturally to require the unity of faith and ceremonies, and furnishes designing men with a pretense for representing their adversaries as profane, and the objects of divine as well as human vengeance … [Indeed], the intolerance of almost all religions, which have maintained the unity of God, is as remarkable as the contrary principle of polytheists. 2{ }^{2}
In its most extreme expression, it is said, monotheism encourages contemptuous attitudes and often violent action toward benighted non-believers. The “violent legacy of monotheism” 3{ }^{3} has been characterized as a “pathological narcissism.” 4{ }^{4}
In his ramified writings on biblical faith and Judaism, Martin Buber implicitly addressed this criticism. He was clearly alert to the cruel paradox that the belief in One God often exacerbates the antagonistic divisions that blight the human family. He sought to restrain the negative manifestations of monotheism and to enhance its universal promise by freeing theistic belief, and Judaism in particular, from theological and metaphysical presuppositions that are liable to engender negative expressions of monotheism. In place of doctrinal affirmations, Buber elaborated a phenomenology of theistic faith. In pursuing this end, he did not shy from enjoining insights from Asian religions, especially Buddhism and Daoism.
Does the Torah Sanction Violence?
Even as a young child Buber was dismayed by the violence sanctioned in the biblical narrative. He specifically pointed to his youthful incomprehension of the prophet Samuel’s reprimand of King Saul for sparing the life of Agag, King of the Amalekites, and defying the will of God. That Samuel proceeded to execute Agag and to cut his torso into pieces 5{ }^{5} struck the young Buber as
- 2 David Hume, Natural History of Religion, ed., James Fieser (New York: Macmillan/Library of Liberal Arts, 1992), 39-41. On other hand, Hume also observes that the “tolerance” of polytheistic religions can also lend itself to condone “any practice or opinion, however barbarous or corrupted.” Ibid., 38.
3 Regina M. Schwartz, The Curse of Cain. The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
4 Sam Vankin, Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited (Prague: Narcissus Publishing House, 2001).
51 Samuel 15. ↩︎
gratuitous vengeance, which was all the more “dreadful” when done in the name of God. Years later, in a conversation with an acquaintance, an observant and deeply devout Jew, he recalled his “horror” when as a boy he read “how the heathen king went up to the prophet with the words on his lips, ‘surely the bitterness of death is past,’ and was hewn to pieces by him.” And Buber solemnly added, “I have never been able to believe that this is a message of God. I do not believe it.” 6{ }^{6}
In his mature years, Buber could only resolve what he regarded as a basic antinomy between faith in God, who commands us to love and justice, and God’s vengeful wrath as recorded in the biblical account of Samuel and Agag, by concluding "that Samuel…misunderstood God."7 In elaborating upon this inference, Buber adumbrates what may be viewed as an overarching hermeneutic strategy to contend with the discontents of monotheism.
God’s Word Can be Misunderstood
One must, Buber avers, recognize that “both oneself and … the human race [at large] are inclined to misunderstand God. Man is so created that he can understand, but does not have to understand, what God says to him.” 8{ }^{8} To be sure, the Bible teaches that “God does not abandon man [whom He has created] to his needs and anxieties; He provides him with the assistance of His word; He speaks to him, He comforts him with His word.” But, alas, it often happens that "man does not listen with faithful ears to what is spoken to him. Already in hearing he blends together the command of heaven and [the decrees of earthly existence] …"10 Misunderstandings of God’s word, Buber observes, are evident in all scriptural traditions, even in the Hebrew Bible. "What is involved here is not ultimately the fact that this or that form of biblical historical narrative has misunderstood God’s word; what is involved is the fact that in the word of throats and pens out of which the text of the Old Testament has arisen, misunderstanding has again and again attached itself to understanding, the
- 6 Buber, “Autobiographical Fragments,” in The Philosophy of Martin Buber, eds., Paul Arthur Schilpp and Maurice Friedman. The Library of Living Philosophers, vol. XII (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court/ London: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 31.
7 Ibid., 32 f .
8 Ibid., 32.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid. ↩︎
manufactured has been mixed with the received."11 Though the Word of God was surely heard by the scribes who composed the Hebrew Bible, being human they may have very well misunderstood what they heard.
Buber is quick to acknowledge that “we have no objective criterion” by which to determine the word of God and man’s possible misunderstanding. 12{ }^{12} Hence, bereft of such a clear criterion, whenever he had “to translate or interpret a biblical text,” he invariably found himself in an inescapable tension between “the word of God and the words of man,” and was impelled to proceed with “fear and trembling.” 13{ }^{13} In contrast to liberal Jewish and Christian interpreters of the Bible, who evoke ethical criteria to valorize select biblical passages and teachings as the Word of God, Buber relied on the admittedly ambiguous meta-ethical principle of dialogue. 14{ }^{14} The believing individual knows when he or she is addressed by God and obeys unflinchingly what God demands:
In other words, the positing of an ‘ethical’ criterion that is to be consulted as to whether one shall fulfill God’s will, of which one has become aware [through the divine ‘I-Thou’ address], is pure contradiction: he who really believes in God cannot acknowledge any other court above [God’s]… [T]he believing man of our world can confidently subordinate his ethics to his religiousness because he knows that it is God who shows the right way, and that means just: because he trusts God. 15{ }^{15}
The life of dialogue-as an expression of biblical faith—is emphatically religious, and not ethical per se. Indeed, Buber was not a Kantian; he resolutely did not reduce or equate the religious to the ethical. 16{ }^{16}
11 Ibid., 32f.
12 Ibid., 33.
13 Ibid.
14 Cf. “Living religiousness wishes to bring forth living ethos. […] Only out of a personal relationship with the Absolute can the absoluteness of the ethical co-ordinates arise, without which there is no complete awareness of self. Even when the individual calls an absolute criterion handed down by religious tradition his own, it must be re-forged in the fire of the truth of his personal essential relation to the Absolute if it is to win true validity. But always it is the religious which bestows, the ethical which receives.” Buber, “Religion and Ethics,” in idem, Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation between Religion and Philosophy (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press International, 1988), 98 (italics added). Maurice Friedman, “Interrogation of Martin Buber,” in Philosophical Interrogations, eds., Sydney and Beatrice Rome (New York/Evanston: Harper Torchbook, 1964), 91f.
16 As Steven Katz has systematically demonstrated, Buber’s epistemology, however, is clearly inflected by Kant’s conception of the phenomenal world, which Buber presents as
Nonetheless, God’s commandments as inscribed in Scripture-and later elaborated by the Oral Law of the rabbis-are not to be conceived as heteronomous injunctions. Since they are to be heard and appropriated in dialogue, individual autonomy is to be honored. Accordingly, Buber insists that "some like myself, will not let the biblical word usurp the place of the voice [of God]; they will not acknowledge word [inscribed in Scripture and echoed by the rabbis] as that voice’s absolute, sufficing, immutably valid expression."17 It is precisely from this dialogical perspective that Buber discounted revelation and Israel’s election as privileged knowledge, sanctioning supercilious attitudes of exclusivity. As one of his most perceptive critics concisely put it, "Buber thus shifts the accent from the uniqueness of God to God’s speaking to us and our ability to speak to Him, as the foundation of religious community."18
Dialogue and the Antinomies of Biblical Faith
The biblical account of "the relation between the God of Israel and Israel"19 is thus properly understood as a dialogue-but a dialogue fraught with the risk of misunderstanding and what Buber would call ‘mismeetings’ (Vergegnungen). The Bible, accordingly, is to be read as a historical narrative of Israel’s unceasing struggle to understand the word of God, record the people’s affirmation of faith as well as refractory moments of disobedience, and its frequent failure to comprehend what God expects of them. Buber held that the study of Israel’s history of faith as related in the Hebrew Scriptures thus requires a specific “mode of research,” 20{ }^{20} which, while drawing upon the scholarly discipline of philological textual analysis, rejects “source criticism”:
the “It-World” determined by space-time coordinates, and, in turn, causality. See Steven T. Katz, Post-Holocaust Dialogues: Critical Studies in Modern Jewish Thought (New York/ London: New York University Press, 1985), 1-51. I-Thou relations, however, as Katz duly notes, are instantiated in a noumenal realm beyond the phenomenal world-the world of It (Ibid., 9-11). Unfettered by the imperious dictates of culturally determined norms and categories of inter-subjective perception, I-Thou relations are meta-nomian, and indeed constitute the ontological ground of “authentic” ethical and religious life.
Buber, “Biblical Humanism,” in Buber, The Bible. Eighteen Studies, ed., N.N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 213.
Fritz Kaufmann, “Buber’s Philosophy of Religion,” in The Philosophy of Martin Buber, eds. Paul Arthur Schilpp and Maurice Friedman (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 1991), 218.
Buber, The Prophetic Faith, trans. Carlye Witton-Davies (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 1. Ibid., 6.
[For] even if we were allowed to speak of ‘sources’ and if it were even possible to fix their dates (and also the dates of the additions and redactions), we would thereby only be able to establish layers of the literary, not the religious development [of Israel’s faith]. 21{ }^{21}
And it is its ongoing dialogue with God that determines the contours and nature of Israel’s religious development. 22{ }^{22} This development, however, is not a dialectical, progressive process, guided by immanent laws (as Hermann Cohen, for one, would argue), but rather reflects a discontinuous dialogical pattern. 23{ }^{23} Within the scope of this ever-fluctuating dialogue, the scriptural narrative is throughout punctuated with expressions of self-reflection and criticism. These ruminative moments of questioning Israel’s construal of God’s word, Buber stresses, are not limited to the censorious interventions of the prophets. In discussing Genesis and the akedah, Buber observes that:
In Israel, where in the narrative before the exodus from Egypt… every firstling was consecrated to be redeemed . . . there was a tendency to treat YHVH not as YHVH but as one of the melekh gods, and to acquire His aid by offering a child. The prophets in their fierce protests denied the belief that such was acceptable in God’s sight: He demands noting but justice and love. Not so our narrator. Even though he too knew this demand [nonetheless] in the story YHVH actually demands the offering of the child, and in the most cruel and strange manner, for God’s own promise concerning his offspring would be frustrated if Abraham fulfilled this demand. 24{ }^{24}
Reading between the lines, so to speak, the narrator is alert to this fundamental antinomy of biblical faith. But his hermeneutic strategy for dealing with God’s seemingly contradictory demands differs from that of the prophets. The narrator of Genesis, Buber observes, resolves his perplexity by holding that God
allows the demand [to sacrifice Isaac] to be fulfilled to such an extent that the intention enters the realm of reality, but the intention only. YHvH does not here forego the offering, as later the God of the prophets did, but
- 21 Ibid., 4 (Buber’s emphasis).
22 Cf. “At every stage [in tracing Israel’s religious development] we shall discover something not only about the formation of this teaching, but also its nature.” Ibid., 1.
23 “Interrogation of Martin Buber,” 101-03.
24 Buber, The Prophetic Faith, 90ff. ↩︎
He permits man to give a ransom, and so to hand over to God in the shape of a ransom what was demanded… 25{ }^{25}
For the narrator of Genesis, God “demands all from man, and He grants man all, even the feeling that it is in man’s power to give God something, to give Him all.” 26{ }^{26} But offerings devoid of a genuine, spiritual intention are not only vacuous gestures: They ‘offend’ God. “This is what the narrator wishes to tell his people,” an admonition, Buber underscores, that is especially directed to their political rulers. 27{ }^{27}
Non-Supersessionist Monotheism
It is in the light of the dialogical conception of God’s relation with Israel that Buber endorsed a pluralistic view of world religions, and dismissed, for instance, those who question the prophet Amos’s monotheism because he presumably recognized other gods beside Yahweh. 28{ }^{28} Parenthetically, one may note that Buber’s pluriversum-that is, affirmation of cultural and religious diversity-is highlighted by the fact that in I and Thou, the only Jews mentioned are Jesus, Peter, and John, whereas there are abundant references to the Buddha, Hindu, and especially Daoist teachings. 29{ }^{29}
28 Buber, The Prophetic Faith 93f., 109f. Cf. “‘Amos,’ so I read in a recent commentary, ‘approached near to monotheism, but did not reach it, for in his eyes there are, apart from YHVH, other gods …’ [Amos, 5:26]… Remarks like these appear to me to me calculated to reduce in value the question of the presence or absence of this ‘monotheism’ of which so much is said… It may be uncertain whether he reached some ‘ism’ or other; all the pretension of such distinctions come to nothing when it tries to assert itself in the face of what is to be found here: a man, given up to the oneness of his God.” Ibid. 110 (italics added).
29 See, for instance, the passage in I and Thou which juxtaposes the “doctrines of immersion [that] invoke the great epigrams of identification-one of them above all the Johannine ‘I and the Father are one’ [John 10:30], and the other one of the doctrine of Sandilya: ‘The All-embracing is my self in the inner heart’ [Khaddogya Upanishad, III, 14.4].” Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970), 132. On Buber’s extensive writings on Eastern religions, see Irene Eber’s introduction to Chinesische Schriften: Martin Buber Werkausgabe, (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2013), Bd. 2:2.
In his dialogue with representatives of other faith communities, Buber was acutely—and painfully—aware that the great impediment to genuine interfaith understanding was that:
Each [religion] has its origin in a particular revelation and its goal is the overcoming of all particularity [through the conversion of the other]. Each represents the universality of its mystery in myth and rite and thus reserves it for those who live it [that is, members of its faith community]. 30{ }^{30}
Yet, it is precisely because of the plurality of faith experiences that:
[To] compare one religion with another, valuing and devaluing it, is always an undertaking contrary to being and sense: one’s own temple building, which can be known from within the innermost shrine [‘adytum’] compared with the external aspect of the alien temple as it offers itself to the attentive observer. One may compare the corresponding parts of the buildings according to structure, function and connection with one another, honestly, but never valuing: because their relation to the ever invisible Sanctissimum is concealed. 31{ }^{31}
The recognition of the “mystery” of the faith experience which informs and inspires each religion mandates a respectful, indeed, reverential tolerance of difference, of the Other. 32{ }^{32}
30 Buber, “Christ, Hasidism, Gnosis,” in Buber, The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism, trans. Maurice Freidman, introd., David B. Burrell, C.S.C. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1988), 242.
31 Ibid., 242 f .
32 Cf. Buber’s response to an article in which the Christian author to “the Jews as hopelessly ‘spiritually dead,’ i.e., unconvertible.” In a letter to the author, he questioned his declared intention to promote interfaith understanding if he identifies that “Jew’s spiritual life with [their potential] convertibility.” “I have my spiritual life in the closeness between God and me,” Buber explained. Hence, “I can no more believe that God permits a Christian to question this than I can believe that God permits me to question this sort of thing in a Christian. Judaism and Christianity stand together in the mystery of our Father and judge; thus, a Jew may speak of a Christian and Christian of a Jew only in fear and trembling before the mystery of God. Only on this basis can there be genuine understanding between Jew and Christians.” Buber to Karl Thieme, letter dated June 12, 1949, in The Letters of Martin Buber: A Life of Dialogue, eds., Nahum N. Glatzer and Paul Mendes-Flohr, trans. Richard and Clara Winston and Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1991), 540.
This tolerance is borne by an ontological paradox; for while acknowledgment of the “mystery” in which each religion abides promotes mutual acceptance, it also implies that in some basic sense the religious experience of the other is impermeable, inaccessible to outsiders. In the preface to the first issue of the inter-confessional journal, Die Kreatur (1926), he edited together with a Protestant (Viktor von Weizsäcker) and a Catholic (Josef Wittig). Buber and his colleagues referred to this situation as also one of mutual exile, an anguished estrangement from one another. And yet, it is precisely this cognitive impasse that engenders contrition and a rejection of supersessionism:
The separation of religions, from which there is no other liberation than messianic redemption, is borne and bred by the anguish of exile. But their mutual separation is not to be construed as imaginary, misty crazed formations; they are rather meaningfully persistent spheres of truth that will endure until they are to submerge into the unitive reality of the [future] Kingdom of God. What is permitted, however, at this hour in history, and, what they are indeed called upon is to enter a dialogue (Gespräch): A call beckoning them to open up to each other above and beyond [their separation] . . . and to make an honest attempt to discuss their shared concern for [God’s] creatures (Kreatur). There is a going together without a merging together. There is working together without living together. There is a unity of prayer without the unification of those who pray. Walking in parallel lines, which will meet in infinity, they go their separate ways: Their intention, however, is to meet at the goal, which is the nameless covenant in which their respective truths separate them, but from the truth of the reality of the fulfillment of the common direction unite them. We may not anticipate [the Kingdom], but we are to prepare it. 33{ }^{33}
Until the advent of the Kingdom and the dawn of one universal Truth, each faith community is to attend to its distinctive “sphere of truth,” 34{ }^{34} while sharing
- 33 Die Kreatur (Berlin: Lambert Schneider, 1926), 1.
34 Significantly, Buber insisted that the “sphere of truth” to which Jews are beholden is not to be construed as “monotheism,” for such a label would imply that they subscribe to privileged, hence untenable theological claims. In a telling exchange with a critic of his conception of faith, Buber conceded that, "It is repugnant to me personally to find the life substance of a community of faith like Judaism in a concept like ‘monotheism.’ " Israel’s faith is not to be construed as a Weltanschauung, but rather the belief in the God of the Shema. This confessional pledge to the One and Unique God is ‘the living center of Judaism.’ " Jews are to "confess themselves unreservedly to the Unique and One, knowing with their whole soul what they are saying and answering for it with their ↩︎
a common concern for the created order. 35{ }^{35} Implicit in this appeal to interfaith tolerance is an anti-Platonist rejection of the concept of essence. Accordingly, Buber was duly wary of attempts to surmount the bane of supersessionism by leveling the differences of religions to one common essence. It was his wont, therefore, to say that all religions are essentially different. 36{ }^{36}
It is thus told that a Zen Master who, on a tour around the world in the company of an American admirer, came to Jerusalem and called upon Buber. With the exuberance of an irenic enthusiast, the American expatiated on what he deemed to be the fundamental unity of all religions, proclaiming that despite their apparent differences they share one and the same essence. As the American held forth, the Zen master sat in silence, and Buber listened, and then gave the American “one of his long, piercing looks, and shot him the question: ‘And what is the essence?’ At this point the Zen master could not contain himself: he jumped from his seat and with both hands shook the hands of Buber.” 37{ }^{37}
Postscript
With respect to the thesis that monotheism is the root source of the divisive Manichean fury that sears the soul of humanity by casting the Other as an execrable reprobate, the Russian-Jewish novelist Vasily Grossman reminds us that this ‘evil’ is potentially characteristic of all social entities that claim unique access to the good. In his monumental novel about the battle of Stalingrad, Fate and Life, a Russian Orthodox priest incarcerated in a Nazi concentration camp for Soviet prisoners and crazed by despair, rants about the Satanic madness that has locked two comparable totalitarian ideologies in an apocalyptic conflict: “The good of the first Christians, which had embraced all mankind, in turn gave way to a purely Christian good; the good of the Muslims was now distinct. Centuries passed and the good of Christianity split up into distinct goods of
whole lives, … with their whole souls and lives, address Him, the unique One, as their eternal Thou, in a community-‘Our Father, our King!’—and each lone alone-nothing else than Thou-that is the life-substance of Judaism.” Buber, “Replies to My Critics,” in The Philosophy of Martin Buber, eds. Schlipp and Friedman, (see fn. 5, above), 714.
35 The journal was a decidedly non-confessional; indeed, none of the articles-contributed by some of the leading intellectuals of period, such as the Russian religious existentialist Nikolai Berdyaev and the iconoclastic Walter Benjamin-were explicitly theological.
36 R.J. Zwi Werblowsky, Beyond Tradition and Modernity: Changing Religions in a Changing World (London: The Athlone Press of the University of London, 1976), 115. Ibid.
Catholicism, Protestantism and Orthodoxy… And at the same time there was the good of the poor and the good of the rich. And the goods of the whites, the blacks and the yellow races… More and more goods came into being, corresponding to each sect, race and class. Everyone outside a particular magic circle was excluded…Sometimes the very concept of good became a scourge, a greater evil than evil itself."38
Works Cited
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Buber, Martin. “Autobiographical Fragments.” The Philosophy of Martin Buber. Edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp and Maurice Friedman. The Library of Living Philosophers, vol. XII. La Salle, Illinois: Open Court/ London: Cambridge University Press, 1967.
—_. “Biblical Humanism,” in Buber: The Bible. Eighteen Studies. Edited by N.N. Glatzer. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.
—_. “Buber to Karl Thieme, letter dated June 12, 1949.” The Letters of Martin Buber: A Life of Dialogue. Edited by Nahum N. Glatzer and Paul Mendes-Flohr. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston and Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1991.
—_. “Christ, Hasidism, Gnosis.” The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism. Translated by Maurice Freidman, introduction by David B. Burrell, C.S.C. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1988.
—_. I and Thou. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970.
—. The Prophetic Faith. Translated by Carlye Witton-Davies. New York: Macmillan, 1949.
—_. “Religion and Ethics.” Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation between Religion and Philosophy. Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press International, 1988.
Buber, Martin, Viktor von Weizsäcker, and Josef Wittig. Die Kreatur. Berlin: Lambert Schneider, 1926.
Eber, Irene. Introduction to Chinesische Schriften: Martin Buber Werkausgabe. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2013.
Friedman, Maurice. “Interrogation of Martin Buber.” Philosophical Interrogations. Edited by Sydney and Beatrice Rome. New York/Evanston, IL: Harper Torchbook, 1964.
38 Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate, trans., Robert Chandler (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 404f. (italics added).
Grossman, Vasily. Life and Fate. Translated by Robert Chandler. New York: Harper & Row, 1986.
Hume, David. Natural History of Religion. Edited by James Fieser, 39-41. New York: Macmillan/Library of Liberal Arts, 1992.
Katz, Steven T. Post-Holocaust Dialogues: Critical Studies in Modern Jewish Thought. New York/London: New York University Press, 1985.
Kaufmann, Fritz. “Buber’s Philosophy of Religion.” The Philosophy of Martin Buber. Edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp and Maurice Friedman, 201-35. Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 1991.
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Vankin, Sam. Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited. Prague: Narcissus Publishing House, 2001.
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The Value of the Particular: Lessons from Judaism and the Modern Jewish Experience
Festschrift for Steven T. Katz on the Occasion
of His Seventieth Birthday
Edited by
Michael Zank and Ingrid Anderson
with the Editorial Assistance of
Sarah Leventer
B RILL