What are Martin Buber's essential writings? The editor is confronted with a body of work that spans a creative period of more than 65 years and that appears in a variety of literary genres and methods combining poetry, fiction, playwriting, translation, philosophy, and narrative, with subjects ranging from Viennese literature to Christian mysticism, from the Hebrew prophets to Taoism, from philosophy to art, and from Hasidism to capital punishment. Martin Buber (1878–1965) was nothing short of a humanist in a Renaissance manner, a universal scholar in the tradition of the classical Goethe, whose Bildung (education) became an icon for many German-speaking Jews and remained their ideal long after it was abandoned by their German fellow citizens.¹ In this, Buber stood at the climax of a development that had begun with the European Enlightenment and its Jewish manifestation, the Haskalah, embracing education as the single catalyst for political and social emancipation, and which continued throughout the nineteenth century with Jews enthusiastically immersing themselves in their cherished German culture and not seldomly disappearing in it.