Martin Buber

Born in Vienna in 1878 to an observant Jewish family, Buber broke with tradition to study secular philosophy, then spent nearly fifty years writing about Zionism and working inside the movement as it stretched from Europe into the Near East. In 1923 he published "Ich und Du", the essay that made the I-Thou and I-It distinction central to existentialist thought. Two years later he began translating the Hebrew Bible into German, a project that ran parallel to his philosophical work. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature ten times and the Peace Prize seven times, though he never won. He died in 1965, having moved from Austria to Israel and left a framework for thinking about human encounter that outlasted the century.