"Ein Stück Kulturarbeit wollten wir leisten". Sionismo e cultura tedesca nei primi scritti ebraici di Martin Buber

Martin Buber’s early Zionist writings (1900-1916) are an important contribution to the redefinition of German Judaism in the post-assimilationist period. They constitute an aspect of that Jüdische Renaissance which, in the first decades of the XX century, reconfigures the idea of Judaism on new criteria, from the recreation of an aesthetic dimension to the rediscovery of ethnicity. The article focuses on Martin Buber’s cultural Zionism and on its connection with German culture, particularly on the contradiction of a Zionism which – though aiming at an independent, autonomous Jewish cultural identity – largely draws on images, symbols and words typical of the German nationalist, neoromantic, right-wing framework. Starting from the Renaissance vogue and the attempt to establish a new Jewish art, the article moves on to underline, through a lexical and linguistic analysis of Buber’s Zionist writings, the analogy, and sometimes the total coincidence, of the cultural Zionist discourse with the conceptual apparatus of the German völkische Bewegung.