The Legend of the Baal-Shem

Martin Buber's 1908 retelling of Hasidic legends centred on Israel ben Eliezer (the Baal Shem Tov), founder of the 18th-century Eastern European Hasidic movement. Buber treats the tales not as history but as folk literature carrying a distinctive existential and mystical sensibility, presented in literary German prose for a Western readership largely unfamiliar with Hasidism.

The book opens with a descriptive essay on the inner life of the Hasidim — their ecstasy (hitlahavut), service (avoda), intention (kavana), and humility (shiflut) — and continues with twenty stories drawn from the Hasidic oral tradition. It is the earliest of Buber's seven volumes on Hasidism and establishes the I-Thou dialogical framework that would later define his philosophy. Gershom Scholem famously argued that Buber imported existentialist categories the texts do not contain; the Buber-Scholem dispute over the nature of Hasidism is one of the major intra-Jewish-mysticism debates of the 20th century.

The legend is the myth of I and Thou, of the caller and the called, the finite which enters into the infinite and the infinite which has need of the finite.

Introduction

First lines

This book consists of a descriptive account and twenty stories. The descriptive account speaks of the life of the Hasidim, a Jewish sect of eastern Europe which arose around the middle of the eighteenth century and still continues to exist in our day in deteriorated form. The stories tell the life of the founder of this sect, Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, who was called the Baal-Shem, that is, the master of God's Name, and who lived from about 1700 to 1760, mostly in Podolia and Wolhynia.

Contents

Reception

Buber's first major work on Hasidism, predating the better-known Tales of the Hasidim by four decades. Gershom Scholem famously argued Buber's reading of Hasidism imported existentialist categories into texts that did not contain them, and that Buber overstated the movement's break with Lurianic Kabbalah; the Buber-Scholem dispute is one of the major intra-Jewish-mysticism debates of the 20th century and is unresolved. The book remains the standard entry point for general readers into Buber's Hasidic project.

Frequently asked

What is The Legend of the Baal-Shem about?

It is Martin Buber's 1908 retelling of folk legends surrounding Israel ben Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov, founder of 18th-century Hasidism. The book opens with an essay on the inner life of the Hasidim and continues with twenty stories drawn from the tradition, presenting the movement as a living encounter between God and the human person.

How does this book differ from Buber's later Tales of the Hasidim?

Buber wrote The Legend of the Baal-Shem with considerable literary freedom, treating folk material as raw substance for his own retelling. The later Tales of the Hasidim (1947) reflects a stricter relationship to the source tradition, reconstructing each story as faithfully as possible. Buber himself describes the earlier work as freer in form.

What is the Buber-Scholem dispute?

Gershom Scholem argued that Buber imported existentialist and dialogical categories — particularly his I-Thou philosophy — into Hasidic texts that did not contain them, and that Buber overstated the movement's independence from Lurianic Kabbalah. The dispute is one of the central methodological arguments in 20th-century Jewish studies and has not been definitively resolved.