Human Relations in the philosophy of Arendt, Buber, Rosenzweig, and Levinas

Introduction

The Jewish stress on human relations profoundly shaped four major twentieth-century thinkers, but not in a uniform way. In Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Emmanuel Levinas, the influence is explicit and philosophical-theological: relation to the human other becomes the privileged site of relation to God. In Hannah Arendt, the influence is indirect, historical, and secularized: Jewish experiences of exclusion, statelessness, pariahhood, and collective vulnerability become the basis for a political philosophy of plurality, public action, and the “right to have rights” (Arendt, 1951/1973; Bernstein, 1996). The central claim is therefore not that these thinkers simply “applied” Judaism to philosophy. Rather, each transformed Jewish relational ethics into a distinctive political-philosophical grammar: dialogue in Buber, revelation and redemption in Rosenzweig, ethical responsibility in Levinas, and plural public action in Arendt.

A necessary assumption should be made explicit: “Judaism” here does not mean a single, ahistorical essence. It refers to a broad biblical-rabbinic inheritance in which interpersonal obligation is not morally secondary to divine worship. Leviticus 19 links holiness to concrete duties toward neighbor, poor, stranger, worker, and adversary; Genesis 1:27 grounds human dignity in the image of God; rabbinic sources treat conduct toward others as indispensable to religious life. Recent academic theological synthesis likewise emphasizes that Jewish ethics joins theology and interpersonal duty, especially through tselem Elohim, justice, love of neighbor and stranger, and the refusal to separate moral from religious obligation.

Martin Buber: From Jewish relational ethics to dialogical ontology

Martin Buber (1878-1965 CE) is the clearest case of direct influence. His I and Thou turns the Jewish ethical intuition that one encounters God through human relations into a full philosophical anthropology. For Buber, the self is not first an isolated substance that later enters relations. The self becomes an “I” in one of two basic relations: I–It, which objectifies, uses, classifies, and manages; and I–Thou, which meets the other in presence, reciprocity, and non-instrumental address (Buber, 1923/1970). In this sense, Buber radicalizes the Jewish interpersonal command: the neighbor is not merely an object of duty but a mode through which the self becomes spiritually and ontologically real.

This is why Buber’s thought is not simply ethics but political ontology. His philosophy of dialogue makes the “between” primary: the life of spirit is not hidden inside the solitary subject but occurs in encounter. The divine “Eternal Thou” is not reached by escaping human relations; it is intimated in them. Scholarly accounts of Buber emphasize precisely this connection between self, other, text, God, and his effort to overcome modern alienation by authentic relation (Wright, 2007). 

The political implications are visible in Buber’s Zionism. Politically, this relational ontology helps explain Buber’s commitment to community, dialogical socialism, adult Jewish education, and Jewish-Arab cooperation. His binationalism in Palestine was not an accidental political preference; it followed from the conviction that a people’s national life must be morally answerable to the presence and claims of another people (Buber, 1947/2002; Mendes-Flohr, 1989). The same Jewish premise - human relations as sacred obligation - therefore became a critique of statist nationalism when nationalism reduced the other to a demographic, strategic, or territorial obstacle.

The standard counterargument is strong: Buber’s I-Thou can appear too romantic and insufficiently institutional. It offers a powerful account of encounter but less guidance on law, coercion, economic inequality, and asymmetrical power. This critique is especially serious in politics, where goodwill does not by itself resolve domination. Yet the criticism does not negate the influence. It clarifies its character: Buber translated Jewish relational ethics into a normative criterion by which political arrangements must be judged, even when his own theory did not fully supply an institutional theory of justice.

Franz Rosenzweig: Revelation as commanded love and redemption through the human world

Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929 CE) shares Buber’s relational turn but gives it a more systematic and liturgical form. The Star of Redemption rejects the “old thinking” of totality, especially the philosophical tendency to absorb God, world, and human being into a single conceptual system. Against totalizing idealism, Rosenzweig begins with irreducible realities - God, world, and human being - and with the relations among them: creation, revelation, and redemption (Rosenzweig, 1921/2005; Gordon, 2007). His work is widely regarded as one of the central achievements of modern Jewish philosophy, with revelation playing a decisive conceptual role.

The Jewish importance of human relations enters Rosenzweig through the commandment of love. Revelation is not primarily the communication of doctrines; it is God’s address to the person. The divine command to love God is fulfilled outwardly in love of neighbor. Recent scholarship on Rosenzweig’s account of revelation notes that “love thy God” and “love thy neighbor” are treated as inseparable dimensions of one command (Herskowitz, 2024). Thus, the movement from God to human other is not a moral supplement to theology; it is the form revelation takes in lived existence.

Politically, Rosenzweig’s importance lies in his resistance to totality. His political significance lies in his anti-totalizing conception of community and redemption. He resists the Hegelian sacralization of the state and refuses to identify historical power with ultimate meaning (Gordon, 2003). Redemption is not achieved by a sovereign state imposing unity on plurality; it is anticipated in liturgy, speech, prayer, education, and everyday acts of love. Judaism, for Rosenzweig, embodies a communal form of life that testifies to redemption without becoming identical with political domination.

The counterargument is that Rosenzweig is less directly political than Arendt or even Buber. His emphasis on Jewish liturgical life may seem inward, communal, or theologically particular rather than politically universal. But this objection is only partly persuasive. Rosenzweig’s political importance lies precisely in his refusal to let the state become the final horizon of meaning. The Jewish relational structure of commandment and neighbor-love becomes, in him, a critique of political totality: no state, nation, or historical system may absorb the singular person or the ethical relation.

Emmanuel Levinas: Judaism, the face, and ethics as first philosophy

Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995 CE) radicalizes the Jewish relational tradition more than any of the other three. For him, ethics is “first philosophy”: before ontology, freedom, knowledge, or politics stands the encounter with the face of the Other (Levinas, 1961/1969; Bergo, 2006). The face is not merely a visible human surface. It is the manifestation of vulnerability and command. It says, in Levinas’s famous formulation, that one must not kill. The self is not sovereign first and responsible later; it is constituted by responsibility to the Other.

This is a philosophical transformation of the Jewish claim that relation to God is inseparable from conduct toward human beings. Levinas repeatedly draws on biblical, prophetic, rabbinic, and Talmudic sources, but he does not simply theologize ethics. Rather, he translates Jewish ethical transcendence into phenomenology: the infinite appears not as an object of knowledge but as the ethical demand issued by the other person (Levinas, 1974/1998; Cohen, 2007; Fagenblat, 2010). Stanford’s (SEP) account of Levinas likewise stresses that his philosophy begins with the encounter with another person and the responsibility it elicits prior to reflective calculation.

Politically, Levinas’s key move is the “third party.” If I were responsible only to one Other, ethics might remain a dyadic relation of infinite obligation. But the third party - the other others- introduces comparison, judgment, equality, institutions, and justice. Politics arises because responsibility must be distributed among many vulnerable persons. The state is therefore necessary, but never morally self-justifying. It must remain answerable to the ethical relation from which justice emerges (Levinas, 1974/1998; Morgan, 2011).

The main objection is that Levinas’s asymmetrical responsibility may be politically excessive. If I am infinitely responsible for the Other, how can law, reciprocity, rights, and institutional limits function? Levinas’s answer is not fully systematic, and critics are right that his politics remains underdeveloped. Yet this incompleteness is also his political force. Levinas does not offer a finished constitutional theory; he offers a permanent ethical critique of every political order that forgets the vulnerable human being in the name of security, sovereignty, efficiency, or totality.

Hannah Arendt: A secular Jewish transformation of relationality into plurality

Hannah Arendt’s (1906-1975 CE) relation to Judaism is more complex. She was not a Jewish theologian in the manner of Buber, Rosenzweig, or Levinas, and she often resisted religious or communitarian reductions of politics. Her mature political thought draws deeply on Greek and Roman sources, Augustine of Hippo, Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger, republicanism, and revolutionary traditions (Arendt, 1958/1998; Villa, 2000). Nevertheless, it would be misleading to detach her political philosophy from Jewish experience. Richard J. Bernstein argues that Arendt’s confrontation with “the Jewish question,” antisemitism, statelessness, and totalitarian domination shaped major themes in her thinking about politics and responsibility (Bernstein, 1996).

For Arendt, the decisive problem is not primarily neighbor-love but political belonging. The catastrophes of the twentieth century showed that abstract human dignity is politically fragile when persons are expelled from a community in which they can appear, speak, act, and claim rights. Her famous formulation of the “right to have rights” means that human rights require a public world in which one is recognized as a participant, not merely as a biological human being (Arendt, 1951/1973). Her essay “We Refugees” and her Jewish writings show that the refugee is not only an object of humanitarian pity but a political figure exposing the limits of the nation-state system (Arendt, 1943/2007; Flohr, 2024).)

This produces Arendt’s secular analogue to Jewish relational ethics: plurality. Human beings exist not as “Man” in the abstract but as distinct persons who disclose themselves through speech and action in a shared world (Arendt, 1958/1998). Action is impossible in isolation. Power arises not from domination but from people acting together. Promise and forgiveness are political capacities because they repair the unpredictability and irreversibility of action among plural persons.

Hannah Arendt transforms Jewish relationality into political ontology: the human being is a “who” disclosed among others, not a solitary substance. Unlike Levinas, she does not ground politics in infinite responsibility; unlike Buber, she does not ground it in dialogical sacred presence; unlike Rosenzweig, she does not ground it in revelation. But her political thought bears the mark of Jewish historical experience: a person’s dignity requires a world in which that person can appear, speak, act, and be recognized.

The counterargument is that Arendt’s political ideal is not Jewish but Greek: the polis, public speech, civic glory, and republican freedom. This is partly correct. Arendt does not derive politics from halakhah, neighbor-love, or tselem Elohim. She is also suspicious of compassion and love as political principles, because they can abolish the distance necessary for public judgment. Yet this does not erase the Jewish influence. It shows that Arendt secularizes and politicizes it. For Buber, Rosenzweig, and Levinas, the human relation reveals or bears transcendence. For Arendt, the human relation creates a public world in which dignity can appear and rights can become real.

Comparative synthesis

The four thinkers can be arranged along two axes. First, Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig emphasize mutuality, speech, and relation, whereas Emmanuel Levinas emphasizes asymmetry, vulnerability, and responsibility. Second, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Emmanuel Levinas retain explicit theological or quasi-theological structures, whereas Hananh Arendt translates Jewish relational vulnerability into secular political categories.

Their shared inheritance is a rejection of the isolated sovereign self. Buber’s self exists in dialogue; Rosenzweig’s self is addressed by revelation and turned toward the neighbor; Levinas’s self is accused and obligated by the face; Arendt’s self appears only among plural others in a public world. Their shared political consequence is a critique of totality: the state, nation, system, bureaucracy, ontology, or ideology becomes dangerous when it erases the concrete human other.

The differences are equally important. Buber risks underestimating institutional conflict; Rosenzweig risks liturgical particularism; Levinas risks ethical over-demandingness; Arendt risks separating politics too sharply from compassion and social need. Yet each offers a necessary corrective to the others. Buber gives politics a dialogical criterion; Rosenzweig prevents politics from becoming redemptive idolatry; Levinas forces justice to begin with vulnerability; Arendt insists that ethical concern must be institutionalized in a public world of rights, action, and plurality.

Objection and Reply: Is This “Jewish Influence” Overstated?

A serious objection is that this essay risks over-Judaizing four thinkers who were also shaped by German idealism, existentialism, phenomenology, martin Heidegger, Immanuel Kant, Georg W. F. Hegel, Christianity, socialism, Zionism, and the catastrophe of European totalitarianism. This objection is strongest in Arendt’s case, because she was a secular political theorist and explicitly resisted reducing politics to morality or religion. It also matters for Levinas, whose technical vocabulary is phenomenological, and for Rosenzweig, whose system engages German philosophy and Christian theology.

The objection is valid if “influence” means simple doctrinal derivation. None of these thinkers merely applies Leviticus 19:18 or Genesis 1:27. But the objection fails if influence is understood as a deep problematic: the Jewish insistence that divine and ethical life are tested in relation to other persons gave these thinkers a way to contest the sovereign subject and the totalizing system. Buber calls this relation dialogue; Rosenzweig calls it speech, revelation, and redemption; Levinas calls it responsibility; Arendt calls it plurality and public appearance. Their philosophical vocabularies differ, but their shared target is the same: any order that makes the other person invisible, interchangeable, mute, or usable.

Conclusion

The Jewish importance of human relations influenced Hannah Arendt, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Emmanuel Levinas by relocating philosophy from the solitary subject to the space between persons. In Buber, this becomes dialogical ontology. In Rosenzweig, it becomes revelatory love and redemptive communal life. In Levinas, it becomes ethics as first philosophy and justice through the third party. In Arendt, it becomes the political condition of plurality and the right to belong to a world where one can act and be recognized.

The profound influence, then, is not reducible to a shared doctrine. It is a shared resistance to abstraction. Against philosophies that begin with consciousness, system, state, race, nation, or Being, these thinkers begin again from the human other: the neighbor, the stranger, the face, the fellow citizen, the refugee, the one who speaks, suffers, answers, and appears. That is the political-philosophical legacy of Jewish relational ethics in their work.

Their common lesson is political as well as theological. A society that instrumentalizes persons, excludes communities, absolutizes sovereignty, or dissolves plurality betrays the relational basis of human dignity. In this sense, modern Jewish philosophy does not merely preserve a religious ethic; it offers a fundamental critique of modern domination. The neighbor is not an accessory to spiritual life. The neighbor is where philosophy, politics, and the divine are tested.

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