The David B. Keidan Collection of Digital Images from the Central Zionist Archives (via Harvard University Library) · Public domain

Buber's central idea was a distinction between two ways of meeting the world: an I-Thou relationship, where another person is encountered directly, against an I-It relationship, which treats them as an object to use. He set it out in Ich und Du (1923), then spent much of the following decade translating the Hebrew Bible into German. Born in Vienna to an observant Jewish family, he broke with that upbringing to pursue secular philosophy, but stayed engaged with the Zionist movement for nearly fifty years. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature ten times and the Peace Prize seven, without ever winning either.