Martin Buber, a Jewish Austrian, was born in 1878 and died in 1965, at the age of 87. Buber’s childhood was spent in Vienna, which was at the time the capital of the soon-to-fall Austro-Hungarian empire, which dissolved in the wake of the First World War. Raised by his grandparents on his father’s side—his parents divorced when he was a young child—Buber matured into adulthood with a significant amount of wealth thanks to the financial background of his grandfather. From his adolescence, Buber showed a profound ability to learn languages, learning Hebrew, German, and Polish as modern languages, and learning Latin, Greek, French, English, and Italian later as academic interests. In 1899, at the age of 21, Martin met Paula Winkler, whom he would later marry, and with whom he would have two children (son Rafael and daughter Eva). Paula would die in 1958, seven years before Martin’s own death in 1965.

An academic from the start, Buber spent the first years of his career doing publishing and translating work, interested especially in language and poetry. It was not until his later thirties that he began to show interest and develop research in the areas that would serve as the foundation of his work I and Thou.