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Buber was the son of Carl Buber, an agronomist, and his wife--both assimilated Jews. When Martin was three his mother left his father, and the boy was brought up by his grandparents in Lemberg (now Lviv, Ukraine). The search after the lost mother became a strong motive for his dialogical thinking--his I-Thou philosophy.

Solomon Buber (1827-1906), the Lemberg grandfather, a wealthy philanthropist, dedicated his life to the critical edition of Midrashim, a part of the nonlegal rabbinic lore. His works show him as a Hebrew gentleman-scholar who was also interested in Greek linguistic parallels. His wife, Adele, was even more a product of the 19th-century Enlightenment movement among eastern European Jewry that sought to modernize Jewish culture. Though strongly influenced by both his grandparents and taught Hebrew by Solomon, young Martin was drawn more to Schiller's poems than to the Talmud. His inclination toward general culture was strengthened by his grammar-school education, which provided him with an excellent grounding in the classics. During his adolescence his active participation in Jewish religious observances ceased altogether.

In his university days--he attended the universities of Vienna, Berlin, Leipzig, and Zürich--Buber studied philosophy and art. His doctoral dissertation (Vienna, 1904) dealt with the theories of individuation in the thought of two great mystics, Nicholas of Cusa and Jakob Böhme, but it was Friedrich Nietzsche's proclamation of heroic nihilism and his criticism of modern culture that exerted the greatest influence on Buber at that time. The Nietzschean influence was reflected in Buber's turn to Zionism and its call for a return to roots and a more wholesome culture.

On the invitation of the Zionist leader Theodor Herzl, in 1901 he became editor of the Zionist weekly Die Welt ("The World"). But soon a significant difference of opinion developed between the two men. Buber favoured an overall spiritual renewal and, at its core, immediate agricultural settlements in Palestine, as against Herzl's emphasis on diplomacy to bring about the establishment of a Jewish homeland secured by public law. Consequently, Buber resigned his post the same year he assumed it; he remained a Zionist but generally stood in opposition to official party policies and later to official state policies of Israel. He was among the early protagonists of a Hebrew university in Jerusalem.