“I am human, I consider nothing human alien to me.”

 Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto. “I am human, I consider nothing human alien to me.” 

         Publius Terentius Afer, an African, a Berber, was born a slave near Carthage in what is today Libya. He was taken to Rome by his owner, the Roman Senator Terentius Lucanus, from whom he took the name Terentius, “Terence.” His patron educated him, then freed him because of his unusual intellectual talents. In his short life (he likely died on a sea voyage to Greece when he was perhaps in his mid-twenties) he wrote six plays, still extant. As a man who underwent significant social and cultural transformations on his journey from the margins to the center of his world, he was uniquely qualified to know the meaning of homo sum . . . , his most famous line.

        So too Martin Buber, who was born in Vienna at the heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was raised on its fringes in what is today Ukraine and spoke Polish as the language of his childhood schooling. Decades later, Buber became a German citizen. He lived in Germany, first in Berlin, then in Heppenheim, from about 1900 to 1938. He had a very productive career as a writer and German-Jewish cultural leader in the German-speaking world until he was forced by Nazism to emigrate to Palestine at the age of sixty. This was ten years before the State of Israel was born. Hebrew then became the language of his daily life and writings for his last 27 years. He put years of effort into advancing dialogue between Jews and Arabs in Palestine.

        In spite of the differences between Terence’s trajectory and Buber’s, Buber, like Terence, knew the power of “I am human, I consider nothing human alien to me” from within.