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Jacob Taubes Jacob Taubes. From Cult to Culture: Fragments Toward a Critique of Historical Reason. Edited by Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Amir Engel. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. pp. cm. $24.95, paper, ISBN 978-0-8047-3984-9. Jacob Taubes. Occidental Eschatology. Translated with a Preface by David Ratmoko. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. xxiii + 215 pp. $21.95, paper, ISBN 978-0-8047-6029-4. Reviewed by Nitzan Lebovic Published on H-Judaic (March, 2011) Commissioned by Jason Kalman (Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion) The academic folklore around Jacob Taubes ing distinguished scholars and politicians; for se‐ could fll a few volumes of The Best Academic ducing women around the world, including in the Gossip, if such a thing existed. (It’s a great wonder ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Jerusalem; and that no one has ever thought to publish something for possibly causing the suicide of his ex-wife Su‐ like that; why limit academic gossip to its literal san Taubes (b. Feldman, 1928-69), an exceptional meaning? As we can see from the stories about thinker in her own right. Taubes’s conflicted spirit Taubes, gossip can be tightly interwoven with an found a haven in the stormy intellectual atmos‐ academic’s intellect and worldview). Among the phere of post-Holocaust German and German- many stories--some well-known professors would Jewish academia. His rivals were often those he swear them true--Taubes is famous for having most loved and admired, and his relationship forged items in his academic vitae while teaching with Gershom Scholem is a case study of this. Be‐ at Harvard and inventing a whole bibliography tween the early 1950s and late 1970s Taubes ad‐ on the spot when ambushed by a group of profes‐ mired Scholem and simultaneously attacked him. sors; for embarrassing and sometimes humiliat‐ The best example of this schizophrenic relation‐ H-Net Reviews ship can be seen in Taubes’s plan in the late 1970s thetic and political implications. His ideas are as to organize an “anti-festschrift” for Scholem, an brilliant as they are inconsistent and unground‐ effort that was blocked when Scholem learnt ed--many of his lectures ended with a soliloquy about it, and warned the president of the Freie about the gaps and absences behind all kinds of Universitaet in Berlin that any such publication identities and traditions, emphasizing the lack of would make him turn against the university as a continuity or instable identity rather than its co‐ whole. In spite of his exceptional sense of rivalry, herence. Taubes was a sad and a sick man (he was or perhaps because of it, Taubes is known as one diagnosed and hospitalized with a clinical depres‐ of the most brilliant thinkers of the postwar gen‐ sion that he discusses openly in his letters), but eration--a generation that included some of also a man of exceptional erudition who looked at Taubes’s own teachers--Scholem and Leo Strauss, the world from a post-Holocaust and post-apoca‐ Martin Buber and Ernst Cassirer, Hugo Bergman lyptic perspective, with a black sense of humor and, less directly but no less importantly, Walter and a cynical view of the habits and norms of the Benjamin and Franz Rosenzweig. Among his disci‐ world. Taubes’s fnal, agonized conclusion was a ples or intellectual descendants are many of the tortured reflection on the demise of democracy contemporary world’s academic aristocracy, and the failed hope for the independence of the among them--to name just a few--Jan and Aleida free spirit. He chose to focus on those neglected Assmann, Susan Sontag , Avital Ronell, Peter Slo‐ thresholds in Western culture--for example the terdeijk, and Giorgio Agamben, who did not study forgotten community of Christian Jews in or work with Taubes, but has admitted the impor‐ Jerusalem, shortly before the destruction of the tance of his lessons to contemporary critical temple--that occupy the liminal space between thinking. From Taubes’s students and friends one conflicting worldviews. Such thresholds were as finds as many stories about his cruelty towards provocative as they were fascinating and fruitful. those he disliked or failed to appreciate as stories For Taubes those liminal areas allowed a struc‐ about his extraordinary intellectual perfor‐ tural critique that crossed national boundaries mances, exhibited in nightlong monologues in and conventional historical divisions. The gap in which he would interpret and recite--from memo‐ time separating Paul from modern thinkers was ry--whole midrashic tales with their Halachic con‐ less important to him than how accurately Paul or text, complete philological tractates originating Freud traced the threshold between Judaism and from the fathers of the church or Marcionite Christianity, or other “public enemies.” As Taubes Gnosticism, reaching the contemporary artistic, described it in his scandalous lifelong admiration political, or literary unconscious. Taubes, accord‐ and simultaneous critique of the “Crown Jurist of ing to both rumor and the scarce written word-- the Third Reich,” Carl Schmitt, implying the fa‐ his dissertation, Occidental Eschatology, is the mous distinction in Schmitt’s 1932 The Concept of only complete book he ever wrote--was equally the Political: “This is where an almost ninety- well versed in Talmud and left Hegelianism, and year-old man sat with someone who was a little in Jewish, Gnostic, and Christian traditions. He over ffty and spelled out [Paul’s Romans] 9:11 ... freely alluded to ancient Jewish sources, the fa‐ ‘Enemy is not a private concept; enemy is hostis, thers of the church, scholastic theologians, and not inimicus, that’s not my enemy.’” Taubes places Enlightenment philosophers , ancient esoteric this within a modern post-Holocaust context, this writings, and modern revolutionary ones. His lec‐ time a Jew and a German, stemming from the old‐ tures, collected by his loyal students, zigzag be‐ er Jewish-Christian conflict that Paul confronted tween ancient philosophical and theological prin‐ in a direct, often anti- Jewish, manner: “And this is ciples, medieval scholasticism, and modern aes‐ the point I challenged Schmitt on, that he doesn’t 2 H-Net Reviews see this dialectic that moves Paul and that the edge and erudition as a way to move forward be‐ Christian church after 70 has forgotten, that he yond any simplistic solution or closure, be it na‐ adopted not a text but a tradition, that is, the folk tionalism, religious identity, or any social role. traditions of church anti-Semitism, onto which he, Occidental Eschatology--an indirect attack on in 1933-36, in his uninhibited fashion, went on to Taubes’s professors in Zürich[3]--progressed from graft the racist theozoology. That is something a revolutionary and apocalyptic Jewish tradition that he, the most important state law theorist, did to the hidden “eschatological moment” within indeed receive as a lesson.”[1] The interpretation German Idealism. “The historical place of revolu‐ of Romans 9 was mentioned as a thread that both tionary apocalypticism is Israel. Israel aspires and connects and separates the Jew and the Christian, attempts to ‘turn back’ [Umkehr].... The pathos of the German Jew and the German. Indeed, the gap revolution defines Israel’s attitude to life” (p. 15). has been opened by Paul--“remember that Paul’s Through the centuries and the legacy of a Paulini‐ appointed task is not that of an apostle to the Gen‐ an-monotheistic world, Taubes reaches from Is‐ tiles, but that of an apostle from the Jews to the rael to Kant, no less: “In a nearly forgotten essay Gentiles ... he introduces the concept of the rem‐ about Das Ende aller Dinge [The End of All nant and speaks of pas Israel”--but the responsi‐ Things] ... the thought of ‘the End of all Time’ has bility for a tendentious understanding of his in‐ ‘something horrifying about it because it leads, as tentions lies on Schmitt’s shoulders.[2] it were, to the edge of an abyss,’ the abyss of rea‐ The importance of the new Stanford transla‐ son, ‘yet there is also something compelling about tions of Taubes’s small (but not modest) oeuvre it, because one cannot help but keep looking back cannot be understood without this short introduc‐ at it in horror’” (p. 140). tion. The translation of the two key texts Taubes “Keep looking back in horror” is indeed published in his lifetime (in contrast to the post‐ Taubes’s lesson, found in the least expected spot humous The Political Theology of Paul [2004]), the of all, at the heart of Kantian philosophy. Yet, it is first as a whole, the second only as individual es‐ a classic Taubesian trick he plays on his readers says, is an essential contribution to the contempo‐ or listeners, trying to prove to them that they, his rary understanding of such topics as political the‐ audience, are speaking the prophecy unintention‐ ology, religion and violence, and religious hatred. ally but no less profoundly. Taubes’s attempt to create the conditions of possi‐ The book as a whole is speaking “Taubesian” bility in ancient esoteric texts has won much ac‐ introspections without ever admitting the lines claim since the revival of interest in religion and separating the personal from the impersonal. theology in the early twenty-first century. The two Taubes, who identified his academic role with the texts before us, Taubes’s 1947 dissertation Occi‐ political and philosophical position of the dental Eschatology--wonderfully translated and stranger ever estranging social norms, reached introduced by David Ratmoko--and a collection of the limit of alienation: Apocalypse is all about the Taubes’s essays from the next four decades--first stranger in exile--exile that is a mental-psycholog‐ published in German in the mid 1990s--demon‐ ical state, a political and an intellectual state.
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    Philosophy in Review XXX (2010), no. 6 Jacob Taubes Occidental Eschatology. Translated with a Preface by David Ratmoko. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2009. 228 pages US$60.00 (cloth ISBN 978-0-8047-6028-7); US$21.95 (paper ISBN 978-0-8047-6029-4) Jacob Taubes From Cult to Culture: Fragments Towards a Critique of Historical Reason. Edited by Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Amir Engel, with an Introduction by Aleida Assmann, Jan Assmann, and Wolf-Daniel Hartwich. Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press 2010. 456 pages US$70.00 (cloth ISBN 978-0-8047-3983-2); US$24.95 (paper ISBN 978-0-8047-3984-9) Jacob Taubes (1923-1987) did not leave behind a large body of work. At the time of his death his only book, based on his doctoral thesis and published in 1947, had long been out of print. He had, however, devoted students who sought to make his teachings, essays, and other interventions public. The posthumous publication in 1987 of a small pamphlet on Carl Schmitt (Ad Carl Schmitt. Gegenstrebige Fügung), and in 1993 of his seminar on St. Paul (translated into English in 2004), brought his ideas to the attention of a wider public. Then in 1996 Von Kult zur Kultur, a collection of his essays, was published and is now available in an English version. Taubes was born in Vienna to a family of rabbinical scholars. He moved to Switzerland in 1936 where he pursued rabbinical studies. From 1942 on, he also pursued university studies in Basel and in Zurich, where he was exposed to the teachings of the theologians Karl Barth and Urs von Balthasar as well as the controversial jurist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt.
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