Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes

Description

Scion of a distinguished line of Talmudic scholars, Jacob Taubes (1923–1987) was an intellectual impresario whose inner restlessness led him from prewar Vienna to Zurich, Israel, and Cold War Berlin. Regarded by some as a genius, by others as a charlatan, Taubes moved among yeshivas, monasteries, and leading academic institutions on three continents. He wandered between Judaism and Christianity, left and right, piety and transgression. Along the way, he interacted with many of the leading minds of the age, from Leo Strauss and Gershom Scholem to Herbert Marcuse, Susan Sontag, and Carl Schmitt. Professor of Apocalypse is the definitive biography of this enigmatic figure and a vibrant mosaic of twentieth-century intellectual life. Jerry Muller shows how Taubes’s personal tensions mirrored broader conflicts between religious belief and scholarship, allegiance to Jewish origins and the urge to escape them, tradition and radicalism, and religion and politics. He traces Taubes’s emergence as a prominent interpreter of the Apostle Paul, influencing generations of scholars, and how his journey led him from crisis theology to the Frankfurt School, and from a radical Hasidic sect in Jerusalem to the center of academic debates over Gnosticism, secularization, and the revolutionary potential of apocalypticism. Professor of Apocalypse offers an unforgettable account of an electrifying world of ideas, focused on a charismatic personality who thrived on controversy and conflict. Dedication Contents Introduction: Why Taubes? 1 Yichus: Vienna, 1923–36 2 Coming of Age in Switzerland, 1936–47 3 Intellectual Roots, GrandThemes, 1941–46 4 Occidental Eschatology and Beyond, 1946–47 5 New York and the Jewish Theological Seminary, 1947–49 6 Jerusalem, 1949–52 7 Making It? 1952–56 8 Columbia Years, 1956–66: The Merchant of Ideas and the Invention of Religious Studies 9 Between New York and Berlin, 1961–66 10 Berlin: Impresario of Theory 11 The Apocalyptic Moment 12 Deradicalization and Crisis, 1969–75 13 A Wandering Jew: Berlin–Jerusalem–Paris, 1976–81 14 “Ach, ja, Taubes . . .”: A Character Sketch 15 Schmitt and Political Theology Revisited, 1982–86 16 Final Act, 1986–87 17 The Afterlives of Jacob Taubes Conclusion Acknowledgments Abbreviations Notes Primary Sources Index A Note on the Type