Jacob Taubes: Professor of Apocalypse

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, the United States, and Cold War Berlin. Regarded by some as a genius, and by others as a charlatan, Taubes moved among yeshivas, monasteries, and leading academic institutions, including Columbia University. 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. This wide-ranging study 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.