Blake Smith
Tablet, Feb. 22, 2022
“Taubes’ lectures represent one of the most powerful critiques of liberalism, understood not only as a political philosophy, but as a spiritual disposition, or rather a spiritual desiccation, by which liberals neutralize the radical promises of faith.”
The publication of Professor of Apocalypse, the first comprehensive biography of Jacob Taubes in English, seems likely to fuel a revival of the reputation of one of the most significant yet underappreciated thinkers of the late 20th century. In his day, Taubes was hardly obscure, as evidenced by his relationships with figures like Carl Schmitt, Gershom Scholem, Leo Strauss, Susan Sontag, Emil Cioran, and many luminaries he influenced or enraged. As his papers and correspondence are translated, the challenge of Taubes’ thought will only grow greater and more urgent, pressing uncomfortably on those who wish to hold onto both the promises of the God of the Bible and to our heritage of political liberalism.
A scholar of religious history, and the son of Zurich’s chief rabbi, Taubes was an expert on Jewish and Christian ideas about the end of the world, and a wide-ranging political thinker. His rootedness in core Western ideas about messianism and God made him an uncomfortable interlocutor for those who wished to burnish political liberalism by showing how it could be extricated from, or coexist happily with, ideas about a divinity who would redeem mankind through a chosen messenger.
In a series of lectures to an audience of Protestant scholars in Heidelberg, Germany, a few weeks before his death on March 21, 1987, Taubes argued that the most important political question is the question of Messiah. The pattern of our political and religious life together, and the meaning of our individual lives, depend on its answer. The question is not who, among the many candidates put forward by various communities of believers, he is—nor whether he has already come, is still alive, is yet to appear, etc. These questions will appear important only if we have already answered the question of whether, in the first place, we want Messiah. Against such a desire stands all our yearning, often unspoken but constant and strong, for things to remain the same, our complicity with the powers of the present world.
These lectures were, in many ways, given under questionable auspices. Taubes had been invited to speak on the apocalypse, his area of expertise, for a conference on the theme “Time is Pressing.” He began by informing his audience that time was indeed “pressing, for me, because of an incurable disease.” Given that this would be his last chance to speak to an audience, he would, therefore, talk not so much about the apocalypse as about the Messiah, as understood by a thinker whom, Taubes insisted, exemplified Jewish messianism: Paul of Tarsus.
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