When Jacob Taubes died in 1987 at the age of sixty-four, he had published only one book of his own, and that had been four decades earlier (when he was twenty-four), a text difficult to find even in academic libraries. Just after his death, Merve Verlag, a small left-wing publishing house founded by some of his students, produced a booklet that bore his name as author, comprised of two talks that Taubes had given about his ambivalent relationship with the right-wing political theorist Carl Schmitt, supplemented by some correspondence.Footnote ¹ Though he produced a flood of letters, a form in which mental inhibitions on expressing his thoughts were lower, Taubes found it difficult to write for publication. He died as the author of a single book—long out of print, and barely read.

Now, twenty-three years after his death, three books he wrote are available in English—books already published in German, and translated into a number of other languages. A series of lectures that he delivered not long before his death was transcribed and edited by Aleida Assmann and other friends, published as Die politische Theologie des Paulus (1993). An English translation by Dana Hollander was published by Stanford University Press in 2004 as The Political Theology of Paul. That book offered an interpretation of Paul as the great antinomian of the Western tradition, and, by making Paul “kosher” for the political left, led to a string of interpretations by postmodern leftist luminaries, most notably Giorgio Agamben. Before publishing the lectures, Assmann saw to the republication of Taubes's first book, Abendländische Eschatologie (second edition, 1991; a third edition, with an afterword by Martin Treml, appeared in 2007), a volume now translated by David Ratmoko and under review here. Taubes had published a handful of essays and articles, in German, English, Hebrew, and French. Not long before he died he assembled some of them, and asked that they be published after his death. Here again Alaida Assmann took the lead, editing, together with Jan Assmann and a few collaborators, a collection under the title Vom Kult zur Kultur: Bausteine zu einer Kritik der historischen Vernunft (1996). Now translated into English, it is second of the two books under review.

In reviewing works in translation, one must consider the substantive content of the volumes as well as the relative success of the process of translation. Translation has become an underrated form of scholarly creativity. Words are multivalent, and recapturing the intended meaning depends in part on knowing the subject matter of the work being translated, as well as the context in which it was written. Translating Taubes is a particular challenge, for his works cover a broad historical swath, and draw upon a variety of disciplines, including philosophy, theology, and religious studies. Moreover, many were written as responses to intellectual interlocutors or as challenges to received opinion, leaving the translator with the task of recapturing relevant contemporary allusions.

Let us turn first to Occidental Eschatology, the published version of Taubes's doctoral dissertation at the University of Zurich, completed when he was twenty-three. This is the work of a very bright, remarkably erudite, and intellectually ambitious young man, working hard to convey just how bright and erudite he is. Written under minimal supervision, it is also the book of an author trying to figure out how to write, and changing intellectual register from a beginning composed in the mode of the existentialist expressionism of the 1920s (à la Rosenzweig and Heidegger) and then moving on to the more academic genres of Religionsgeschichte and Ideengeschichte. Digressive and abounding in casual overgeneralization, the book is derivative for long stretches. (Over time, Taubes became sufficiently conscious of its faults that he personally removed copies of the book from academic libraries.) Yet the book is also remarkable in its own way.

The book has a major and a secondary theme. The secondary theme is that the notion that history has a linear direction, rather than a recurrent, nature-like pattern, is a product of the eschatological habit of mind, with origins in the Hebrew Bible. The author claims that the notion of an end-time to which history is heading makes it possible to view history as a progressive process. The book traces the origins of this eschatological vision in modern German philosophy to the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, medieval transformations, and ultimate secularization. This secondary theme concerns the origins and development of the philosophy of history.

The major theme treats the history of apocalypticism and of Gnosticism. Both share the belief that the existing order (or existing world) is evil and corrupt. Apocalyptics search for signs that this order is coming to an end and engage in action to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth. Gnostics convey knowledge about just how fallen the world really is, and claim to know of an alternative, more perfect order. Both are antinomian. But apocalyptics are more active and oriented to external transformation, while Gnostics are more inclined to transform the self through special knowledge. The book seeks to convey both the history of these propensities and what Taubes calls “the revolutionary pathos of apocalypticism and Gnosis” (Occidental Eschatology, 38–9).This revolutionary pathos runs through much of the book and through Taubes's subsequent work as well. Apocalyptic movements inevitably fail, at least by their own standards. But, Taubes asserts, they serve as the motor force of history, transforming old orders into new ones. Their failure leads to a new round of Gnosticism, which serves as a subterranean stream of discontent until the next round of apocalyptic enthusiasm and action.

Drawing from a diverse range of writers and scholars, Taubes tries to trace these themes through the history of the West, from the book of Daniel through the Zealots, early Christianity, Joachim of Fiore, the Anabaptists and Puritans, and then through the secularization of eschatology, ultimately in Marxism. He also takes a stab—quite unusual for his time—at exploring the parallels in the development of Christian eschatological strains from Joachim to the Reformation radical, Thomas Müntzer, and to Jewish strains from the Zohar through Lurianic Kabbalah, ending in Shabetai Tsevi. To be sure, much of the scholarship is secondhand, but Taubes was able to draw together work from a remarkable range of scholars (including Martin Buber on biblical theocracy; Hans Jonas on Gnosticism; Herbert Grundmann on Joachim; Ernst Benz on Franciscanism; Ernst Bloch on Thomas Müntzer; Hans Urs von Balthasar on early modern German thought; and Karl Löwith's From Hegel to Nietzsche, from which Taubes drew most of his interpretation of nineteenth-century thought). His bold attempt was to synthesize this diverse material into a coherent narrative and analytic framework. Aspiration exceeds execution, for sometimes the material seems more cut and pasted than fully integrated. The reader is likely to be intellectually stimulated and exasperated by turn.

The English translation, by David Ratmoko, does a reasonable job of conveying the sense of the original, no mean achievement. Though there are occasional misinterpretations of significant terms or phrases, these rarely negate the sense of the passage in question (for example: when the text speaks of eschatology as providing a vision of the future Kingdom of God, “die den gültigen Horizont eines Lebenskreises sprengt,” it means not that eschatology “bursts through the established horizons of a cycle of life,” [85] but rather that it bursts through the established culture or civilization). The translator also provides a preface that includes some useful (and some misleading) biographical information, and a not-so-successful attempt to summarize the themes of the book.

Occidental Eschatology is a difficult introduction to Taubes's thought. But now readers of English have a somewhat more accessible alternative in the collection From Cult to Culture: Fragments Toward a Critique of Historical Reason, which includes essays published by Taubes from the late 1940s through the mid-1980s. Based on the German volume, the majority of the twenty-two collected essays were originally published in English, and the editors of the English edition have wisely gone back to the originals wherever possible. The volume begins with a brief but very useful preface by the editors, Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Amir Engel, followed by a translation of the long introduction to the German edition written by Aleida Assmann, Jan Assmann, and Wolf-Daniel Hartwich. That introduction is often insightful but written in a highly allusive academic German (it is no coincidence that there is no German phrase for “carrying one's learning lightly”), and many allusions are likely to be lost on the English-speaking reader. Moreover, the translation of the highly compressed German occasionally strays beyond the border of comprehension. (Again, a single example must suffice. A sentence from the German original means something like this: “The fundamental chords of Barth's thought [and incidentally of Hegel's as well] are the conceptual pairs of self-division/alienation on one hand and reconciliation/redemption on the other.” Instead, [on page xxxix of the translation] we get “The conceptual pairs of diremption and alienation as well as the reconciliation and redemption constitute the fundamental chord in Barth and Hegel.”)

Fonrobert and Engel provide useful notes with detailed bibliographic information on sources, translations, and sometimes the context in which the pieces were written. These contribute added value even to readers of the German edition.

Both the preface and the introduction emphasize the polemical impetus behind much of Taubes's writing. Especially after he established himself in Germany (where he began teaching at the Free University in Berlin in 1961, after stints at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Hebrew University, Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia universities), Taubes could motivate himself to write for publication mainly when taking issue with some interlocutor or received opinion (negation was one of his favorite words). This provides another stumbling block to easy comprehension, especially for the later essays—many taken from Taubes's contributions to annual conferences of Poetik und Hermeneutik, a group of German academic philosophers, literary scholars, theologians and historians—because one needs to know a good deal about Taubes's interlocutors (such as Hans Blumenberg and Odo Marquard) to make sense of his responses. Fortunately for readers of this journal, most of the essays of greatest interest to scholars of Jewish studies are from the 1950s and 1960s and were written in English.

The essays have been arranged by the German editors not in chronological order, but into four broad rubrics: “Law, History, Messianism”; “World Alienation: Gnosticism and Its Consequences”; “Theology after the Copernican Turn” and “Religion and Culture.” Significant essays on Jewish topics include “The Issue between Judaism and Christianity: Facing up to the Unresolvable Difference,” “The Price of Messianism,” “Martin Buber and the Philosophy of History,” and “Nachman Krochmal and Modern Historicism.” Also relevant is an essay on the idiosyncratic German Jewish biblical interpreter, Oskar Goldberg, published as “From Cult to Culture.”

The volume begins with one of Taubes's late essays, “The Price of Messianism,” an inquiry into what he sees as the shortcomings of Gershom Scholem's understanding of messianism, especially Scholem's insistence on distinct Jewish as opposed to Christian patterns of messianism. A recurrent theme in Taubes, from his doctoral dissertation to his final lectures on Paul, is to see Jesus and Paul as figures within the Jewish tradition rather than beyond it, one of many forms of internal self-critique and attempts at collective self-transformation in Jewish history. Whatever the truth value of this claim, it captured Taubes's sense of himself as a Jewish antinomian (a self-image not confined to him alone).

One of the earliest essays, by contrast, presents a strikingly contrasting view: “The Issue between Judaism and Christianity,” which appeared in Commentary in 1953, at a time when distinctions between Judaism and Christianity were being underplayed by influential writers such as Will Herberg. Much of recent Jewish thought, Taubes contended, with Rosenzweig especially in mind, was overawed by the historical fact of Christianity's success. “Jewish thinkers like Hans Joachim Schoeps and Will Herberg have become so spellbound by Christianity's historical success that they try to give a ‘theological’ justification” (46). By contrast, Taubes argues that “the Christian religion in general, and the body of the Christian church in particular, is of no religious relevance to the Jewish faith.” Indeed, “From the Jewish point of view, the division of the divinity into ‘Father’ and ‘Son’ splits the divine essence; it was, and is, regarded by synagogue quite simply as blasphemy” (48). He was also critical of the attempt to define monotheism as the defining element of Judaism, pointing to nonmonotheistic propensities in Kabbalah. No, he insisted; since the time of Ezra, the defining element has been law, halakhah: “All theological speculations are secondary to this” (53). Many modern Jews have accepted the notion that Judaism is “legalistic,” the essence of the Pauline critique: “Modern Jewish thinking is in large part a prisoner of this antinomianism, which pervades modern thought in general. …” (58). But, Taubes asserts, “Halacha is a structure in which a considerable variety of religious experience is integrated” (54), from rationalism to mysticism. And he defends the halakhic emphasis on “the rational and everyday sobriety of justice” against the fleeting power of love, or the quest for “the ecstasy and delirium of man's soul” (57) (what we now call “spirituality”).

Moreover, Taubes contends, from the Jewish point of view Christianity is not a major phenomenon. “Christian history, Jesus's claim to the title of Messiah, and Paul's theology of Christ as the end of the law, are not at all ‘unique events’ for Judaism, but things that have recurred in the Jewish pattern of religious existence” (54). “Antinomian messianism” is a recurrent phenomenon in Jewish history.

Were one to read this article alone, one might conclude that Taubes opposed antinomianism. In fact, he was attracted to it (both in theory and in practice) and especially to the figure of Paul. But in this case, Taubes's inclinations took second place to the opportunity to challenge reigning opinion.

Many of the other essays in the book draw upon themes and material from Occidental Eschatology: the creative power of apocalypticism; eschatology and the philosophy of history; and Gnosticism as a recurrent phenomenon, down to twentieth-century surrealism. Sometimes the themes are reconsidered from a variety of angles. At times the material is simply recycled from his dissertation.

Additional insights appear in virtually every essay of the collection. The Krochmal essay, for example, includes an excellent, brief discussion of the fundamental ahistoricism of rabbinic thought, a propensity reinforced by the reaction against Sabbatianism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Or take this formulation: “It is often overlooked but nevertheless fundamental for the understanding of the developments of historic studies since the seventeenth century that the historic consciousness, while heir to the tradition of the historic religions, Judaism and Christianity, acts as a critical, even as a liquidating, agent for the tradition of historical religions” (41). Elsewhere in the same essay, the reader finds an excellent summary of Leo Strauss's distinction between medieval and modern Enlightenment (without an attribution to Strauss).

The blurb on the back of both volumes states that Jacob Taubes was “one of the great Jewish intellectuals of the twentieth century.” The scion of a minor hasidic dynasty and of many generations of talmudic scholars, that was certainly his aspiration, though readers of these volumes may well regard the characterization as hyperbolic. Yet readers will see that Taubes's mind was wide-ranging, frequently penetrating, and eminently capable of thinking against the grain of received opinion. He specialized in insights—especially in tracing parallels in different religious and historical contexts. Of these, Siegfried Kracauer, in a comment on Taubes's comparison of Gnosticism and Surrealism noted that Taubes's structural comparisons “are as misleading as they are revelatory. They are misleading because they are achieved at a great distance from the given material” (112). Yet, Kracauer continued, “this same formidable distance from the material, which is responsible for the dubiousness of the structural comparisons … also enables them to play a revelatory role. Taken from a great height, they remind one of aerial photographs; just like these, they allow one to catch a glimpse of normally invisible configurations of the broader landscape they survey… .” (112). That seems like a fairer verdict on Jacob Taubes. But thanks to the editorial labors of Fonrobert and Engel, and the translation assistance of Mara H. Benjamin and William Rauscher, readers of English can now judge for themselves.