TATTOOING SEE BODILY MARKS
TAUBES, JAKOB. Jakob Taubes was born in Vienna
on February 25, 1923. In 1937, as a result of the appoint-
ment of his father, Zwi Taubes, as chief rabbi to Zürich, he
moved to Switzerland and survived the Nazi persecution. In
1943 he became a rabbi. In 1947 he completed his studies
in philosophy at Zürich and published Abendländische Escha-
tologie (Western Eschatology).
In 1948 he moved to the United States, where he mar-
ried Susan Anima Feldman. He obtained a post at the Jewish
Theological Seminary in New York, where he worked with
Louis Finkelstein, S. Libermann, and Lewis L. Strauss. In
1949 he met Gershom Scholem (1897–1982). However, his
association with Scholem was not successful: personal and
theoretical reasons led to a quick breakdown in their rela-
tions.
He returned to the United States in 1953 and after
being awarded a Rockefeller scholarship he spent the next
two years at Harvard University. In the academic year 1955–
1956 he taught at Princeton University. In 1956 he was a
professor of history and philosophy of religion at New York’s
Columbia University, where he remained for ten years. He
met Peter Szondi (1893–) and Theodor Adorno (1903–
1969). In 1966 he was appointed as the chair of Jewish
studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, a post that he held
until 1979, when he took charge of the new Department of
Hermeneutics. During this same period he taught at the
Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris. In Berlin Taubes
became an icon of the student movement.
Along with Jürgen Habermas (1925–) and Dieter Hein-
rich (1927–), he was editor of the Theorie series of
Suhrkamp. In 1983 the first of the three-volume Religions-
theorie und Politische Theologie was published and dedicated
to Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), whom Taubes had met in
1978 and with whom he had remained in touch. The history
of this working relationship was the subject of his book Ge-
genstrebige Fügung. In 1987 the Heidelberg Seminar on the
Letters to the Romans took place and was eventually published
under the title Die politische Theologie des Paulus. After being
ill on a number of occasions and spending time in nursing
homes, he died on March 21, 1987.
Taubes’s work was based on identifying a link between
religion and politics. Beginning in the early 1980s he pre-
pared work that would lead to the three-volume Religions-
theorie und Politische Theologie, an endeavor that had actually
begun in the 1950s when, after producing a work on political
philosophy and theology, he published two studies (Theology
and Political Theory and On the Symbolic Order of Modern
Democracy), the product of a detailed study of Schmitt’s
works; or earlier when, in Abendländische Eschatologie, the
only book published during his life, he attempted to return
to the problem of political theology, the source of which he
identified in the origins of Jewish theocracy. In this work,
a year after the publication of Lebendiges Judentum (Living
Judaism; the book by Zwi Taubes, in which the Zionist
standpoint appears as the only means of escape for European
Jewry), there is no reference to the so’ha; however, the whole
work is based on the need to question the historical position
reached without resorting to the solution proposed by his fa-
ther. A forerunner of the debate that followed concerning
modernity, despite being referred to by Karl Löwith (1897–
1973) in Meaning in History (1949), Abendländische Escha-
tologie remained forgotten for a long time. The work is an
attempt to examine the position in Western history of the
need for fulfillment specific to apocalyptics. It is divided into
four parts: the first identifies in Jewish apocalyptics and their
Gnostic expression “the essence of eschatology”; the second
is devoted to the “history of apocalyptics”; and the third and
fourth volumes are concerned with its definition, first theo-
logically and then philosophically, in modernity.
The history of philosophy and political theology are the
two pivotal themes of his work and they find full expression
in Paul’s (c. 3–c. 66) Messianism. At first Taubes attempted
to redefine the idea of Messianism in a different way from
Scholem; thus, in the seminar on the Letters to the Romans,
in an answer to the views of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–
1900), Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Karl Barth (1886–
1968), Schmitt, Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), and
Scholem himself, he returns Paul to his Jewish roots, believ-
ing that Paul’s antinomic Messianism, first of all, was the
only way to attain the fulfillment of the original apocalyptic
requirement of the end of history, without thereby resorting
to a dualist Gnostic or Marcionite solution, and also that it
represented the most appropriate way of dealing with the
question of Law, either the Torah or the Nomos, which
nonetheless found its most complete expression in Schmitt’s
concept of sovereignty. In short, through Paul, Taubes pro-
duces a detailed Messianic account of the two main problems
of the postmodern age: the end of history and the end of sov-
ereignty. In his opinion, following in the footsteps of Benja-
min, Pauline Messianism produced an upheaval of political
theology and a radical reconsideration of the history of phi-
losophy.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works by Jakob Taubes
Religionstheorie und Politische Theologie. Munich, 1983–1987.
Ad Carl Schmitt: Gegenstrebige Fügung. Berlin, 1987.
Abendländische Eschatologie. Munich, 1991.
Die politische Theologie des Paulus. Munich, 1993.
Vom Kult zur Kultur. Munich, 1996. A collection of essays.
Il prezzo del messianesimo: Lettere di Jacob Taubes a Gershom
Scholem e altri scritti. Macerata, Italy, 2000, with an unpub-
lished seminar on Benjamin’s thesis.
Messianismo e cultura. Milan, 2001.
Other Sources
On Taubes, see Norbert W. Bolz and Wolfgang Hübener’s collec-
tion Spiegel und Gleichnis: Festschrift für Jacob Taubes (Würz-TAUBES, JAKOB 9021