Jacob Taubes: Madman, Leftist, Fascist, Genius?

by Daniel Miller

This essay appears in Issue 2 of the Mars Review of Books. Visit the MRB store here.

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Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes

by Jerry Z. Muller

Princeton University Press, 656 pp., $35.99

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When Jacob Taubes, scion of rabbinic aristocracy, international wanderer, and object of love, fear, fascination, and hatred died in Berlin on March 21, 1987, he hadn’t published a book since his doctoral dissertation 40 years earlier and the book was long out of print and barely read.

Thirty-five years later, with four Taubes books available in English (the doctoral thesis Occidental Eschatology, a collection of essays From Cult to Culture, a short book about his famous encounter with notorious “Crown Jurist of the Third Reich” Carl Schmitt, and a transcript of his last testament The Political Theology of Paul) and now this extraordinarily detailed biography, Taubes is recapturing a special position in contemporary thought, in the station between apocalyptic politics and messianic nihilism—where it seems that every other field of thought has also now arrived.