Professor of Apocalypse

The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes

Jerry Z. Muller

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780691231600
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Biographies de philosophes

The controversial Jewish thinker whose tortured path led him into the heart of twentieth-century intellectual life 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, and Cold War Berlin. Regarded by some as a genius, by others as a charlatan, Taubes moved among yeshivas, monasteries, and leading academic institutions on three continents. 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. Professor of Apocalypse is the definitive biography of this enigmatic figure and a vibrant mosaic of twentieth-century intellectual life.Jerry Muller 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. He traces Taubes's emergence as a prominent interpreter of the Apostle Paul, influencing generations of scholars, and how his journey led him from crisis theology to the Frankfurt School, and from a radical Hasidic sect in Jerusalem to the center of academic debates over Gnosticism, secularization, and the revolutionary potential of apocalypticism. Professor of Apocalypse offers an unforgettable account of an electrifying world of ideas, focused on a charismatic personality who thrived on controversy and conflict.

CHAPTER ONE

Yichus

VIENNA, 1923–36

JACOB TAUBES WAS descended from rabbinic nobility, in a culture in which distinguished lineage—yichus—meant a great deal. When Jacob entered the world in Vienna in 1923, he became the first member of his family born beyond the borders of Eastern Europe. He was raised in a family that spanned the cultures of Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jewry and German-speaking, central European Jewry, as well as the intellectual worlds of traditional Jewish piety and modern European scholarship. To understand Jacob Taubes, then, we must begin with those cultures and intellectual worlds.

From Galicia to Vienna

Until shortly before Jacob’s birth, his family had lived in Galicia. That region is no longer found on the map, a victim of the political transformations of the twentieth century. But Galicia was once a center of Jewish life, a heartland of the pietistic movement of Hasidism, and the birthplace of twentieth-century intellectual luminaries including the religious thinker Martin Buber, the novelist Shmuel Yosef Agnon, and the historian Salo Baron. For the century from the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars to the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Galicia was the largest province in the Austrian half of the empire. In 1867, as the German-speaking house of Habsburg tried to accommodate rising ethnic nationalist sentiment, Galicia was placed under the administration of its Polish nobility, and Polish became its official language. With the dissolution of the empire in the wake of the First World War, Galicia was incorporated into the newly founded state of Poland. After the Second World War, the eastern half of Galicia became part of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, and with the demise of the Soviet Union, part of Ukraine.

Among the more traditional Jews of eastern Galicia, from which the Taubes family sprang, the Galician dialect of Yiddish was the language of everyday conversation. Knowledge of Polish would have been more rare. But as a leader of the Jewish community in the town of Czernelica, Jacob’s grandfather, Zechariah Edelstein, would have needed a command of Polish, and this seems to be the language he spoke to his grandson Jacob in the 1920s and 1930s.¹

In the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, Jews poured westward out of Galicia. Hoping to escape the poverty of their homeland, Galician Jews streamed into the United States, into Germany and Hungary, and into Vienna, whose burgeoning Jewish population was increasingly comprised of immigrants from Galicia.

By virtue of its geography, politics, and culture, Galicia was at the boundary between East and West.

The German-speaking Jews of Germany and of the Habsburg Empire often referred to the Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe and Russia as Ostjuden—“Eastern Jews.” The distinction was not only one of geography: it also referred to a cultural, social, and economic gradient that descended as one moved eastward. Western Jews characterized themselves by their manners and respectability, which included Western styles of dress and deportment; by their attachment to Western high culture; and by their movement beyond “traditional” Jewish occupations, such as peddling, characteristic of a more backward economy, into shopkeeping, banking, journalism, and the learned professions. The distinction was also reflected in their conceptions of Jewish identity. That the Jews were both a nation and a religious group was taken for granted in the East, while in the West there were movements of religious reform that jettisoned the national element of Judaism and expunged references to it from the prayerbook.² Religious services in the East were frequent, disorderly, and emotional. In the West, they were rarer, more orderly, and somber. But the distinction between Eastern and Western Jews was evanescent. Western Jews were often Eastern Jews who had moved westward a generation or two earlier and had assimilated to their new circumstances. The adoption of European culture and of languages other than Yiddish went on within the communities of Eastern Europe as well. If the distinctions between Western and Eastern Jews were fleeting, the evaluation of what it meant to be Eastern was also shifting. The style of life deemed backward could also come to be regarded as authentic, while, in turn, the adoption of Western culture and manners could be deemed artificial and inauthentic.³

Jacob Taubes had a foot in each of these worlds.

Jacob’s Ancestry

Jacob Taubes descended from the Taubes, Eichenstein, and Edelstein families. They lived in a string of towns bounded by the Dniester River in the east and the Carpathian Mountains in the west, along a fifty-mile stretch from Stanislawow (now called Ivano-Frankivsk in Ukrainian) in the north, to Czernowitz (Chernivtsi) in the south. Jacob’s father came from Czernelica, a town in the region of Stanislawow. Were one to place the point of a compass in Czernelica and trace out a radius of one hundred miles, to the southeast, one would hit Iasi, a major center of Jewish life in Romania, where several generations of Taubeses served as rabbis. In the southwest, one would hit Sighet (the hometown of Eli Wiesel) and Satu Mare (Saint Mary’s), the Hungarian home of the Satmar dynasty of anti-Zionist Hasidic rabbis, who would exert a strong if intermittent attraction upon Jacob Taubes.

For Jews living in an age before the nation-state became the dominant political form in East-Central Europe, such political designations were by no means decisive. Their cultural horizons were only partially shaped by the shifting political borders of the multinational empires in which they lived. The Taubes, Eichenstein, and Edelstein family connections reached out beyond Galicia into Bukovina, Romania, and Hungary.

While there was no Jewish nobility in the sense of landowners of military origin, there was an aristocracy of the intellect and of the spirit: as one contemporary observer put it, “The post of rabbi functions as a letter of nobility.”⁴ Lineage (yichus) played a large role, and the Taubeses (like many rabbinic clans) traced their descent back to Rashi, the greatest of the medieval Jewish exegetes.⁵ The names Taubes, Edelstein, and Eichenstein all signaled ancestry in the rabbinic nobility.

The surnames themselves, however, were relatively new. They had been imposed by the budding bureaucratic state in order to keep track of the Jews as subjects, and as potential objects of taxation and conscription. In 1777, the Habsburg emperor Joseph II decreed that the Jews of Galicia and Bukovina would be given fixed, hereditary surnames. These new names were often determined by the emperor’s decidedly non-Jewish bureaucrats. Not infrequently, the names assigned were downright malicious. Jacob Taubes’s mother, Fanny, for example, was surnamed “Blind.”

FIGURE 1.1. Jacob Taubes’s Immediate Ancestors.

The origins of the name “Taubes” are ambiguous. It might have been derived from the German taub, meaning deaf. But more likely it was based upon the Yiddish feminine given name, “Toybe,” derived from the Yiddish word for dove, toyb.⁶ Yiddish orthography was not standardized in the nineteenth century, and the name was spelled in a variety of ways. Jews had traditionally referred to themselves by their given names and patronymic, and—in cases of distinction—by their towns of origin. Their given names were typically those of revered ancestors, and recurred frequently across generations. Such was the case of Jacob Taubes, born Jacob Neta Taubes, or in Hebrew “Yaakov.”

It was on his grandmother’s side that Jacob’s ancestry was particularly illustrious. His eighteenth-century progenitors included Yaakov Taubes of Lvov, who sired several generations of scholars. Yaakov’s son, Aharon Moshe Taubes of Sniatyn and Iasi (1787–1852)—Jacob’s great-great-great-grandfather—was a luminary of Talmudic scholarship. His glosses on the Talmud and its commentators, Karnei Re’em, were incorporated into the Vilna Shas, which became the standard edition for the modern study of the Talmud. The notes of his son, Shmuel Shmelke Taubes, also made it into the Vilna Shas.

Nineteenth-century Galicia was a center of Hasidism, and one of Jacob’s ancestors, Zwi-Hirsch Eichenstein of Zhidichov (1785–1831), was an early Hasidic wonder-rabbi, the founder of a minor Hasidic dynasty. Zwi-Hirsch was a tzaddik, a charismatic holy man. By virtue of his piety and lineage, the tzaddik was believed by his followers (Hasidim) to be able to intercede with God on their behalf. The sick, the blind, and the lame came to him in search of cures; childless wives in search of fertility; and businessmen in search of good fortune. Often there were formal pilgrimages to the rebbe, especially between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.⁷

Though Hasidism had about it an element of revolt against the perceived aridity of Talmudic learning, Zwi-Hirsch developed a particularly intellectualist brand of Hasidism. His best-known book, Ateret Zwi, was a commentary on the central text of Jewish mysticism, the Zohar, as well as on the great medieval kabbalist, Isaac Luria. But to say that Zwi-Hirsch was learned does not mean that he valued all learning. He was a fervid opponent of the Maskilim, Jews who favored the integration of traditional Jewish learning with modern enlightenment, and in 1822 he excommunicated the Maskilim of the city of Tarnopol.

Zwi-Hirsch founded a Hasidic court that attracted followers from Galicia, Slovakia, and Hungary. On the eleventh day of the Hebrew month of Tammuz, the anniversary of his death, Zwi-Hirsch’s disciples and admirers celebrated their master with an annual pilgrimage to his grave.⁸

Jacob Taubes was named after his paternal great-grandfather, Natan Neta Ya’akov Edelstein, the rabbi of the small town of Czernelica. When he died, his place as town rabbi was taken by his son, Zechariah Edelstein (our Jacob’s grandfather). He would marry a girl from the far more distinguished Taubes and Eichenstein families, Chava Leah Taubes.⁹

Here’s how it happened. The daughter of the Hasidic wonder-rabbi and kabbalist, the Zhidichover Rav, Zwi-Hirsch Eichenstein, married Yaakov Taubes, a son of Aharon Moshe Taubes, the great Talmudist. This Ya’akov Taubes served as head of the rabbinical court (av bet din), first in Zhidichov and then in Iasi until his death in 1890. The son of Chava Leah and Yaakov, Yissachar Dov Taubes (1833–1911) became the rabbi of nearby Kolomya.¹⁰ His wife, Vita Yota Hirsch (d. 1879), gave birth to a daughter, Chava Leah Taubes (d. 1939), who went on to marry Zechariah Edelstein, the rabbi of Czernelica. Chava Leah gave birth to twelve children, of whom seven survived into adulthood.¹¹

Jacob’s father, Haim Zwi Hirsch, was born in Czernelica in 1900. There was a Jewish school in the town, founded a decade earlier though the largess of Baron Maurice de Hirsch, who had created a foundation to provide Western-style education to the Jews of Galicia and Bukovina, with education in German, Polish, and Hebrew.¹² Haim Zwi may have been among the ninety students enrolled in the school.¹³

Haim Zwi Hirsch Taubes¹⁴ was named for his distinguished ancestor Zwi-Hirsch Eichenstein. He studied with his father and also with his older brother, Rabbi Neta Ya’akov, who died as a young man in the influenza epidemic that followed the First World War.¹⁵ If he attended the Hirsch school, Zwi Hirsch would have been the first generation in his family to receive a Western-style education, in addition to a traditional Talmudic education at the feet of his father and of his brother. Zwi was known by his mother’s surname (Taubes) rather than his father’s (Edelstein). This reflected the fact that because of the legal and financial costs, Zwi Hirsch’s parents, like many Galician Jews, did not get a civil marriage, and siblings were often registered under different surnames.¹⁶

During the First World War, Galicia became a battleground between the contending armies of Russia and Austria-Hungary. The family of Jacob’s grandfather, Zechariah Edelstein, like tens of thousands of Galician Jews, found safe haven in Vienna.¹⁷ Like many fellow Jewish refugees, the Edelsteins remained in Vienna after the war. Though few Jews had been permitted to reside in Vienna until 1848, there was a steady flow of Jews into the city in the seven decades thereafter, many of them from more economically backward areas of the empire, such as eastern Galicia. Numbering over 200,000 souls, Jews comprised more than 10 percent of the population of the city.

Zwi Hirsch went on to study at the Rabbinical Seminary in Vienna and at the University of Vienna, and by 1930 was the rabbi of one of the largest synagogues in Vienna, in the Pazmanitengasse. Zwi’s nat...