Professor of Apocalypse

"Scion of a distinguished prewar Viennese Jewish family and son of the chief rabbi of Zurich, Jacob Taubes (1923-1987) was a philosopher of religion and scholar of Judaism and the New Testament whose career and public life intersected with that of many of the luminaries of postwar continental European and American intellectual life in the humanities. In a life that took him to teaching posts in Jerusalem, New York, Paris, and Berlin, he became a repository of knowledge about the high culture of the West, both religious and secular. Yet his scholarly output during his lifetime was minimal. At the time of his death in 1987, Taubes had not published a book since his doctoral dissertation in 1947 (a work that, by then, was long out of print and barely read). Jerry Z. Muller argues, nonetheless, that this man's troubled and troubling life merits scrutiny-not because he was a world-class, original thinker, but because he was such an inescapable and significant presence in the lives of intellectuals and academics on three continents. In this book, Muller tells the story of a man who exerted influence on postwar intellectual life in Europe and America less through his written work than through personal contact and conversation. Taubes had enormous vitality and appetite for life. A charismatic speaker and gifted polemicist, he was an inveterate social networker who seemed to know everybody and loved to make connections between people. He acted as a merchant of ideas, finding ideas in one national, religious, or disciplinary context and retailing them in another. And as a person, he left no one indifferent. Taubes brought joy and mirth into the lives of some, but he thrived on disorder and created disorder around him, sometimes at great personal cost to those in his circle. His erotic activities mirrored his championing of doctrines and movements that transgressed normative boundaries. Some revered him as a genius; others dismissed him as a charlatan. Muller does not take sides, finding plausible grounds in the historical record for all of these judgments. In recounting Taubes's life, Muller illuminates much about postwar intellectual life in America, Germany, and Israel"--