¹ Stuttgart 1934.

² Anson Rabinbach describes “the new Jewish sensibility” of the above thinkers as poised “between enlightenment and apocalypse”. While rebelling against the assimilatory dissolution of Judaism in the universal “religion of morality for all humanity” (as in the case of Leo Baeck's Essence of Judaism), these younger thinkers move towards more pronounced forms of Jewish identity, most of all Jewish Messianism, which they strongly oppose to the rabbinic tradition. Among those new representatives of “Jewishness without Judaism,” Rabinbach lists: “The Jewish Nietzscheans, most notably Kurt Hiller, Theodor Lessing, Salomo Friedländer, and Martin Buber; and the ‘linguistic’ mystics from Gustav Landauer and Benjamin to the Oskar Goldberg Kreis would certainly also have to be included. Or we can restructure the axis long other lines, for example, Benjamin and Bloch as ‘theological messianists’; Landauer/Buber/Scholem as ‘radical Zionist messianists’, Rosenzweig and Lukàcs along a critical Hegelian axis; perhaps with Kafka, Brod and the Prague Bar Kochba circle as the antithesis of that constellation”: Anson Rabinbach, “Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse: Benjamin, Bloch and Modern German Jewish Messianism”, in New German Critique, no 34 (Winter 1985), p. 84. Taubes’ location on this map would be a middle-way between Bloch's theological messianism and Lukàcs’ and Rosenzweig's tarrying with Hegel – in other words, between apocalypsis and historiosophy. On the Jewish “mystics of revolution” of the Weimar era see also an excellent study ofWołkowicz, Anna, Mystiker der Revolution. Der utopische Diskurs um die Jahrhundertwende, Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego: Warszawa, 2007Google Scholar.

³ Even in “The Price of Messianism”, one of his latest essays, Taubes still maintains that “Rabbinic Judaism consistently opposed messianic movements. During the sixteen hundred years of the hegemony of rabbinic Judaism we witness only the sporadic and always ephemeral emergence of Messiahs who leave no traces except in historiography”, in Taubes, Jacob, From Cult to Culture. Fragments Towards a Critique of Historical Reason, ed. by Assmann, Aleida (Stanford University Press: Stanford 2009) p. 6Google Scholar (later in the text as CC).

⁴ Taubes knew and admired Löwith's Von Hegel bis Nietzsche, in which Löwith for the first time tested the hypothesis of the influence of Joachim da Fiore on Hegel, while Löwith in Meaning and History (Chicago, 1949)Google Scholar already mentions Taubes twice.

⁵ I emphasize the qualification “early Taubes”, referring mostly to the period of Occidental Eschatology, for “later Taubes” is a more complex case; already in the 50s he became visibly less harsh on Rabbinic Judaism, while his messianic enthusiasm, which he initially shared with Ernst Bloch, began to wane, eventually to reach the point of an almost explicit refutation of Bloch's influence. For instance, in The Political Theology of Paul, the latest series of lectures from the 80s, Taubes would call Bloch dismissively “wishy-washy”: Taubes, Jacob, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. by Hollander, Dana (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004) p. 74Google Scholar (later in the text as TP).

⁶ Derrida, Jacques, “On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy,” in Raising the Tone in Philosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant, Fenves, Peter (ed), trans. By Leavey, John P. Jr. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993)Google Scholar as well as Bloom, Harold, Omens of Millennium. The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996)Google Scholar.

⁷ Taubes, Jacob, Occidental Eschatology, trans. By Ratmoko, David (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2009) p. 4Google Scholar; my emphasis. Later in the text as OE.

⁸ Taubes is obviously not alone in the historiosophical ambition to square the circle of antinomianism, which he shared with Bloch and Benjamin. The latter, as early as 1914, writes about the antinomian traces constituting ‘real’ history: “The elements of the end condition are not present as formless tendencies of progress, but instead are embedded in every present as endangered, condemned, and ridiculed creations and ideas. The historical task is to give absolute form in a genuine way to the immanent condition of fulfilment, to make it visible and predominant in the present” (from Wolin, Richard, Walter Benjamin. An Aesthetic of Redemption (Berkeley: University of California Press 1994) p. 49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; my emphasis). Moreover, as Anson Rabinbach convincingly shows, Benjamin would associate this “historical task” of enhancing and elucidating the “ridiculed” antinomian traces with the role of the modern Jewish intellectual. Bloch in “Symbol: The Jews” (a prophetic fragment included only in the first 1918 edition of The Spirit of Utopia) defines this particularly Jewish sensibility as “a latent gnosticism” issuing in the powerful opposition of “the good and the illuminated against everything petty, unjust and hard”: Anson Rabinbach, “Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse”, p. 101.

⁹ See especially “Christianity and Its Fate” in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, On Christianity: Early Theological Writings by Friedrich Hegel, trans. by T.M. Knox with an introduction, and fragments translated by Richard Kroner (Gloucester, Mass., Peter Smith, 1970).

¹⁰ See Scholem, Gershom, The Messianic Idea in Judaism. And Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (Schocken Books: New York, 1995)Google Scholar.

¹¹ Compare Barth himself: “The most radical ending of history, the negation under which all flesh stands, the absolute judgment, which is the meaning of God for the world of men and time and things, is also the crimson thread which runs through the whole course of the world in its inevitability.” And further: “No road to the eternal meaning of the created world has ever existed, save the road of negation. This is the lesson of history”: Barth, Karl, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. By Hoskyns, Edwyn C. (Oxford University Press: Oxford 1968) pp. 77, 87Google Scholar. Taubes, of course, is very much aware of the changes that occurred in the passage from the first to the second edition of the Römerbrief, already at the stage of writing Abendländische Eschatologie. Later he summarized them as follows: “The antithesis in the ternary dialectic that served in the first edition as a transitional element is emphasized in the second edition to such a degree that dialectical theology becomes a ‘theology of crisis.’ The spirit of critique is radicalized to a spirit of crisis. The antithesis takes on the aspect of a perennial contradiction. The negative characteristics are exegetically unfolded in all lengths and at all depths. The smell of death reaches to the highest and most sublime realms of human activity… If the dialectic of the first edition of the Römerbrief can be interpreted in the light of a religious Hegelianism, the second edition reveals the influence of Kierkegaard's negative dialectic on every page.”: Taubes, “Theodicy and Theology: A Philosophical Analysis of Karl Barth's Dialectical Theology,” The Journal of Religion, vol. 34, nr 4/1954, pp. 236–7; my emphasis.

¹² Rabinbach, p. 87.

¹³ In the later idiom of The Political Theology of Paul this opposition would indicate a contrast between the “messianic” and the “katechonic” use of revelation. On this difference see also David Ratmoko's comments in his preface to Occidental Eschatology.

¹⁴ The Exodus from nature into history, from eros into spirit, is thus also an exit from the plastic world of myth into the desert of human self-constitution: “Mythic consciousness does not recognize borders between divine, worldly, and human realms. In mythic narrative, the transition between gods, things, and humans remain fluid…. Then, the dreamlike stage of this mythic unity of gods, things, and humans is exploded by the experience of transcendence proper to monotheistic religions of revelation…. The de-godding (Entgötterung) of the world is thus not only the work of Greek philosophy, but primarily the work of monotheistic revelation” (“The Dogmatic Myth of Gnosticism,” CC, p. 66).

¹⁵ On this idea in more detail see my “Taking Life Out of Nature: Jewish Messianic Vitalism and the Issue of Denaturalization” in Radical Orthodoxy: Theology, Philosophy, Politics, Vol. 1, Numbers 1 & 2 (August 2012), pp. 167–87.

¹⁶ Scholem says: “The emptying of the world to a meaningless void not illuminated by any ray of meaning or direction is the experience of him whom I would call the pious atheist. The void is the abyss, the chasm or the crack which opens up in all that exists. This is the experience of modern man, surpassingly well depicted in all its desolation by Kafka, for whom nothing has remained of God but the void, in Kafka's sense, to be sure, the void of God”: Scholem, Gershom, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis, Selected Essays, Dannhauser, Werner (ed), (Schocken Books, New York 1976) p. 283Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Jonas, Hans, Mortality and Morality. A Search for the Good after Auschwitz, trans. by Vogel, Lawrence, Chicago, Evanston (Northwestern University Press 1996) p. 134Google Scholar.

¹⁸ The phrase verhinderter Mystizismus is also Scholem's.

¹⁹ Gershom Scholem to Walter Benjamin, Letter 66, 20 September 1934 in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem. 1932–1940, trans. By Smith, Gary and Lefevre, Andre (New York: Schocken Books 1989) p. 142Google Scholar.

²⁰ In the “Price of Messianism”, Taubes attacks Scholem for emphasizing too strongly the influence of Luria on German Idealism and the influence of the Sabbatian movement on the French Enlightenment: “Scholem has advanced a rather strange thesis, striking but without any historical foundation, concerning the “dialectical” nexus between Sabbatian messianism and the rise of the Aufklärung in Jewish history. The death of a Frankist adventurer at the guillotine of the French Revolution does not secure a link between Sabbatian messianism and the Aufklärung. The link is too weak to sustain a dialectical turn from one to the other” (CC, 7). For Taubes, the development of the Radical Enlightenment is directly indebted to the millenarist notion of the Spirit whose origin is unequivocally Christian. Yet, in the longer run back, Taubes will also claim that this origin is, in fact, Jewish-messianic, so the debate between Taubes and Scholem is not so much the issue of influence as such, as rather the issue of how far historically should the influence be placed. In Occidental Eschatology, written before his conflict with Scholem (which might have clouded the objectivity of his judgment), he still claims that “the steady rhythm of eschatology was not a singular development exclusive to Christian Europe…. The eschatology of the Zohar, like that of the Spanish Kabbalah, runs along lines which are closely akin [isotop] to those of Joachim and the Spirituals” (OE, 87).

²¹ We could also go on in listing the borrowings from Luria in Hegel: the divine tsimtsum as the first alienation of Spirit who thus creates the world; the world's fallen status as totally alienated from God (Anderssein des Gottes); Shekhinah (the holy presence in the fallen world) as the secret identity of the Spirit, operative within created reality; and the tikkun envisaged as the ultimate de-alienation of the world in the act of Absolute Knowledge and the return of reality to God. On the affinity between Hegel's notion of the Spirit and the Judaic doctrine of Shekhinah, the divine presence, see Taubes's article on the eighteenth-century Jewish Hegelian, Nachman Krochmal, “Nachman Krochmal and Modern Historicism”. Yet even here, Taubes “stresses the Christian origins of the concept of spirit” (CC, 31), thus fully agreeing with Löwith's genealogy of der Geist (CC, ibid, p. 29). But, as I claim in this essay, this does not hinder Taubes in his strategy of re-hebraisation of modernity, for Christianity, especially the messianic-pneumatic-spiritual Christianity, is not seen by him as an alternative to Jewishness, but as a more consequential fulfilment of Jewishness than Judaism itself.

²² This also means a one-way, irreversible passage from the pre-modern method of analogy to the modern method of dialectic. The following sentence from Taubes’ essay “Dialectic and Analogy” could thus be read as an interesting memento for John Milbank: “A theology that has lost the cosmological basis for the principle of analogy but nevertheless continues with the method of analogy becomes purely metaphorical. In a Copernican universe a theology that takes its symbols and presuppositions seriously can only proceed by the method of dialectic” (CC, 171–2).

²³ On this difference see Taubes, Jacob, “The Realm of Paradox”, Review of Metaphysics, no 7 (1953/1954), p. 482Google Scholar.