Jacob Taubes: Secret King of the German Jews

“Interiorization is not a dividing line between ‘Judaism’ and ‘Christianity’: it signifies a crisis within Jewish eschatology itself--in Pauline Christianity as well as in the Sabbatian movement of the seventeenth century. How else,” Taubes asks, “can redemption be defined after the Messiah has failed to redeem the external world except by turning inward?”

Jacob Taubes, a man beyond petty distinctions between left and right, theism and atheism, is an enigma after my own heart:

I discussed Taubes’s attraction to one of the leaders of the radical right wing in Israel, Geula Cohen. As Taubes’s own letters to Hugo Bergman demonstrate, it is impossible to separate his libidinal interest in her from his theopolitical curiosity regarding the Zionist 'political messianism.'

I too have a hard time separating libidinal interest from theopolitical curiosity. The eschaton is a delayed orgasm, and the creative tension till that point is reached (internally or externally) is what drives the state of exile:

Apocalypse is all about the stranger in exile--exile that is a mental-psychological state, a political and an intellectual state. Looking at the history of the world from the perspective of the apocalypse is choosing the ultimate perspective of estrangement. “The theme of self-alienation is to be heard for the first time in the context of apocalypticism. Alienness or exile [die Fremde] and the topic of self-alienation permeate the whole of apocalyptic, Gnostic literature.... To be alien means: to come from elsewhere, not to be at home in this world” (p. 26). Rosenzweig and Martin Heidegger’s understanding of “homelessness” echos in these words. Following them, Taubes concluded that every “turn” must be understood with that absence at its midst: “The dramatic homecoming that follows, as ordained by the motif of salvation, is the metaphysical history of the light deprived of light, of life in the world deprived of life, of the estranged life in the estrangement of the here and now. History is the path of light into the world, through the world and out of the world” (p. 27).

We will never see the likes of these metaphysically brimming, half-charlatan half-genius German Jews again. I, lowly Ostjuden from Halb-Asien, salute thee.

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