Jacob Taubes

1. Introduction

Jacob Taubes (1923–1987) was a Jewish theologian, rabbi, and sociologist of religion whose relatively small written oeuvre exerted a disproportionate impact on postwar continental thought. Working between Vienna, Zürich, New York, Jerusalem, and West Berlin, he explored how Jewish and Christian eschatology, apocalypticism, and messianism continued to structure ostensibly secular politics, law, and critical theory.

His early book Abendländische Eschatologie (Occidental Eschatology, 1947) presented a sweeping history of Western expectations of the “end,” tracing lines from biblical prophecy and early Christianity through medieval millenarianism to Hegel, Marx, and modern revolutionary movements. Later lectures and essays developed a distinctive form of political theology, in conversation and contest with figures such as Carl Schmitt, Jürgen Habermas, and Hans Blumenberg.

Taubes is particularly associated with a radical reading of the apostle Paul as a thinker of messianic time and the suspension or relativization of law, a reading that helped prepare what has been called the “Pauline turn” in contemporary philosophy. His seminars at the Free University of Berlin became a key site for reintroducing questions of sovereignty, secularization, and apocalyptic expectation into German debates about modernity.

While assessments differ on the coherence and originality of his work, there is broad agreement that Taubes functioned as an intellectual mediator across religious and disciplinary boundaries, connecting Jewish tradition, Christian theology, sociology of religion, and critical theory in an idiosyncratic but influential way.

2. Life and Historical Context

Taubes’s life intersected with many of the major ruptures of 20th‑century European history. Born in Vienna in 1923 into an Orthodox rabbinic family, he grew up within a milieu steeped in rabbinic learning and Central European Jewish culture. The Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938 forced the family into exile in Switzerland, a displacement that many commentators see as formative for his lifelong preoccupation with catastrophe and exile.

In Zürich, Taubes studied philosophy, theology, and history of religions, completing his doctorate in 1947. Postwar Switzerland and Germany provided the immediate context for Occidental Eschatology, written against the backdrop of ruined European nationalism, the Holocaust, and the emerging East–West divide. His work from this period is frequently read as a response to both fascist and Marxist political theologies.

From the mid‑1950s he taught in the United States, notably at Columbia University, entering Anglophone debates on secularization and religion in public life. The Cold War, decolonization, and American sociological theory formed the wider setting for his turn to the sociology of religion and Weberian categories.

In 1966 he moved to West Berlin, where the divided city and the upheavals of the 1960s student movement supplied a charged environment for his seminars on apocalypticism, revolution, and political theology. His role in founding the Institut für Judaistik at the Free University coincided with renewed German engagement with Jewish thought after the Holocaust.

The following table sketches key life moments in relation to broader historical developments:

3. Intellectual Development

Taubes’s intellectual trajectory is often divided into phases corresponding to shifts in location and disciplinary emphasis, though these phases overlap and interact.

Rabbinic and Philosophical Formation

His early years in Vienna and exile in Switzerland combined traditional rabbinic study with exposure to German philosophy and Christian theology. Teachers in Zürich introduced him to neo‑Kantianism, phenomenology, and history of religions, while family background rooted him in Talmudic and halakhic reasoning. Scholars often interpret this dual formation as underlying his later ease in moving between Jewish sources and Christian or secular texts.

Historian of Eschatology

With Occidental Eschatology (1947), Taubes emerged as a historian of ideas focused on apocalyptic and messianic currents. He drew on Ernst Troeltsch, Karl Löwith, and Max Weber to argue that revolutionary politics inherits theological expectations of the end. During this phase he engaged patristics, medieval heresy, and modern philosophy in a broadly genealogical narrative.

Sociologist of Religion and Transatlantic Theologian

In the 1950s–early 1960s, especially at Columbia University, his work took a more explicitly sociological turn. He used Weberian categories (charisma, rationalization, sect/church typologies) to analyze modern Judaism and Christianity. At the same time, he participated in contemporary Protestant and Catholic theological discussions, positioning himself between confessional theology and religious sociology.

Berlin Political Theology and Late Pauline Focus

After 1966 in Berlin, Taubes’s seminars shifted toward political theology, sovereignty, and critical theory. Dialogues with Carl Schmitt, Habermas, and Blumenberg intensified his interest in secularization and the theological genealogy of political concepts. In the early 1980s, this culminated in lectures on Paul that reworked earlier concerns with eschatology into a focused analysis of messianic time and law. Posthumous publications from this period have strongly shaped his current reputation.

4. Major Works and Key Texts

Taubes published relatively few monographs; much of his influence stems from lectures, essays, and correspondence, many edited posthumously. The following table outlines his principal works:

In addition, edited volumes of his correspondence—especially with Carl Schmitt—have become crucial sources for understanding his role in postwar debates on political theology. Scholars disagree on how far these letters should be treated as systematic statements rather than occasional polemics.

Many of his seminar notes circulated informally among students and were later mined for editorial reconstructions. Consequently, the textual basis of Taubes’s thought is partly mediated by editors’ decisions, a fact that commentators emphasize when assessing the coherence of his oeuvre.

5. Core Ideas: Eschatology, Apocalypticism, and Messianic Time

Taubes’s core ideas center on the claim that eschatology, apocalypticism, and messianic time are not marginal religious curiosities but structural forces in Western history and thought.

Eschatology as Historical Motor

In Occidental Eschatology, he interprets expectations of the “last things” as shaping conceptions of history and politics. Proponents of this reading argue that, for Taubes, doctrines of final judgment, resurrection, and the end of history underpin notions of progress, revolution, and liberation. Modern philosophies of history (Hegel, Marx) are thus described as secularized eschatologies.

Critics contend that this framework risks over‑theologizing modern politics and flattening differences between religious and secular teleologies. Some historians claim his broad strokes underplay economic, institutional, or cultural factors.

Apocalypticism and Radical Break

Taubes treats apocalypticism—expectation of imminent world‑transforming revelation—as a recurring pattern that informs millenarian movements, revolutionary uprisings, and critiques of order. He links early Christian apocalyptic expectation to modern revolutionary pathos, suggesting that both articulate a desire for rupture rather than gradual reform.

An alternative interpretation, inspired by social history, stresses the diversity of apocalyptic movements and suggests that Taubes’s typology is too unified, projecting a single “explosive” model onto varied phenomena.

Messianic Time

In his later work, especially on Paul, Taubes develops the notion of messianic time as an interim, tension‑filled temporality between the present age and its fulfillment. This time is “short” and relativizes institutions, social roles, and legal structures without simply abolishing them.

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“In Paul, time is short: the decisive thing is not the end of time, but the time that remains between.”

— Jacob Taubes, Die politische Theologie des Paulus

Interpreters differ on whether Taubes’s messianic time should be read as a concrete political horizon (e.g., for revolutionary praxis) or more as a critical stance undermining absolutized orders. Some also question how consistently he relates Jewish messianic expectations to Pauline and later Christian conceptions.

6. Political Theology and Secularization

Taubes’s contribution to political theology centers on the claim that modern political concepts—sovereignty, revolution, state, and even critique—retain transformed theological structures. He develops this claim both in dialogue with and against Carl Schmitt.

Political Theology Beyond Schmitt

Following Schmitt, Taubes accepts that key modern concepts are “secularized theological concepts.” However, he emphasizes apocalyptic and messianic elements more than Schmitt’s focus on order and decision. Where Schmitt foregrounds the sovereign’s power to decide on the exception, Taubes often highlights theological forces of rupture and opposition that unsettle sovereignty.

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“Carl Schmitt has seen that modern political concepts are secularized theological concepts—but he drew from this insight the wrong political consequences.”

— Jacob Taubes, quoted in Apokalypse und Politik

Supporters see this as shifting political theology from a conservative defense of order toward an analysis of conflict and potential transformation. Critics argue that his alternative remains under‑specified, oscillating between affirmation of revolutionary politics and skeptical distance.

Secularization as Transformation, not Disappearance

In debates with figures like Habermas and Blumenberg, Taubes rejects a simple narrative in which religion recedes and autonomous reason or the modern state takes over. Instead, secularization is described as a process whereby religious motifs persist in changed forms within philosophy, law, and politics.

Proponents claim that this view helps explain why modern ideologies often display quasi‑religious intensity and symbolic structures. Detractors maintain that Taubes sometimes overstates continuity, underestimating genuinely novel dimensions of modern institutions and discourses.

A comparative snapshot:

7. Pauline Thought and the Critique of Law

Taubes’s late lectures on Paul present a distinctive reading of the apostle as a thinker of law, time, and community, with implications for political theology.

Law and Its Suspension

Drawing on Paul’s letters (especially Romans and 1 Corinthians), Taubes interprets the Torah not as a purely negative burden but as a structure that is both affirmed and relativized in light of the messiah. He emphasizes passages in which Paul speaks of being “under grace, not under law,” reading these as signaling a suspension or de‑absolutization of legal authority rather than straightforward antinomianism.

Proponents of this interpretation argue that Taubes sees Paul as exposing law’s limits: law cannot secure righteousness, and its claims are historicized within messianic time. This reading has been influential among philosophers interested in the relationship between normativity and exception.

New Testament scholars critical of Taubes point out that his focus on law’s suspension may underplay Paul’s positive ethical exhortations and his continued use of scriptural authority. Some also note that Taubes’s Jewish background shapes his sensitivity to intra‑Jewish debates in Paul, but that he does not systematically engage recent historical‑critical scholarship.

Messianic Community

Taubes portrays the Pauline ekklesia as a community that cuts across ethnic, social, and legal boundaries (e.g., Jew/Greek, slave/free). This community lives in the “time that remains,” characterized by provisionality and loosened attachments to the world’s structures.

Supporters see here a resource for thinking non‑national, non‑ethnic forms of association. Others caution that Taubes’s emphasis on radical equality does not fully address hierarchical and gendered aspects present in the Pauline corpus.

Relation to Judaism and Christianity

Taubes’s reading accentuates Paul’s roots in Jewish apocalypticism while showing how his interpretation of the messiah reconfigures the relation to Torah. Some Jewish scholars welcome this as a non‑supersessionist approach that takes Jewish debates seriously; others argue that Taubes still situates Paul in a trajectory that tends toward Christian and secular political theologies more than to rabbinic continuities.

8. Methodology: Between Theology, Sociology, and Philosophy

Taubes’s methodology is marked by a deliberate crossing of disciplinary boundaries. He combines theological, sociological, and philosophical approaches in ways that have been both admired and criticized.

Theological Hermeneutics

From theology, Taubes adopts close reading of scriptural and doctrinal texts, attention to eschatology and revelation, and engagement with confessional debates. His own rabbinic training informs his sensitivity to textual nuance and tradition. However, he typically refrains from systematic dogmatics, using theology more as a hermeneutic lens than as a confessional stance.

Sociology of Religion

Influenced by Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch, he analyzes religious movements through concepts like charisma, routinization, and church–sect dynamics. In his American period, he applied these tools to modern Judaism, Christian movements, and secular ideologies, treating them as social carriers of eschatological expectations.

Supporters argue that this dual focus—on meanings and social forms—allows Taubes to link ideas with institutions. Critics suggest that his sociological analyses are often programmatic rather than based on empirical research.

Philosophical and Genealogical Analysis

From philosophy, especially German idealism and critical theory, Taubes takes a concern with concepts (e.g., sovereignty, history, subjectivity) and with genealogy—tracing how modern notions inherit and transform older theological motifs. His method often proceeds by establishing analogies and structural homologies across epochs.

Some commentators praise this approach as creatively synthetic; others regard it as speculative, relying on conceptual resemblance more than demonstration. There is ongoing debate about how rigorously his historical claims can be substantiated versus how much they function as provocative hypotheses designed to reframe questions.

9. Engagements with Schmitt, Habermas, and Blumenberg

Taubes’s profile in postwar thought is closely tied to his engagements with Carl Schmitt, Jürgen Habermas, and Hans Blumenberg, each representing a different stance on political theology and secularization.

Carl Schmitt

Taubes read Schmitt as a key theorist of political theology and corresponded with him in the 1970s and 1980s. He acknowledged Schmitt’s insight that modern political concepts are secularized theological concepts, yet criticized the authoritarian and conservative implications Schmitt drew. Taubes’s lectures on Paul have been interpreted as an attempt to develop an alternative, messianic political theology that both uses and subverts Schmitt’s analytic tools.

Some scholars see this as a productive critical appropriation; others question the extent to which Taubes’s engagement sufficiently distances itself from Schmitt’s problematic political legacy.

Jürgen Habermas

In dialogue and debate with Habermas, Taubes challenged procedural and communicative models of rationality by insisting on the enduring force of eschatological and apocalyptic impulses. Habermas, by contrast, tended to view religious contents as candidates for translation into secular, discursive forms.

Analysts note that their disagreements over the role of religion in the public sphere and over the concept of secularization helped shape German debates in the 1960s–70s. Interpretations differ on whether Taubes offers a viable alternative to Habermas’s theory or primarily functions as a persistent theological irritant to it.

Hans Blumenberg

Blumenberg’s Die Legitimität der Neuzeit (The Legitimacy of the Modern Age) famously argued against the thesis that modernity is merely secularized theology. Taubes engaged this work critically, defending a stronger continuity between theological and modern concepts. Where Blumenberg stressed conceptual self‑assertion and breaks with theology, Taubes emphasized structural inheritances, especially in eschatology and political expectations.

This exchange is often cited as emblematic of two major interpretations of secularization: one highlighting rupture (Blumenberg), the other transformation and persistence (Taubes and Schmitt). Secondary literature remains divided on which approach better captures the complexity of modern intellectual history.

10. Reception and Influence on Contemporary Philosophy

Taubes’s reception is marked by a contrast between his limited primary output and extensive secondary discussion.

Immediate Reception

During his lifetime, Taubes was better known as a teacher and interlocutor than as a canonical author. His Berlin seminars influenced a generation of German scholars in religious studies, philosophy, and political theory. Contemporary reactions alternated between enthusiasm for his erudition and criticism of his fragmentary style and personal provocations.

Posthumous Impact

After his death in 1987, edited publications—especially Die politische Theologie des Paulus—significantly raised his profile. Philosophers and theorists associated with the “Pauline turn,” such as Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Žižek, drew on his reading of Paul’s messianic time and critique of law. Others in political theology and critical theory have used his work to revisit the relationship between revolution, sovereignty, and eschatology.

A schematic overview of areas of influence:

Assessments and Critiques

Supporters highlight his role as a bridge figure linking Jewish thought, Christian theology, and critical theory, and credit him with re‑opening questions of eschatology in philosophy. Critics point to the fragmentary, sometimes anecdotal nature of his writings, questioning their systematic coherence and historical precision.

There is also debate over editorial reconstruction of his lectures and correspondence: some regard these posthumous texts as reliable expressions of his thought; others treat them more cautiously, emphasizing their status as occasional and rhetorical interventions rather than fully worked‑out theories.

11. Legacy and Historical Significance

Taubes’s legacy is often described as greater than what his small corpus might suggest, owing to his role as a catalyst in debates about modernity’s theological underpinnings.

Reframing Eschatology and Political Theology

Historians of ideas credit him with helping to establish apocalypticism and messianism as central, rather than peripheral, to understanding Western political and philosophical traditions. His reworking of political theology away from purely Schmittian concerns with order toward attention to conflict, rupture, and critique has influenced subsequent scholarship in theology, political theory, and intellectual history.

Cross‑Confessional and Interdisciplinary Mediation

Taubes is frequently cited as a model—though a controversial one—of interdisciplinary and cross‑confessional engagement. His readings of Paul from a Jewish standpoint, his use of Weberian sociology to interpret religious movements, and his philosophical genealogies of secularization all contributed to blurring traditional disciplinary and confessional boundaries.

Ongoing Debates

His historical significance is evaluated differently:

• Some scholars see him as a minor but pivotal figure whose ideas prepared the ground for later developments in Agamben, political theology, and studies of secularization.
• Others regard him more as a charismatic teacher whose influence is mediated through students and later interpreters, questioning how far one can speak of a coherent “Taubesian” system.
• A further line of assessment focuses on his correspondence and public controversies to understand the moral and political implications of engaging with figures like Schmitt.

Despite divergent judgments, there is broad agreement that Taubes occupies an important place in the postwar reconsideration of the relationship between theology and modern politics, ensuring his continued relevance in discussions of eschatology, secularization, and the politics of time.