ÜThroughout his life, sharp judgments were made about the philosopher of religion Jacob Taubes by those who knew him. This biography lists them all, it tells of a dubious life. Contemporaries saw questionable traits in the highly gifted scion of a Jewish family of rabbis and scholars, who was born in Vienna in 1923 and whose parents moved to Zurich in 1936. He was considered arrogant and lively, imaginative and quicksilver, lazy and boastful, “brilliant, perverse, demonic, manipulative,” as it says at one point. He spreads “pretentious nonsense” (Joseph Agassi), tends toward “philosophical frivolity” (Gershom Scholem), is driven by “shameless ambition” (Leo Strauss). On the one hand, Taubes was well-read and always knew everything, had something to say about everything, on the other hand, he also gave spontaneous speeches about philosophers that had been invented especially for him in order to trick him with his pretended knowledge of everything.
Taubes was in loose contact with the truth. He liked to bluff and often passed off other people’s thoughts as his own. He later claimed there was a long version of the only book he had written when he was twenty-three, but it never surfaced. Just as little as there were the two books that he announced in a letter of application in 1954 as “coming out”. During this time he gives lectures in New York based on texts written by others in Jerusalem. He speaks of a 150-page manuscript on Maimonides’ political theology, which nobody has ever seen. The older he got, the younger he made himself in resumes to preserve the child prodigy. In private dealings he was an indiscreet person. For his own advancement, he was ready for any infamy. Later, when he was a professor in Berlin, he was nicknamed “Jakob the Liar”. The Greek scholar Jean Bollack called him “the incarnation of evil” because of his experiences with the university political schemer Taubes.
What interest in the history of ideas does such a person deserve? Jerry Z. Muller, a historian from Washington, writes almost eight hundred pages about her and has interviewed a large number of contemporary witnesses and archives for twenty years. He meticulously follows Taubes on his way from Zurich to New York, Jerusalem, Cambridge Mass. and finally Berlin, depicts hundreds of encounters, numerous affairs and the thoughts of each of Taubes’ essays.
He never got through to his own studies
Almost all of them deal with the state of religion in the modern world. For two thousand years, Christianity in particular has had to be reinterpreted: because what was predicted has not happened and because historical research, including scientific knowledge, makes the traditional texts and miracle tales look old. Taubes, on the other hand, had in mind an interdisciplinary study of religions that should preserve the fire of religion even under the circumstances of the deceased god. His slogans were: rejection of the world, breaking the law, redemption through sin. He was interested in the constantly renewed attempts to resist the temptation to establish oneself in the world by means of religious arguments and practices.
