Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes

Abstract

The life, career and personality of Jacob Taubes were extraordinary, even by the standards of the twentieth century. The scion of an established rabbinic family in Vienna, he survived the Holocaust because his father accepted a position in Zurich and moved to Switzerland in 1936, just in time to avoid persecution by the National Socialists. Taubes graduated with a PhD from the University of Zurich and was ordained as a rabbi in 1947, then spent the years from 1947 to 1949 at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City, before moving to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem from 1949 to 1952. In 1952 he returned to the USA where he received scholarships from several prestigious universities. From 1956 to 1966 he taught at Columbia University where he became a tenured professor. In 1966, having split his time between New York and Berlin since 1961, he moved permanently to the Free University where he would teach, with interruptions, until his death in 1987. Educated as a theologian and philosopher, Taubes ignored traditional disciplinary boundaries and intervened in sociological, philosophical and theological debates. At the Free University in Berlin, he held a double appointment in Jewish Studies and ‘hermeneutics’, and continued teaching his favourite authors and topics regardless of disciplinary demands and expectations.