Published in 1947, it was the only book he ever wrote. for an ambitious dissertation on how ancient religious doctrines of redemption shaped modern thinking about history and the self. Following family tradition, he was ordained as a rabbi but also earned a Ph.D. Jacob Taubes was born in Vienna in 1923 and was educated in Switzerland. “Professor of Apocalypse” is at once a history of ideas, a gripping psychological melodrama and a study of the surprising power of intellectual charisma to make and unmake lives. Muller has been studying the Taubes legend for many years, and now we have this fascinating, judicious biography. Just who was this man? And why did he matter to so many people in so many different places? The historian Jerry Z. In each of these places people recounted lies, betrayals and suicides of those close to him, including his first wife - and in the next breath said how wonderful it had been to know him. In Berlin Taubes was remembered as a provocateur of the radical left-wing students who terrorized professors in the 1970s, yet was a friend of dubious figures on the radical right.
In Jerusalem there were stories about a brilliant if shady scholar of Jewish mysticism who celebrated the High Holy Days in an anti-Zionist, ultra-Orthodox community while living with Catholic priests - and who once, it was rumored, passed the night with a woman in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Harvard professors laughed about a charlatan who was once tricked into expounding with great confidence on a nonexistent medieval thinker they had invented. Jewish intellectuals in New York reminisced about a young Swiss rabbi who ran a private seminar on religious texts for them in the late 1940s, yet by the 1960s was teaching the political erotics of Erich Fromm and Norman O. MullerĪt one point in my life, no matter where I lived or visited, someone would tell me a Jacob Taubes story. PROFESSOR OF APOCALYPSE The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes By Jerry Z.
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