Even Saul Bellow May Have Struggled To Work Out This Character
The biographer is clear-eyed about Jacob Taubes’s hyperbolic claims to universal knowledge. Taubes, in short, was a performer, perfectly willing to contradict himself and challenge all manner of established thought.

‘Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes’
By Jerry Z. Muller
Princeton University Press, 656 pages
Jacob Taubes’s life was the “stuff of a Saul Bellow novel,” according to a former Taubes student interviewed by Jerry Z. Muller. In actuality, Taubes was such an outrageous and improbable figure that Bellow might well have thought readers would not stand for such a factitious confection.
Taubes taught at Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, the Free University of Berlin, and other distinguished institutions of higher learning while publishing only one book (his dissertation) and alienating many of his colleagues. This included the renowned scholar Gershom Scholem, who actually fled when Taubes knocked on a colleague’s door.
Taubes dazzled interlocutors with the range of his rabbinic learning, understanding of the philosophy of history, and his worldwide connections to the best philosopher/scholars. In the classroom he was mesmerizing, calling on a range of historical events and ideas and showing their significance for contemporary life.
Taubes lacked academic rigor. He knew everything, it seemed, but could not get it down on paper. Instead he picked the brains of geniuses, scoured the indexes of books and tables of contents, and somehow divined what was in books he had not read but could discourse upon eloquently.
Some scholars said Taubes was a fraud. Scholem deemed Taubes positively poisonous and evil — not to be trusted because he would betray and distort confidences. Mr. Muller attributes some of Taubes’s troublemaking to his hypomania and later to full-blown manic depressive episodes.
Yet the biographer is clear-eyed about Taubes’s hyperbolic claims to universal knowledge. Taubes, in short, was a performer, perfectly willing to contradict himself and challenge all manner of established thought.
A case in point is his account of St. Paul. Taubes treated him not as the founder of Christianity but as a self-critical Jew attempting to break out of what he considered the confines of religious law. Taubes’s Paul was an antinomian, and so was Taubes. His brief for Paul was largely discounted in his lifetime, but, as Mr. Muller shows, contemporary views have caught up with Taubes, and he is no longer such an outlier on the subject.
The word evil, in connection with Taubes, appears many times in this biography. Philip Rieff called Taubes “the only evil man I’ve ever known for whom evil was a principle of existence.” Where did that principle come from? Taubes was saturated in a knowledge of the history of Gnosticism, which contended that the world was a realm of evil.
Taubes, at times, relished his involvement in evil, even boasting he had driven more than one woman to suicide. He conducted campaigns against colleagues, seduced women — even those married to his friends — and said, quite openly, he felt no loyalty to the world as it was presently constituted and seemed to welcome an apocalypse.
Yet this was a man who opened the minds of generations of students, who took women scholars seriously and advanced their careers. Even when a scholar found him dead wrong, that scholar would often go away energized by Taubes’s range of references and contrarian arguments.
Mr. Muller is quite nimble in threading his way through Taubes’s contradictions, explaining the circumstances in which his subject alternately prevaricated against and leveled with his friends and enemies. Repeatedly, Taubes made friends of enemies and enemies of friends. Even Bellow might have been winded trying to work out the intricacies of such a character.
The biographer is a diligent researcher, and yet, as with all biographies, there are gaps and silences. Mr. Muller did not interview Susan Sontag, one of Taubes’s most famous students and also his teaching assistant at Columbia. Did Sontag say no? Or did her death on December 28, 2004, occur before Mr. Muller, who started research in 2003, could get to her?
Sontag, a Taubes protege, emulated his swings from one side of an argument to the other with a lofty disregard for inconsistency. Her absence is important for another reason: One of Mr. Muller’s key sources is Rieff, once married to Sontag. It would have been fascinating to get her response to his negative account.
A final chapter recounts the astonishing longevity of Taubes’s thinking, as disciples began to compile and publish his essays and talks, carefully editing out his diatribes, and doing for the religious philosopher — both full of doubt and fervent in prayer — what he could not do for himself.
Mr. Rollyson and co-author Lisa Paddock published “Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon,” revised and updated, in 2016.