The Man Who Made Thinking Sexy

Issues got here to a head when Scholem unwisely confided to Taubes that he was involved about one other scholar’s psychological well being. Taubes reported this to his “good friend,” whose spouse he was additionally sleeping with. The poor unstable man was shattered, left Jerusalem and years later, after his spouse’s suicide, dedicated suicide himself earlier than a portrait of Scholem. Scholem broke off relations with Taubes and would later say that it was by him that he had come to know the truth of ethical evil on the planet.

Taubes, although, would stay obsessive about Scholem for the remainder of his life, sending him passive-aggressive letters a few reconciliation whereas denigrating him to others. Scholem felt stalked and began holding a file on him, creating a reciprocal damaging obsession. Their relationship is the supply of numerous Taubes tales that flow into. Muller stories that when Scholem was visiting mates in Jerusalem when Taubes arrived unannounced, so he locked himself within the rest room, refusing to come back out till the monster left. One other story, not in Muller’s e book, has it that Taubes as soon as knocked on Scholem’s door, asking for his ex-teacher’s blessing. Scholem raised his hand and stated, “Could the solar of the Holy Land by no means shine in your face once more.” This was the sample of Taubes’s subsequent mental and private relationships: courtship, consummation, disappointment, riot, betrayal.

Essentially the most important of these relationships was along with his spouse, the novelist Susan Taubes, whom he married when she was simply 21. At first they appeared to have a tantric maintain on one another and drew others into their open erotic life, together with Susan Sontag, who finally made a film primarily based loosely however unmistakably on the couple, with the arresting title “Duet for Cannibals.” Within the early Sixties Sontag even taught programs on eros and mysticism with Taubes at Columbia, the place he had a cult following. However she additionally witnessed his cruelty and manipulation, particularly of his spouse. It was Sontag who recognized Susan Taubes’s physique after she drowned herself in East Hampton in 1969.

But by all of it Taubes remained on the transfer, accruing posts in the USA and Europe whereas leaving emotional wreckage behind him. And everybody knew this: That’s the exceptional factor. Befriending Taubes required a form of interior dissociation, setting apart data of his character and the pleasure of his firm. A primary assembly with Jacob Taubes will need to have been an exhilarating expertise. Over time he had crafted a seductive theological-political patter during which phrases like messianism, mysticism, eschatology, apocalypse, gnosticism, redemption and antinomianism swirled round in a gravity-free vacuum, by no means touching historic floor. Virtually all his concepts have been borrowed from others, but they nonetheless left individuals impressed and generally enlightened.

Certainly, Taubes was terribly nicely learn in lots of languages and fields and had a wonderful reminiscence, which allowed him, not less than all through a dialog or lecture, to make every little thing appear related and directed towards some final decision he by no means acquired round to articulating. Even standard faith students who raised an eyebrow at his wilder concepts felt he generally understood issues from inside and noticed connections that they had missed. As one put it, Taubes had “excellent pitch” for the spiritual creativeness. The provocative essays and lectures of his which have been revealed since his demise attest to this.

Essentially the most astonishing flip in his public life got here within the late ’60s and early ’70s, when he was educating on the Free College in Berlin. Muller, a specialist on Germany, is at his greatest within the Berlin chapters, weaving collectively perceptive accounts of the postwar mental scene and the political dynamics that led to radicalization and terror. Taubes, ever looking out for transgressive alternatives, had a central function in each. At one level the previous yeshiva bochur declared himself a Maoist and may very well be discovered working teach-ins with the Marxist thinker Herbert Marcuse. On the similar time he was cultivating a relationship with the disgraced authorized scholar Carl Schmitt, the antisemitic “crown jurist” of the Third Reich, whose works he promoted for his or her radical potential.