Professor of Apocalypse by Jerry Z. Muller

Author:Jerry Z. Muller [Muller, Jerry Z.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691170596
Publisher: Princeton UP
Published: 2022-02-08T00:00:00+00:00

Scholem Again

Marcel Marcus was a Jewish student who had grown up in Berlin, led a leftwing Zionist student group, and attended many of Taubes’s classes from 1967 to 1972. Taubes attended his Passover seder. Marcus was keen on pursuing graduate studies in the United States and asked Taubes for a recommendation. “The best recommendation would be to say that you don’t know me,” Taubes responded.75 There was more than a grain of truth to that. When Gershon Greenberg went to Jerusalem, he met Jacob Katz, a great historian of modern Jewry, who was part of Scholem’s circle. When Greenberg informed Katz that he had studied with Taubes, Katz (an otherwise mild-tempered gentleman) responded, “Young man, to have studied with Jacob Taubes is nothing to be proud of!”76

Taubes continued to be haunted by his troubled relationship with Scholem, who, for his part, had not relented in his distaste for his former disciple. Their relationship was complicated by the fact that they had many friends and colleagues in common, including Adorno, Jean and Mayotte Bollack, the journalist George Lichtheim, and Peter Szondi. Whenever Taubes reached out, Scholem responded with disdain compounded by genuine fear. In 1968, Scholem was visiting with the Bollacks at their home in Paris. Taubes appeared unannounced at the door, having somehow divined that Scholem was present. Scholem promptly fled the room and locked himself in the bathroom, swearing he would not set eyes on Taubes again. Only when Taubes left the apartment did Scholem reemerge.77

In 1969, Scholem’s former student Joseph Weiss committed suicide in London—while facing a photo of Scholem, whom he continued to revere as his master. Weiss’s first wife, Miriam, had had an affair with Taubes during his years in Jerusalem. Erna, Weiss’s second wife and widow, put Weiss’s library of rare Judaica up for sale through Chimen Abramsky, a famed book collector. Taubes arranged for the Judaica Institute to purchase the collection for its library. But when the collection arrived in Berlin, Taubes was astonished to find that the most valuable pieces were missing. It turned out that Weiss had stated in his will that Scholem would have the right to choose a few titles for himself, but Scholem had taken the cream of the collection. Taubes decided to cancel the purchase and return the books to Abramsky in London.78 He wrote to Mrs. Weiss of his disappointment at the turn of events. He told her he was shocked by the death of Joseph, adding, “Many years ago our ways parted but I continued to esteem him as a person where the erudition of the scholar, the interpretative power of the critic and the metaphysical concern of the theologian came together into a unique, even if uneasy balance.” A copy of Taubes’s letter reached Scholem, who scrawled in the margin that this characterization was “stolen word for word from the dedication of my book to Walter Benjamin!!!”79

Taubes corresponded regularly with George Lichtheim, then living in London, and a friend of both men. (While living in

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