On Paul and Jacob Taubes – Mark Lila un NYRB in 2008:

‘The first thinker to promote Paul as a resource for the left was Jacob Taubes, who died in 1987. Taubes was born in Switzerland in 1923 into a distinguished rabbinic family and was himself ordained in the 1940s. After the war, and after publishing his one book, a study of Western eschatology, Taubes became a peripatetic professor and political gadfly moving restlessly between New York, Berlin, Jerusalem, and Paris, leaving admiring students and broken friendships strewn behind him. Frequent the intellectual circles of any of these cities and you will discover that everyone of a certain age has a Taubes story. In New York you learn that in the late Forties he taught Talmud to some future neoconservatives; in Berlin you find a photo of him addressing a demonstration of Sixties radicals while Rudi Dutschke and Herbert Marcuse sit admiringly at his side. Zelig had nothing on Jacob Taubes.’

(…)

‘After Moses, there was never a better Jew than Paul. “I regard him,” says Taubes dryly, “as more Jewish than any Reform rabbi, or any Liberal rabbi, I ever heard in Germany, England, America, Switzerland, or anywhere.” Mainstream Jews were baffled when Taubes declared himself to be a Pauline Jew; he would respond that while Jeremiah was a prophet from and to the Jews, Paul showed it is possible to be “an apostle from the Jews to the nations”—which is exactly how Taubes saw himself.
He attracted Christian scholars who agreed with this reading of Paul, including one who made the marvelously anachronistic remark that the language of the Pauline epistles “isn’t Greek, it’s Yiddish!”’

(…)

‘Every society, according to Schmitt, rests implicitly on a kind of political revelation. Take, for example, God’s delivery of the Ten Commandments to the Hebrews on Sinai. Seen from a theological angle, God was giving his revealed truth a political form through Moses; seen from a political angle, Moses was invoking God to legitimate his own act of state-creation. For Taubes as for Schmitt, all serious politics has this mysterious double character.
Taubes’s reading of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans offers a good example of this theological-political thinking. Taubes homes in on Paul’s antinomianism—his ruthless attack on Jewish and Roman law as the enemies to be vanquished if the Bible’s messianic promise was to reach the whole of mankind. Paul’s declaration that “you are not under law but under grace” (Romans 6:14) announces a double coup d’état against Moses and Caesar, a sovereign decision establishing a new world order. Jesus has virtually no part in this reading of early Christianity; he was just a martyr in the early years of the insurgency. The real revolutionary was Paul, who imagined a utopian order and brought it about through theological-political fiat. “Compared to this,” Taubes declares, “all the little revolutionaries are nothing.” Translation: if you want to be a big revolutionary, take your cues from Paul.’

Read the article here.

A peripatetic professor who resembled Zelig and who succeeded in making Carl Schmitt kosher again.

You are not under law but under grace, is a double coup d’état indeed.

The revolution will come from Saint Paul.

Indeed the meantime, waiting for a meaningful political revelation.