“I intend to examine the inner dynamics of the messianic idea in Judaism,” he began. “This entails reconsidering Gershom Scholem’s  theses on messianism.”160 Taubes focused on Scholem’s 1959 essay, “Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism,” the lead essay in Scholem’s book of 1971, The Messianic Idea in Judaism. Taubes took aim, above all, at a distinction that Scholem had made in passing between the nature of messianism in Judaism and in Christianity. In Judaism, Scholem maintained, the coming of the messiah was conceived as an event that occurred in history and in public, transforming the world in some perceptible way. By contrast,  after the failure of Jesus to return, Christianity maintained that redemption takes place in an inward transformation, within the soul of individuals.

Taubes argued that this distinction was too sharp, historically inaccurate, and “obfuscates the dynamics inherent in the messianic idea itself.”

“When prophecy fails” and the messiah fails to appear (or reappear), rather than disintegrating, a messianic community can preserve itself by turning inward and conceiving of redemption as an interior event in the  human soul. For Taubes, this marked “a crisis within Jewish eschatology itself—in Pauline Christianity as well as in the Sabbatian movement of the seventeenth  century.” Taubes’s main objection was to Scholem’s failure to treat the Pauline experience as paradigmatic of Jewish eschatology.

[…] Taubes then proceeded to make a number of disconnected but striking observations. When messianic movements survive  after the failure of the initial expectations of redemption, it is not  because of the intrinsic nature of the life of the messiah, but Because of the interpretation of events offered to the community of believers by the would-be messiah’s interpreters. That meant Paul of Tarsus in the case of Jesus, Nathan of Gaza in the case of Sabbatai Zevi. The life of Jesus and of Sabbatai Zevi both ended in “scandal”: crucifixion in the former case, conversion to Islam in the latter. In each case, it was the interpretation of this scandal that mattered.

In cryptic language, Taubes laid out another stimulating thesis about the two major messianic movements in the history of Judaism— Pauline Christianity and Sabbatianism. The first developed “just before rabbinic Judaism had begun to mold the fantasy and reality of the Jewish  people,” that is, before the destruction of the Second  Temple and the creation of rabbinic Judaism—which for Taubes was a spectacular work of creative imagination. Rabbinic Judaism had been consistently opposed to messianic movements, which was why purported messiahs came and went without leaving a trace,  until the Sabbatian movement, which came “when rabbinic Judaism in its classical form began to disintegrate.”

Taubes offered a direct criticism of Scholem’s contention that  there was “a ‘dialectical’ nexus between Sabbatian messianism and the rise of the Aufklärung [Jewish Enlightenment].” He agreed with Scholem that the experience of the expulsion from Spain led to the mythical kabbalistic response that Scholem had charted, ending in Sabbatianism. But, Taubes suggested, it also led to an alternative, rationalistic response, by the seventeenth- century offspring of Marranos such as Spinoza.  These rationalists were the true precursors of the Jewish Enlightenment, Taubes argued, while the mythical, kabbalistic response had actually delayed the pro cess of Enlightenment,  until the failed Sabbatian experience, by taking the mythic response to absurd conclusions, opened the door to Enlightenment.

Taubes then took issue with Scholem’s claim, in a famous essay on “The Neutralization of the Messianic Element in Early Hasidism,” that Hasidism, with its “unheard-of intensity and intimacy of religious life,” had had to “pay dearly for its success. It conquered the realm of inwardness but it abdicated in the realm of messianism,” thus robbing messianism of its “apocalyptic fire.” But, Taubes asked, since historically messianism had led to “absurd and catastrophic consequences” (he had the Sabbatian and Frankist episodes in mind), was it not desirable for Hasidism to have taken this turn inward?

Scholem had contended, “The magnitude of the messianic idea corresponds to the endless powerlessness in Jewish history during all the centuries of exile, when it was unprepared to come forward onto the plane of world history.” Taubes took issue with that notion. True, he asserted, rabbinic Judaism had set itself against all messianic movements, and sought an existence outside history, within the symbolic and  legal community of halacha. But millenarian movements beyond Judaism had indeed influenced history, such as the Puritans who arrived in New  England to create a New Zion, and laid the foundation of the United States of America.

Taubes ended by alluding to contemporary trends in Israel. Zionism marked a deliberate turn to history, an attempt by Jews to mold their own historical destiny. But to confuse that with messianism was to court disaster: “The very attempt to bring about redemption on the level of history without a transfiguration of the messianic idea leads straight into the abyss,” he asserted. The conflation of messianism with Zionism “has allowed wild apocalyptic fantasy to take over political reality in the state of Israel.” By setting the record straight, he concluded, the historian “can pose a problem and signal a danger in the pre sent spiritual and politic al situation of the Jewish  people.”

Indeed, the closer one compares Scholem’s work to Taubes’s talk, the clearer it becomes that Scholem himself had made most of the points that Taubes offered in his critique.

Scholem’s account of Sabbatai Zevi, published in 1957, was in part an examination of Sabbatianism as exemplifying dangers inherent in Zionism. In the preface to the Eng lish translation of the book, published in 1973, he characterized the Sabbatian movement as “a movement which shook the House of Israel to its very foundations and has revealed not only the vitality of the Jewish  people but also the deep, dangerous, and destructive dialectics inherent in the messianic idea.” The essay on “The Messianic Idea in Judaism,” first published in 1959, concluded with another such warning. Especially  after the rise of Gush Emunim, Scholem referred frequently in public statements to the dangers that messianism posed to the Zionist proj ect itself.165

The Pauline experience was never near the center of Scholem’s interest as it was for Taubes. But Scholem did indeed refer to it in discussing the history of Jewish messianism, writing, “I naturally would not deny that Paulinism represents a genuine crisis of tradition within Jewish messianism that is analogous to” Sabbatianism. For Scholem, however, this quickly led to “the early Church’s exceedingly rapid break from Judaism.” He referred to the “far-reaching dialectical and downright antinomian justification” that Paul had developed, “whereby Christ could be proclaimed the ‘End of the Law’ (Romans 10:4),” where “for the first time the crisis of the tradition is explained out of the inner dynamic of the redemption itself.” He devoted many pages of his book on Sabbatai Zevi to the history of Christian chiliastic movements influenced by Jewish messianism— including the Puritans later mentioned by Taubes—before concluding,  “The millenarian movements sufficiently illustrate the revolutionary possibilities inherent in precisely those forms of messianism which the church had always suspected of being influenced by Jewish conceptions.  These revolutionary tendencies expressed themselves in Christian history at least as much as in Judaism.” Scholem returned to that theme in his 1959 essay “ Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism.”

In short, what Taubes offered as a critique of Scholem’s theses on messianism was in many res pects either a  restatement of Scholem’s own themes or a variation on them. That would not stop  later scholars from devoting studies to the purported contrast between their views.170

Jerry Z. Muller, Jacob Taubes: Professor of Apocalypse