It has become just as clear that the violent disruption of Jewish tradition through persecution, expulsion, and annihilation in the Holocaust actuates new forms of recomposition and reconstruction. Looking for a way from the periphery back to the center, these movements found the kernel of Judaism in various forms: Rosenzweig found it in liturgical existentalism, Buber in the Chasidic movement, Scholem in the kabbalah, Taubes, with the help ofPaul, in a spiritualized Judaism. Taubes reconstructed Judaism not out of the sources of Jewish mysticism, but rather out of the Jewish/early-Christian apocalypticism that absorbed the explosive content of Gnosticism. After an encounter with Eric Voegelin, the latter was said to have remarked to a friend with every indication of horror: "Today I met a Gnostic in the flesh!" Taubes understood "Gnosticism" as a tradition of breaking with tradition, which sets on fire the cages of the world that are otherwise frozen in their immanence.

[..] Scholem had put forth, in two essays, the thesis that Jewish messianism amounts to an exit from history because it puts off the yearning for justice to the world to come and transforms the antagonistic force of critique and change into an attitude ofpassive expectation and hope. This is what Scholem regards as the price that Judaism has had to pay for messianism on a psycho-economic scale. The price of messianism is the retreat from history into the stand-by mode of hoping and waiting. History is for those whose time has come. That Taubes could not acquiesce without contestation to this thesis should be immediately clear. For him, messianism concentrates and forms antagonistic forces, instead of paralyzing them, and always transposed them into revolutionary action. Messianism provides a basis not for retreat, but rather for an entry into history and an exodus from the natural world of the cosmos and its political order integrated into it.

[…] Taubes holds that the process of interiorization is part of the logic of messianism as such, regardless of its religious identity. Every expectation for redemption turns inward if the redemption fails to appear on the social stage of history.

[…]

In the same way as the Krochmal essay, the early essay from 1953 on the "Difference Between Judaism and Christianity"? makes the concept of law central and gives it the status of a defining, fundamental category. Not strict monotheism, not the aniconic reverence of the divine, but the recognition of the law constitutes the deciding touchstone and determining force of Judaism. Whoever annuls the law abandons Judaism. But even the annulment of the law, that is, antinomianism, is an inner-Jewish phenomenon in the form of negation. Christianity is part of a series of other inner-Jewish phenomena of crisis, which the history of Judaism has never been in want of. This history obtains its vitality from the tension of self-negation. Mysticism, ecstasy', and interiority ("heart") are phenomena of an inner-Judaic countermovement against which rabbinical Judaism established itself. This rabbinical core of Jewish identity stands and falls with the law, with the construction of an external public realm of, representation, of legally defining and legally effective representation, and with the everyday sobriety of justice. This core, circumscribed with the concept of halacha, was in the course of history able to integrate the rationalistic philosophy of Maimonides as well as the wild mystic-mythological speculations of the Lurianic kabbalah, the magical ritualism of Jacob Halevi of Marvege, and the ecstatic prophecy of Abraham Abulafia because they did not destroy halacha, but strengthened it instead. By contrast, the antinomian movements, which wanted to annul the law, were condemned as heresies because they held that the messianic time had arrived and considered "belief" in the Messiah to be more salvific than observance of the law. As Christianity is only one among many inner-Judaic heresies, it is neither a problem nor a mysterium for Judaism. In Judaism there is no "Christian question."

[…] Taubes's preoccupation with Gnosticism arises out of two different impulses. First, Gnosticism interests him historically) as a manifestation ofthe (late) ancient history of religion, which, parallel to his understanding of Christianity, he regards as deriving from the inner crises and tensions ofJudaism. Second, however, and far beyond any historical interest, Gnosticism determines his own religious experience and philosophy; he sees in-Gnosticism a highly relevant theology, probably the only one that can cope with the death of God in the catastrophic events of the twentieth century.

[…] For Taubes, a clear line runs from prophecy to apocalypticism and from apocalypticism to Gnosticism. Apocalypticism is the answer to the case "when prophecy fails," and Gnosticism emerges "when apocalypse fails." 

Aleida Assmann, Jan Assman and Wolf-Daniel Hartwich, Editor's introduction, Jacob Taubes, From Cult to Culture