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The Legacy of an Antinomian Messianism within a Jewish Historical Context

It is significant to note that the contested views of dialectical thinking versus their antinomian counterparts have a long history of division from which to draw their present boundaries. Antinomianism, in fact, stretches as far back as Martin Luther, who coined the term in order to distinguish himself from those over-zealous reformers who saw their newfound faith as being at complete odds with one’s subservience to moral law. Luther’s own personal challenges to canon law and ecclesial order (such as his renunciations of priestly privilege or even his own marriage) seemed to many the impetus they were looking for in order to jettison a variety of laws in their near entirety, ecclesiastical and civic alike. Though Luther found himself disagreeing with other reformers on this point, his turn to the writings of Saint Paul in order to grasp something of the freedom he had been looking for (and which he found specifically in Paul’s letter to the Romans) was perhaps not coincidental to Pauline interests in general. Paul’s letters have often been glimpsed as heralding a new understanding of freedom since their inception, one founded upon a turn away from our “enslavement” to the law (and therefore to sin) and a turn to the spirit that goes beyond all earthly divisions. Whether or not Paul intended such wordings to lead to specific radicalized antinomian positions beyond all rule of law, or whether he simply wished to focus the hopes of a people recently parted from their Judaic heritage, remains a point of much contention. At the very least, however, Paul’s conjectures opened wide a startling new path for thought itself—one that continues to be debated in terms both philosophical and theological.

Recurring antinomian gestures: On the return to Saint Paul in contemporary thought

One can find in the late German exegete Günther Bornkamm’s writings, for example, a wealth of insight as to our contemporary divergence of opinions on the various receptions of Paul’s letters. His indication that the divergence between Jesus and Paul is a fundamental Christian theological problem has only been heightened in the last century by its being turned into an “open battle cry” between diverse thinkers.¹ Take, for example, his comments on Ernst Bloch who, in his Atheismus im Christentum (1968), commits the supposed “Marxist mistake” of one-sidedly praising the revolutionary manner of Jesus’ teachings while simultaneously downplaying the significance of Paul.² Bornkamm’s claim, on this count, is that Bloch seeks to focus on the radicality of Jesus’ teachings and to so vehemently oppose a Pauline discourse as to distort and lessen the eschatological emphasis within the original Christian message.³ Bornkamm, of course, wants nothing to do with such a severance, and sets his sights accordingly on recovering what he sees as the essential core of Pauline teaching.

What is intriguing, and whether Bornkamm intends it to be so or not, is that such a recovery makes an unusual pact with the Marxist thinker on a point that will return to us time and again. As Bornkamm summarizes his own reception of Paul’s radical teachings, “Already in Jesus’ message as well as Paul’s, the people who are really in danger and lost are the ‘good’ who need no repentance, the Pharisee in the temple . . ., the lost son’s grumbling elder brother . . ., the laborers in the vineyard who calculated with their master the greater amount of work done and, in consequence, their claim to bigger pay.”⁴ Paul’s thought, Bornkamm finds, is not at odds with Jesus’ message, but rather the fitting extension of the same “gospel,” one that can be summarized as an attempt to highlight the unique mixture of “earthen vessels” and “treasure” that we all already are.⁵ Such a rendering of Paul’s message means that, quite significantly and radically alike, “The coming kingdom of God—on earth, not beyond it (here Bloch is absolutely correct)—is therefor already breaking in [Anbrechen].”⁶ It is not simply beyond us; it is already here—a constituent part of the material reality in which we dwell and which could be witnessed as such if thinkers like Bloch were not so quick to dismiss Saint Paul. Such is Bornkamm’s insight. Indeed, his conclusion seems to signal a profound possible rapprochement between Marxist and Pauline thought—if those perceptive enough were able to sense the connections lying between them. Despite Bornkamm’s chastising of Bloch, perhaps the latter’s reading of Marx’s historical insights as being only possible through his earlier religious critiques—that is, only by turning his focus away from “heavenly things” was Marx able to grasp something of the freedom possible for humanity here and now—bears a striking resemblance to Bornkamm’s eventual conclusions.⁷

It is doubly intriguing, of course, that the contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou explicitly singles out Bornkamm’s book (along with Stanislas Breton’s Saint Paul) as part of a triangle of thinkers among whom he counts his own more recent contribution to Pauline scholarship.⁸ The fact that such an avowedly Marxist and atheistic thinker would praise Bornkamm’s theological work certainly does signal an affinity that should not go overlooked. It should also indicate to us the profound symmetry between certain contemporary continental philosophers who have chosen to focus upon the writings of Paul and a deep theological tradition of reading Pauline works in particular ways, as I hope to demonstrate.

For its part, Badiou’s stated thesis for this short treatise on Paul concerns itself with the relationship between the establishment of a form of subjectivity freed from the law, something we can recognize even in a rudimentary reading of Luther’s works (though they are divergent in many other respects, to be sure).⁹ In Badiou’s quest to posit a “universal singularity” apart from its enslavement in law, he relies upon the Pauline letters in order to justify a separation from politics as we know it, bound as it is to the structures of law and order.¹⁰ As he quips, “What is essential for us is that this paradoxical connection between a subject without identity and a law without support provides the foundation for the possibility of a universal teaching [une prédication universelle] within history itself.”¹¹ This is the location of the “universal” subject that Badiou is after, one not bound to the particularities of given situations. As such, Badiou notes how “To declare the nondifference between Jew and Greek establishes Christianity’s potential universality; to found the subject as division, rather than as perpetuation [maintenance] of a tradition, renders the subjective element adequate to this universality by terminating the predicative particularity of cultural subjects.”¹²

This is a universal teaching, moreover, that brings the dialectics of identity to a stoppage point, for, as he puts it, Paul is an “antidialectical” thinker, someone who chooses to adhere to the truth of a grace instead of returning to the inscriptions of law.¹³ It is a grace, however, that need not be sacralized—“This de-dialectization of the Christ-event [l’événement-Christ] allows us to extract a formal, wholly secularized conception of grace from the mythological core.”¹⁴ Badiou’s aim, of course, is to “tear the lexicon of grace and encounter [arracher le lexique de la grace et de la rencontre] away from its religious confinement”¹⁵ and, thus, to recognize the “immanentization of the spirit” that comes about after Christ’s death.¹⁶ At the very least, there are echoes of Bornkamm’s thought in Badiou’s emphasis upon these purely “earthen vessels” that we are:

The treasure is nothing but the event as such [l’événement lui-même], which is to say a completely precarious having-taken-place [avoir-eu-lieu]. It must be borne humbly, with a precariousness appropriate to it. [It] must be accomplished in weakness, for therein lies its strength. It shall be neither logos, nor sign, nor ravishment by the unutterable [l’indicible]. It shall have the rude harshness of public action, of naked declaration, without apparel [prestige] other than that of its real content. There will be nothing but what each can see and hear. This is the earthen vessel [le vase de terre].¹⁷

What Badiou (as well as his closest partners in this regard, Slavoj Žižek and Giorgio Agamben) also wants to do, however, is to initiate the next step toward “completing” the Judeo–Christian tradition within a Marxist framework—the profaning of grace or the recognition of a universal subject as removed from the confines of a particular religious tradition. What is being attempted, no less, is the establishment of an antinomianism unheard of since the time of Luther, when the term first acquired its meaning among those early Protestant commentators who sought to free themselves from the law, and as Paul’s writings to many had seemed to encourage.

What we are witnessing today, I would wager, in the fashionable, philosophical return to Pauline thought, is something seen similarly at work in those extreme forms of antinomian thought that have, from time to time, surfaced in certain western religious circles, such as with the Jewish heretic Jacob Frank (1726–91). Gershom Scholem, for example, historically locates this progression toward the “holiness of sin” in the later messianic teachings of Frank, though it was not Frank, but earlier messianic claims that inspired such movements.¹⁸ As Scholem puts it, “Here the external world, the value of which was denied by the inner and secret rites, was that of rabbinical Jewry, for which the Messianic Judaism of Antinomianism, the secret annihilation of the Torah as its true fulfillment, became the secret substitute. But this external world could also be Mohammedanism, if one followed the example of Sabbatai Zevi, or Catholicism if one followed that of Frank.”¹⁹ Such antinomian impulses bear more than just a passing affinity with this present inquiry to discern the difference between antinomian and dialectical approaches to the constitutive tensions (canonical and messianic) within tradition; they dictate the very terms of how such a debate should be framed, illustrating along the way the profound significance which these entirely theological disagreements (orthodox versus heretical positions) hold for our western philosophical developments, as I intend to demonstrate throughout the remainder of this work. At present, however, a brief introduction into the terms of such antinomian impulses (seen most discernibly in the work of Gershom Scholem) and their consequences for contemporary philosophical returns to Pauline literature (in the work of Jacob Taubes) can provide a helpful point of departure for our study.

Gershom Scholem and Jacob Taubes on the historical significance of Sabbatianism

As a fitting gesture toward the direction this century is headed, Daniel Boyarin, in his fairly recent monograph Border Lines, puts forth an intriguing hypothesis—it was Christianity that first gave rise to the partition between Judaism and the newly emergent followers of the Christ event through its intensive efforts to divide the religious world up into its orthodox and heretical movements. In short, the “Christian event” was little more than a codification of the various strains of Judaism (Judaisms) that had previously coexisted in a heterogeneous fashion alongside each other.²⁰ Following this reading, the then-existent forms of rabbinic Judaism and a soon institutionalized form of Christianity quickly emerged as the two identifiable, albeit polarized, religious beliefs to develop shortly after this period of codification. Attempts to label each other as deviant, as well as the ensuing conflicts within their own groupings, only intensified those sustained efforts to draw up the “borderlines” between what was “orthodox” and what was “heretical.” The creation of this border, in consequence, between two faiths otherwise issuing from the same origin, henceforth became the source of our modern conceptualization of religion as an identifiable category. Moreover, and as I will try to explain in what follows, the dualistic foundations upon which the western concept of religion is based, one radically split between the canonical–orthodox formulations of a particular faith practice and their antinomian–heretical (“messianic”) counterparts, would seem to run even deeper, that is, straight into the very structures of how we define our shared sense of humanity.

Boyarin’s thesis, despite its apparent radicality, is not the only voice to sound such a call to reread the history of western religious identifications. In this initial exploration of the philosophical and theological tensions that run throughout this study, I hope to illuminate why this division between Judaism and Christianity, which is truly a division between many Judaisms and multiple Christianities (or, we might say again more simply, a division internal to Judaism itself) is vital to our understanding of, not only western religion and religious practices within a contemporary context, but also of the integrity of each believing individual who is brought up within such religious contexts, thereby also demonstrating the extreme relevance of this drawing of borders for one’s own self-understanding and self-identity. Following Boyarin’s lead, what I will attempt to demonstrate is that by investigating the enduring significance of Sabbatianism as a heretical, antinomian movement within seventeenth-century Judaism, and through its various appropriations in the work of Gershom Scholem and Jacob Taubes, the significance that this movement still has for understanding the tensions present between a variety of still-developing Judaisms and Christianities today can be made manifest. Additionally, I will try to highlight how this single and striking historical example (as well as Giorgio Agamben’s subsequent taking up of this movement’s fundamental insights, as we will later see) also says a great deal about our attempts as humans to establish ourselves through clearly delineated lines of canonical order, most typically demonstrated throughout history in our religious (scriptural) traditions. That is, I intend to show how the rubrics utilized to study Sabbatian thought actually unveil a deeper structural affinity between canonical representations and their messianic undoing.

In a recently published essay on the “essential” division between Judaism and Christianity (a simplified description to be sure), the late German Jewish scholar Jacob Taubes reduces their problematic relationship to the tensions between representation—to which, in his eyes, Judaism must remain faithful—and presentation, which Christianity, or any other messianic movement sprung from its Judaic origins, has tried to elicit through its apparent jettisoning of the law.²¹ Taubes points to the legacy of Sabbatianism in this regard, a seventeenth-century Jewish messianic movement traced by Gershom Scholem, which had once sought to present the divine directly, without any (representative) mediation.²² Just as with the initial stance of Christianity, Sabbatianism attempted to reformulate the coordinates of Judaism from within, to “correct” in fact what Sabbatai Zevi, its founder, saw as the over-legalization of Judaic thought, giving favor instead to the messianic, antinomian subversion of its legalistic–representative frameworks. Occurring historically at another time of Rabbinic crisis, just as had Christianity before it, Sabbatianism signals, for Taubes, something of an internal tension within Judaism that needs to be comprehended and dealt with head-on, rather than continue to give rise to these historical messianic offshoots.

It is, of course, also of interest that Taubes’ work lies at the center of several contemporary philosophical returns to the writing of Saint Paul. What is ultimately of great interest to Taubes within the Christian tradition is the manner in which Paul’s theology reflects both the perceived border between Judaism and Christianity and the inner tensions emanating from within Judaism itself, dynamics which Taubes suspects are at work in more than just the Jewish–Christian divide. In so many words, Taubes’ reading of the Pauline corpus as a heretical form of Judaic thought is essential to his understanding of Judaism itself, what motivates it as a sustained faith practice and causes it to fragment at certain points throughout history. His focus on Paul, then, would seem to take center stage among those subsequent elaborations on Pauline thought (Badiou, Žižek, Agamben) as it continues to set the course for how such Pauline ruminations are to be understood.

As soon becomes clear when one reads through his sparse writings occasioned over the latter half of the past century, Taubes suspects that the same antinomian, messianic tendencies that had once motivated Paul’s separation from his own Jewish roots are the same tendencies that have pushed other Jewish messianic movements to maintain similar positions, such as those discernable in the Sabbatian legacy of the seventeenth century. Taking Gershom Scholem’s academic resurrection of the Sabbatian paradox as his starting point, Taubes links its origins and most basic conclusions directly to Paul’s theological motivations, a determination that will indicate how he sees Paul as being the real originator of Christianity. Before taking a look at his conjectures on Paul’s writings, however, I first want to delve into Taubes’ appropriation of Sabbatianism, though neither necessarily concerning the historical accuracy of his presentation nor his faithfulness to Scholem’s reading, but rather, in order to comprehend his depiction of the movement as it serves to facilitate his later claims. My aim in doing this is to illuminate Taubes’ profound indebtedness to Scholem, as well as his use of Scholem’s work in order to constitute his own views on the great western theological divide between Judaism and Christianity. Only by doing so will we be able to grasp the larger stakes of the debate between dialectical thinking and antinomian impulses.

In a rather, almost hasty introduction to the Sabbatian movement, something which no doubt was occasioned by the nature of his illness at the time of his remarks,²³ Taubes begins his all-too-brief series of lectures on Paul’s letter to the Romans with a solid foundation in the legacy of Sabbatai Zevi, a seventeenth-century messianic figure with whom, according to Taubes, Judaism still needs to wrestle. As he lets the story unfold:

It so happens that in 1648 a manic-depressive, mystically sensitive man comes to a Kabbalist in order to be cured by him of his manic-depressive states. In these manic phases, in this small town Jerusalem or Smyrna that he came from, he has committed obvious transgressions of Rabbinical law. He comes to this man, to this young, twenty-three-year-old Nathan of Gaza, who says to him: I can’t cure you, your suffering is a messianic suffering [messianische Leiden]. The soul of the Messiah [die Seele des Messias] reigns within you. And there ensues a folie à deux; on the one hand, the Messiah and, on the other hand, his proclaimer.²⁴

Nathan of Gaza, playing the role of Paul to an apparent messianic figure, either unknowingly or not, deduces the reasons for this man’s occasional lapse in following Jewish law as being part of his “messianic suffering,” a sure sign (or retroactive legitimation, I would add) that something sacred is at work in the person of Sabbatai Zevi. It was Nathan’s subsequently “blasphemous” writings that were actually to give the movement its shape and its subsequent force beyond any messianic charisma either found or lacking in Sabbatai Zevi. Despite the wide popularity which the movement soon acquired, there was yet another, bigger obstacle to the movement’s ultimate success that was to come some years later, a paradox of faith that would forever after define the very soul of its followers—Sabbatai Zevi would convert to Islam.

As Taubes tells the tale, “The Sultan is worried about this thing getting out of hand in the Jewish ghetto in Smyrna, Constantinople, and so on. And, on the advice of a converted Muslim doctor, he presents to the ‘Messiah’ the flowing alternatives: death or conversion to Islam.”²⁵ Though portions of the Jewish people have been content throughout history to die for their faith rather than convert (though the figure of the Marrano constitutes an interesting departure from this trend), as Taubes points out, Sabbatai Zevi does the astounding thing and converts to Islam, obtaining in the process an annual salary at the court of the Sultan. In the face of multiple accusations of betrayal and a rising tide of dissent, his followers are faced with a potentially lethal discouragement in terms of their religious aspirations. How indeed will he be able to gather all the sparks of purity which the messiah was supposed to do, and as the Kabbalah had seemed to point toward?

So now the problem arises: What is this supposed to mean? Well, that is a very deep mystery. He has descended into the abysses of impurity [Abgründe der Unreinheit], which is the world, so that he can there gather in the sparks of purity [Funken der Reinheit]. That is the Kabbalistic vision [Vorstellung]: the world lives off the sparks of purity, and when these are scattered throughout the world and when they are gathered, the world of impurity collapses into itself [bricht in sich zusammen].²⁶

According to Kabbalistic lore, the sparks of holiness are everything that is important to Judaism on the whole and it is Sabbatai Zevi who has appeared to push them aside through his conversion to Islam.²⁷ In the face of his conversion, things remain, as one might suspect, rather unclear—Are his followers to convert to Islam as well? How is one to read his act of conversion other than as a betrayal of his Judaic roots and of his most loyal followers? Despite the fact that the complexity of the situation would call for an extremely nuanced historical study, Taubes reduces the paradox to its most simple formulation—“There are different answers, and I can’t present all of them to you here, but the principle is clear: the inner experience of redemption [Die innere Erfahrung der Erlösung] is going to be reinterpreted [umgedeutet] in light of an external catastrophe and a slap in the face.”²⁸

Taubes subsequently, and as we might suspect, references the various groups of Jews throughout history who were suspected of antinomian tendencies and who converted (or rather were forced to convert) to Catholicism en masse, though perhaps never fully, he hints, and indeed often converted with a hidden aim toward subverting the established Church. Instead of simply repeating an anti-Semitic accusation, however, the nature of these conjectures is rather to place emphasis back upon Judaism itself, and its relation to the law in general. The point of such an exercise is a decidedly singular one—Taubes claims to be demonstrating the “logic of this type of faith,” something he sees at work in this Jewish, and decidedly non-Greek, movement. As he puts it, “. . . the internal logic of events demanded a faith that is paradoxical, that is contradicted by the evidence.”²⁹

Such is the thesis that he extends to the ancient Jewish rabbinic scholar, Paul (or Saul) of Tarsus. His dramatic rereading of Paul’s Letter to the Romans henceforth constitutes one of the great philosophical–theological movements of the last century. This is the case because it is Taubes’ reading of the Pauline writings that emphasizes how Paul’s legacy entails not only the development of an antinomian messianic position in relation to Judaism, but also the “transvaluation of all the values of this world [Umkehrung aller Werte dieser Welt],” culminating in a certain formation of a “political theology” that has since lost none of its vigor.³⁰ In a word, and pointing toward his great indebtedness to Scholem for more than just historical material, Taubes lays out the very coordinates of where Scholem’s views emanate from:

This paradoxical faith is what I’ve tried to explain to you from the point of view of religious history with respect to the messianic logic [messianischen Logik] in the history of Jewish mysticism, as a logic that is repeated in history. Whoever understands what Scholem presents in the eighth chapter of Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism can penetrate more deeply into Paul’s messianic logic than by reading the entire exegetical literature.³¹

What he uncovers is a messianic logic that is repeated throughout history—for him, the key to comprehending the Judaic–Christian divide tout court. It is no surprise that, as a result, he makes an overt nod toward Scholem’s insight, as we will see.

It is in this eighth chapter of a book dedicated to the memory of Walter Benjamin, whose own take on the messianic played such a pivotal role within last century’s philosophical undercurrents, as I already hinted in the Introduction (see below for more on Benjamin), that Scholem deepens our understanding of Sabbatianism by drawing it into a comparison, not only with certain oppositional forms of Orthodox Judaism and Rabbinical thought, but also with Christianity, which he sees as a sort of precursor to later Judiac mystical movements focused upon the entrance of the Messiah into history. For Scholem, Nathan of Gaza, Sabbatai Zevi’s champion in writing, “. . . does not himself practice antinomianism; he interprets it. He raises an indefinable state of exaltation with its euphoria, which manifests itself in absurd, bizarre and sacrilegious actions, to the rank of a ‘sacred act’ in which a sublime reality becomes manifest: the state of the new ‘world of Tikkun [redemption or healing]’. ”³² And, this action, presumably, is what likewise occurred, though in another form, in the earliest stirrings of Christianity, or that section of it which Taubes will come to identify with the figure of Paul, someone who, Taubes points out, compared himself more to Moses than to Jesus.³³ In essence, what Scholem points us toward is the manner in which the right combination of Kabbalah teaching and messianic expectation, fomented during a period of unrest among the Jewish people within this context, led Nathan of Gaza, according to Scholem, to interpret the heretical, antinomian tendencies of Sabbatai Zevi as actions of the Messiah. Despite these details of the movement’s rise to prominence, however, Scholem nonetheless targets Sabbatianism as a pivotal process within mystical Judaic thought, one that gave voice to the discontent of the general Jewish population of the time and as that which ultimately helped lead to reform within nineteenth-century Orthodox Judaism.³⁴ This is a fact that has often been overlooked, Scholem notes, due to an Orthodox distaste for antinomian tendencies in general.³⁵

Such distaste for the messianic, antinomian tendencies of Sabbatianism on the part of rabbinic, Orthodox Judaism would seem moreover to place the latter at odds with those forms of Lurianic thought that would define the messianic event as an immanent redemption (Tikkun) of all creation through the gathering up of the divine sparks currently residing in our world.³⁶ In Scholem’s eyes, this immanent redemption became an outworking of processes originating within the human soul, a wrestling with the nature of faith and its paradoxes manifest in the unresolved tensions within Judaic law. For this reason, he can characterize Sabbatianism as more than being solely an historical heretical movement; he can speak of it as a seeking after the redemption of the soul itself. According to Scholem,

Sabbatianism as a mystical heresy dates from the moment when the apostasy of Sabbatai Zevi, which was an entirely unforeseen occurrence, opened a gap between the two spheres in the drama of Redemption, the inner one of the soul and that of history. Inner and outer experience, inner and outer aspects of Geulah, of Redemption and Salvation, were suddenly and dramatically torn apart. This conflict, for which nobody was prepared, which nobody had ever dreamt could happen, went to the very root and core of existence. A choice became necessary. Every one had to ask himself whether he was willing to discover the truth about the expected redemption in the distressing course of history or in that inner reality which had revealed itself in the depths of the soul.³⁷

Such a necessary choice when faced with the reality of what Sabbatianism was asking its adherents to follow is no easy task to undertake. As Scholem expands upon this choice, “Sabbatianism arose out of the awareness of an inherent contradiction, out of a paradox, and the law of its birth determined its subsequent development. It is built upon the tragic paradox of an apostate Savior and it thrives upon paradoxes of which one implies the other.”³⁸ And this is the impulse which Scholem detects as an active force moving yet within both Sabbatianism and the general direction of Christianity.

There are differences between these two parallel formulations of the messianic event to be sure, but they are minimal, for Taubes as for Scholem, and mainly centered on the “weaker” personality of Sabbatai Zevi.³⁹ What Scholem is at pains to stress, however, is the very point that Taubes will seize upon so forcefully as well—both movements stem from an internal tension within Judaism, one that will recur almost cyclically and that will generate multiple Judaisms over time. The logic of the messianic dictates the historical rise of occasional antinomian tendencies that will not only offer an unrelenting realignment of the laws guiding Judaism, and of its various representations of itself, but will also turn the Jewish gaze inward, toward a form of discernment between the inner and outer manifestations of the Jewish spirit. Thus, from this inwardness comes the force of a potential division between the “inner” and the “outer” that had once driven Paul to distinguish between the inner and the outer Jew in terms of a contrast between the spirit and the flesh.⁴⁰ For Scholem, historical forms of messianism arise as the antinomian tendency par excellence, the great catalyst within Judaism, and one end of these contradictory forces that are constantly in tension with one another—the law and its messianic undoing.⁴¹

Within a variety of Jewish contexts, and as was certainly the case for Paul, Jewish messianism as a certain development of an antinomian desire was an unstable force, one as likely to die out as quickly as it had begun. It was therefore often transformed into a universalist position so that it might gain greater appeal and applicability, yet one also at odds with the significant stress on particularity that Judaism would place upon its adherents (and in such a statement, we can already discern the seeds of thought that have motivated so many contemporary philosophical gestures, Badiou perhaps foremost among them). This was, and is, a factor that would ultimately cause these antinomian movements within Judaism to break from tradition and define themselves over and against the “chosen” people.⁴²

As we have already seen, Scholem strove to depict Sabbatianism not so much as a transformation of Judaism, but rather as a transformation taking place within Judaism. It was one intended to reform and renew the essential Judaic message or impulse. In this sense, as David Biale has put it concerning Scholem’s reading, “Sabbatianism was not an aberration of Jewish history or a wild departure from traditional Judaism as a result of non-Jewish influences, but a movement whose origins lay in the heart of the legitimate tradition and whose heretical theology developed as a plausible offshoot of accepted concepts.”⁴³ What Scholem sought to produce in his work was a vision of history as counter-history (much as Jan Assmann will later use the phrase, as we will see) wherein the discontinuities and ruptures that drive historical reformulations are given the weight and merit they deserve. In essence, Scholem considered the possibility for a “living relationship” with tradition to take place beyond the normative and generally constrictive framework of orthodoxy.⁴⁴ It is in this way that he sought to provide a viable platform for the expression of these messianisms as part of the Jewish legacy, and despite their heretical transgressiveness—as voices that needed to be heard from within its walls and not ostracized outside them. As he put it, “Jewish so-called Existenz possesses a tension that never finds true release; it never burns itself out. And when in our history it does discharge, then it is foolishly decried (or, one might say unmasked) as ‘pseudo-Messianism’. ”⁴⁵ The task, according to Scholem, is rather to see these movements for what they are—as challenges to the status quo of orthodox thought, challenges conditioned by particular historical developments (i.e., political, social, cultural, religious, etc) that foster such urges. These are the challenges that speak to the very nature of what seems to constitute any orthodox (or canonical) position.

Another parallel trend in Judaic history which Scholem notes as converging with both Sabbatianism and Christianity is that of the Marranos, a grouping of certain Sefardic Jews from Spain who had been forced into public apostasy from 1391 to 1498 though they perhaps preserved something of their private faith in secret.⁴⁶ This split in faith produced a “double life” for most, one that deeply resonated with the later teachings of Sabbatianism, as Scholem illustrates.⁴⁷ Living this double life could, in fact, have provided the very experience which made Sabbatianism possible, what allowed it to take root and eventually to flourish. It is little surprise to Scholem that the writings of the Marrano Abraham Miguel Cardozo, who had also studied Christian theology for a time, came to envision the drama of salvation as a process wherein all true believers of Israel would have to embrace these same antinomian tendencies, live the “double life” of faith and only thus redeem the “fallen sparks” of the divine.⁴⁸

The stakes of leading this antinomian “double life” were, and are great, for this is the very experience of faith that brings with it, not a destruction of, but a possible radical new relationship with the Torah. It provides what can be a subtle shift in perspective that allows an entirely new way of seeing things to emerge. In some historical cases, a “new mood,” as Scholem puts it, subsequently arose within certain Jewish communities traditionally devoted to the Law wherein they were able to express an antinomian tendency far greater than either Christianity or Islam previously had, since both of these movements had developed legal structures designed to prevent any further ignitions of messianic (or antinomian) disruption. These initial messianic disruptions had been constrained with an even greater orthodoxy than Judaism had ever produced precisely because they had begun as antinomian responses to a Judaic (or Judaic–Christian, as in the case of Islam) orthodoxy. Allowing such movements to be heard, however, began new expressions of thought that Scholem, for one, was quick to ascertain as vital to the progression of Judaism as a whole. The seeds for a radicalized hermeneutics ultimately to be born from such a reading as Scholem’s are to be found here.

Two positions consequently developed within Judaism in order to account for these antinomian tendencies. The moderate view, on the one hand, held that it was only the Messiah himself who would live at variance with the Law; all other believers were still called to adhere to its rule. From this perspective, the Messiah alone would submerge himself in the world of sin and despair in order to salvage the Tikkun, to gather the holy sparks and redeem humanity. For believers to attempt this would only bring about the entrance of a form of nihilism through their attempts to enter into a paradox under which no one can truly live; it was the Messiah alone who could withstand such an aporetic existence. The more radical position, on the other hand, sought to universalize this paradoxical status of the Messiah in order to draw believers into a profoundly new form of religious life. As Scholem defines their witness—“The consequences which flowed from these religious ideas were purely nihilistic, above all the conception of a voluntary Marranism with the slogan: We must all descend into the realm of evil in order to vanquish it from within.”⁴⁹ Their doctrine, in essence, was one that promoted a certain “holiness of sin.” The descent into an absolute antinomianism, what became in effect a form of nihilism, was to be transformed ultimately into a doctrine of redemption, one that upheld the paradoxes which the Messiah would seek to embody.⁵⁰

Such subsequent movements sought, as Paul had once done, to proclaim those things once deemed impure as now pure, and therefore to follow their all-too-human desires further than Judaic tradition had ever considered allowable. Hence, by not creating an analogous teaching of counterbalance that all things are permissible, but not all things are edifying, as Paul had once done,⁵¹ these messianic outbursts tended to plunge their followers into an ever-greater nihilistic outlook on existence. A religious myth of nihilism consequently arose as engaged in a permanent struggle with traditional religious frameworks. The Talmudic saying that “The subversion of the Torah can become its true fulfillment” now took on an entirely new meaning, one destined to resonate with later, similar antinomian, messianic tendencies (a temptation and interpretation of things that we will see return with the case of Agamben in the next chapter).⁵²

Despite the reality that these doctrines of a religious messianism were, as would be expected, condemned by the orthodox among the Judaic faithful, as Scholem notes, they nonetheless express a positive truth that needs to be understood—their nihilistic furor “. . . is after all only the confused and mistaken expression of their urge towards a fundamental regeneration of Jewish life, which under the historic conditions of those times could not find a normal expression.”⁵³ The expression they did find, again historically speaking, was one of an inglorious descent into a nihilistic vision of redemption, one that nonetheless exposes its underlying logic as such—“Everyone must in some way share the fate of the Marranos: one’s heart and one’s mouth may not be the same.”⁵⁴ And this was to be the case within Judaism, and not simply outside it. Sabbatianism, whether Jewish scholars were willing to admit it or not, according to Scholem, was the driving force behind the subsequent Jewish Enlightenment of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.⁵⁵ Or, as Biale has put it, “On a theoretical level, then, Sabbatianism prepared the ground for modern secularism and the Enlightenment. The doctrine of the holiness of sin became secular indifference to all traditional Jewish law.”⁵⁶ The effects of antinomianism, whether perceived as a sustainable position or not, were therefore very real and vibrant in their impact upon the community of believers.

These messianic impulses, as Scholem perceives them having been at work in history under many different names and guises, are primed for revolutionary zeal if any such “unbounded political apocalypse” should present itself, as was the case for some Jews who lived at the time of the French Revolution.⁵⁷ Precipitous thoughts, such as those harbored in Sabbatianism, in Scholem’s judgment, are self-contradictory and hence prone to self-disintegration. Yet, as we are about to see in the work of Jacob Taubes, such a judgment may not be entirely foreclosed. That is, though he may have sensed the need to recognize and recover the heretical propensities of antinomian thought within a traditional framework, Scholem may have missed something altogether more radical about such movements than he first suspected.

Jacob Taubes and the division between “Judaisms” and “Christianities”

In conclusion to an essay devoted to exploring the notion of theodicy as a concept situated in-between messianism and apocalypse, Engelhard Weigl finds that the only scholar to adopt the messianic motives of German–Jewish thought from the Weimar Republic of the early twentieth century (“following the footsteps of Walter Benjamin”) is Jacob Taubes.⁵⁸ Noting the unique combination of Pauline and Benjaminian thought in Taubes’ work, Weigl exalts Taubes’ role as a thinker in this tradition by asserting that it was Taubes alone who continued on a messianic tradition that otherwise might have been destroyed by “Hitlerism and Stalinism” in kind.⁵⁹ This is, of course, the same tradition that Agamben will later pick up and affirm quite pointedly in his own lectures on the apostle Paul and his relationship to Benjamin’s messianic themes, as we will see. What I seek to illuminate here, however, is the manner in which Taubes’ writings on the separation(s) between Judaism and Christianity (or even Judaism itself from within), as with his writings on religion and Paul in general, are a profound meditation upon the nature of our most basic western religious desires, ones that are born within the tensions of representation that Taubes outlines as inherent to the Judaic legacy. What Taubes’ thought grasps beyond Scholem’s perspective, however, is that such desires have often given rise over time even to our most basic formulations of the divine, a fact which has still yet to be comprehended in our current day.

In “The Price of Messianism,” a brief polemical essay written against Scholem’s theses on the various historical forms of messianism, Taubes takes up the facts comprising the essence of his re-envisioning of the Judaic–Christian divide. After praising Scholem’s “substantial contribution” to our knowledge of messianism in general, he immediately launches into his polemic against Scholem’s critique of Christianity’s “interiorization of the messianic experience [Verinnerlichung der messianischen Erfahrung]”.⁶⁰ Scholem’s facile division of the messianic ideal into its exterior, political (Judaic) and interior, spiritual (Christian) forms, according to Taubes, fails to bring out the true dynamics inherent in messianism. Again, echoing the themes that are resurgent within this analysis of the Jewish–Christian division, Taubes asks us to consider:

. . . the dialectics in the messianic experience [messianischen Erfahrung] of a group at the moment when prophecy of redemption [Prophezeiung der Erlösung] fails. The “world” does not disintegrate, but the hope of redemption crumbles. If, however, the messianic community, because of its inward certainty, does not falter, the messianic experience is bound to turn inward; redemption is bound to be conceived as an event in the spiritual realm, reflected in the human soul. Interiorization is not a dividing line between “Judaism” and “Christianity”; it signifies a crisis within Jewish eschatology itself—in Pauline Christianity as well as in the Sabbatian movement of the seventeenth century. How else can redemption be defined after the Messiah has failed to redeem the external world except by turning inward?⁶¹

Rather than finding itself reliant upon forms of natural law, Judaic thought is represented by the Torah or divine law (halacha), and it is the fracture present within this divine law that gives the occasional messianic impulse its distinctive antinomian flavor, as was the case for Christianity nearly two millennia ago. The crisis at stake, then, is one regarding the validity of Jewish law itself and not necessarily the separation between the many Judaisms and Christianities. Such is Taubes’ assertion.

Here is where the relevance of Paul’s version of the Christian messianic claim comes to the fore, as “Contrary to Scholem, I would argue that the strategy of Paul toward abrogation [Aufhebung] of the law was not dictated by pragmatic reasons . . . but followed strictly from his ‘immanent logic’ after acceptance of a Messiah justly crucified in consequence of the law.”⁶² Rather than read this as solely an “original” contribution to the realm of the religious, Taubes delves back into the furthest recesses of Judaism itself, finding therein the source for most of Christianity’s later claims—“The materials that Scholem has assembled and interpreted show beyond a shadow of a doubt that the symbols most alien to classic Judaism, such as the incarnation or the divinization [Vergöttlichung] of the Messiah, come to the fore in consequence of the inner logic in the messianic experience [inneren Logik der messianischen Erfahrung].”⁶³ This is the “idea” of messianism, its internal logic working beyond any singular religious tradition and pouring into our cultural and political spheres, which Scholem has apparently overlooked. Hence, Paul is an antinomian in the extreme for Taubes, one who must see the law brought to its end, not only in its Judaic form, but in general, even in its national and cultural contexts. Paul is able to subdivide not only Jewish identity, but all identities into their external/internal elements since his messianic identifications lead him to do so. (This is a logic which Agamben, for example, merely repeats in his lectures on Paul, as we will see later on). Hence, “The crisis of eschatology becomes for Paul a crisis of conscience [Krise des Gewissens].”⁶⁴ In this manner, a universal psychological principle of individuation is opened up as we are rendered divided within ourselves just as our conscience is divided into its internal/external elements. Paul’s initial embracing of an antinomian messianism actually gives birth to the “modern” subject so to speak, and more than a bit akin to Badiou’s development of a universal subject via these same Pauline coordinates.

In Taubes’ estimation, there are only two genuine messianic movements that have taken place, historically-speaking—those in early Christianity and in the Sabbatian movement. And, as we are by now conditioned to expect, their coinciding is not an accident. Rather,

The first occurs just before rabbinic Judaism has begun to mold the fantasy and the reality of the Jewish people, that is, before the destruction of the Second Temple. . . . The second comes to the fore at the time when rabbinic Judaism in its classic form begins to disintegrate—for rabbinic Judaism consistently opposed [ablehnend gegenüber] messianic movements.⁶⁵

Because these messianic movements are re-interpreted (universalized, in Badiou’s language) by their respective communities of followers (most successfully through Paul of Tarsus, in the case of Jesus, and Nathan of Gaza, in the case of Sabbatai Zevi), they survive throughout history. Rather than these messianic figures being produced around the source of an enigma impermeable to historical scrutiny, Taubes rather suggests that they are consistent with the “inner logic” of the messianic idea: “It is in the interpretive context that the messianic message is to be found, not in the life-history [Lebenssgeschichte] of a person, which is as opaque [undurchsichtig] as all earthly events [irdischen Ereignisse] usually are.”⁶⁶ The paradox within each faith is one that arises from within Judaic law itself, leading Taubes to formulate the essential problematic as such: “The horns of the dilemma cannot be escaped. Either messianism is nonsense, and dangerous nonsense at that, but the historic study of messianism is a scientific pursuit . . . or messianism, and not only the historic research of the ‘messianic idea,’ is meaningful inasmuch as it discloses a significant facet of human experience [menschlichen Erfahrung].”⁶⁷

Rather than view the rise of Jewish messianism as a response to feelings of powerlessness, pace Scholem, Taubes reads its relevance as integral to the nature of law on the whole. As he quips, “Every endeavor to actualize [aktualisieren] the messianic idea was an attempt to jump into history, however mythically derailed [mythisch entgleisen] the attempt may have been. It is simply not the case that messianic fantasy and the formation of historical reality [die Gestaltung der geschichtlichen Wirklichkeit] stand at opposite poles.”⁶⁸ Retreating from history, from this standpoint, was actually the position of the rabbinic view—“. . . the outlook that set itself against all messianic lay movements [messianische Laienbewegung] and cursed all messianic discharge [messianische Entladung] a priori with the stigma of “pseudo messianic’.”⁶⁹ In this way, rabbinic Judaism developed a highly stabilized structure through which to posit itself and its people as if “outside” of history, living separate from those seen as immersed in history. As such, “Only those who jumped on messianic bandwagons, religious or secular, giving themselves entirely to their cause, burned themselves out in taking [verzehrten sich in der Übernahme] the messianic risk.”⁷⁰ Twentieth-century Zionist aspirations would fall into this same category of thought, as their hopes in forming the nation of Israel were once again also distrusted by those same rabbinic structures that had once been suspicious of figures such as Jesus or Sabbatai Zevi. This is so because, as Taubes renders it, “every attempt to bring about redemption on the level of history without a transfiguration [Verwandlung] of the messianic idea leads straight into the abyss.”⁷¹

What Taubes is aiming for, both here and elsewhere in his writings, comes to bear directly upon his reading of the gap separating Judaism from Christianity, or even multiple Judaisms from themselves. And this difference, for Taubes, is in its essential details no small matter. It has been the very fabric of our western culture and that which still influences “every moment of our lives”—an extremely bold and wide-sweeping claim to be sure.⁷² The history of their relations has dramatically been dominated by Christian success, both politically and socially, though this fact need not determine our present understanding of their relationship, nor set a trajectory for their future interaction. In fact, without this historical baggage, the tension between them becomes somewhat clearer. Generally speaking, Christianity is dependent upon its Judaic heritage, as Judaism is necessary for its plan of salvation to come to ultimate fruition. From the perspective of Judaism, however, Christianity is little more than another heretical movement, in no sense necessary for Judaism’s survival. Contrary to those Judaic philosophies of the last century that sought to incorporate Christianity into their grand religious narratives (e.g., Franz Rosenzweig),⁷³ Taubes rather highlights the manner in which Christianity appears, at least historically, as an attempt to cope with a crisis present entirely within certain Rabbinic circles of Judaic thought—within, that is, the nature of law itself.

Again, for Taubes, this tension was recognized nowhere more accurately than in the writings of Paul, who, for his part, felt out the divisions with perceptive insight. As he puts it, “It is perhaps no paradox that Paul, a Pharisee and son of a Pharisee, who claimed to have studied under Gamaliel and to have excelled in his zeal for the law and tradition—that this same Paul was better prepared than modern Jewish apologists to define the basic issue dividing Judaism and Christianity. That issue is the law [Und diese Frage ist das Gesetz].”⁷⁴ Paul’s conclusion, that Jesus was the longed-for messiah and that this occurrence superseded the rule of Judaic law, pushes Christianity into the realm of forever being a heretical Judaic sect in its denial of halacha or “the ‘way’ of the law in a man’s life [der “Weg” des Gesetzes im Leben der Menschen].”⁷⁵ By portraying the fundamental division between the faiths as one centered on the issue of law, Taubes is able to shift focus away from the traditional criticism of Christianity’s perceivable threat to Judaism’s monotheistic adherence. Indeed, if Judaism’s central tenet had been simply its monotheistic core, how had it amply survived the “centuries-long predominance of the Lurianic kabbalah” with its insertion of Gnostic and even pagan mythologies into the Judaic system of belief?

Kabbalah movements, he asserts, not only survived, but actually added a certain sense of prestige to Judaic traditions. This was so for the most part because they were able to enhance the strength and prominence of halacha in Jewish life.⁷⁶ “Challenges not to Judaism’s monotheism, but to the validity [Gültigkeit] and interpretation of the law, shake [erschüttert] the Jewish religion and community to their foundations. Any messianic claim represents such a challenge because it claims to have ushered in [heraufzuführen] an age in which the law is superseded [überwunden].”⁷⁷ Rather than this truth being capable of rendering Judaism as merely a “legalistic” religion (“Gesetzesreligion”), the path has been paved for a polyvalent halacha capable of absorbing rationalist, mystical or even ecstatic prophetic philosophies, something which history has demonstrated again and again. It can absorb quite a few divergent views it would seem, except for those views that deviate from an adherence to the law itself, views such as those which Paul and Sabbatai Zevi, for example, had manifested.

The force of Taubes’ argument would seem to lie in the manner in which he is able to align the scope of Christian claims with other heretical–messianic impulses within Judaic tradition. Like the messianic transgressions of Sabbatai Zevi, Christianity appeared at a time in history when Rabbinic Judaism was experiencing an internal crisis of identity. In Taubes’ opinion, it was this internal tension within Judaism that ultimately supplied the motivation for a transgressive–messianic movement:

Christian history, Jesus’ claim to the title of Messiah, and Paul’s theology of Christ as the end of the law [als dem Ende des Gesetzes], are not at all “unique events” [einzigartige Ereignisse] for Judaism, but things that have recurred in the Jewish pattern of religious existence [im jüdischen Grundmuster der religiösen Existenz]. Christian history, as I have said, constitutes no “mystery” for the Jewish religion. Christianity represents a crisis that is “typical” in Jewish history and expresses a typical Jewish “heresy”: antinomian messianism [der antinomistische Messianismus]—the belief that with the coming of the Messiah, not observance of the law, but faith in him is required for salvation [heilsbedeutsam].⁷⁸

Christianity, like Sabbatianism, presented believers with a “paradox of faith,” one which in turn generated a vehicle for the expression of antinomian theological tendencies. Any subsequent antinomian trends in secular thought are thereby to be seen as being merely capitulations to a way of life that does not focus on halacha, or the law lying at the center of a Jewish way of living. To divide matters of religious expression into their spirit/letter (or grace/law) constituent parts is to cede major theological matters to Paul. Yet, despite this reality, he says, “Modern Jewish thinking is in large part a prisoner of this antinomianism, which pervades modern thought in general; in the world today the principle of law is reduced to a juridical device and the ‘pathological inclination of love’ [pathologische Neigung der Liebe] (Kant) is exalted [hochgepriesen] over against the ‘blind principle’ of justice [Gerechtigkeit].”⁷⁹ This is how things have been framed historically, but, as Taubes tries to stress, things could have also happened otherwise.

What he certainly aims to elucidate is the manner in which our cultural, religious, and political representations are established along these lines emanating from the Jewish tradition. In a sense pivotal to the present study, he makes the crucial linkage between halacha and representation as being central to his understanding of Judaic–Christian relations—“. . . halacha must become “external” and “juridical”; it must deal with the minutiae of life [Einzelheiten des Lebens] . . ..”⁸⁰ Halacha is immersed in an inescapable world of representations and their nominal (normative) constructions to which Christian antinomian and its desire for a presentation (grace) beyond representation (law) seems forever wedded. The force of Christianity’s messianic claims over our present sources of cultural intelligibility are to be understood in this sense as the endless contrast between representation and presentation, justice and love, and even law and grace as they continue under a myriad of guises to abound in our world. Even the designators “conservative” and “liberal” would seem to be caricatures that do indeed stem from the same issues that motivate our religious identifications. Seen from this light, it is little surprise that politics and religion often go hand-in-hand, practically speaking, for many people.

This connection is what will further enable Taubes to read Paul as one opposed not just to Judaic law but to the principle of law itself—a political challenge to all earthly forms of rule. If Taubes is to be heard on this point, this is a tension which originates from the same focal point (Judaism) and, though it occasionally deviates into various heretical forms, will remain within its original context as the tension is not easily resolvable, or even resolvable at all. Law and grace, in this polarized contrast, will continue to motivate the various religious beliefs found somewhere along a sliding-scale between representation and presentation, even if this contrast seems to arise from a source outside of Judaic thought (as with Christianity). It is, therefore, within this spectrum of Judaisms that Taubes attempts to posit an answer—“The controversy between the Jewish and Christian religions points to the perennial conflict between the principle of law [Prinzip des Gesetzes] and the principle of love [Prinzip der Liebe]. The ‘yoke of the law’ [Joch des Gesetzes] is challenged by the enthusiasm of love [Enthusiasmus der Liebe]. But the ‘justice of the law’ [Gerechtigkeit des Gesetzes] may, in the end, be the only challenge to the arbitrariness of love [Willkür der Liebe].”⁸¹

The tension between law and grace that he here seizes upon as foundational to all representations is what consequently aligns his work on Paul with his formulations on a contemporary political theology. Following Paul’s development of an antipolitical politics, something perhaps akin to Paul Fletcher’s more recent “(im)political theology,”⁸² Taubes produces a form of apocalypticism as an authentic form of political theology that is inherently on the side of the oppressed as it seeks to delegitimize political power.⁸³ This perception and appropriation of Paul’s writings had been present even in his earliest writings, as his dissertation on western eschatological views can attest. There, in fact, this conjunction prompted a radical re-thinking of the role of the messianic within political thought on the whole, as well as further deepening our account of what ontological forms could be said to resonate within such accounts. In many ways, and as we shall see re-appear most pointedly in a moment through the work of Agamben, the connection between certain antinomian forms of messianic thought and an attempt to construct a “theology of immanence” begins here.

The re-entrance of immanence

In his dissertation, published in English as Occidental Eschatology, Taubes juxtaposes the philosophies of the theistic–transcendental (Kierkegaard) with the atheistic–materialist (Marx), seeing their clash as one ultimately producing what appears to us as the necessity for decision—“The decision [Ent-scheidung] which Marx and Kierkegaard call for deepens the rift [Scheidung] and makes it absolute. That is why this call for a decision marks the beginning of a crisis that is still shaking our present age. For crisis is scission [Scheidung] arising from the call for decision [Entscheidung].”⁸⁴ Echoing his later encounter with Carl Schmitt, the master-theorist of decision within the sphere of the political,⁸⁵ Taubes here outlines the framework through which any radical political theology must be understood, a framework beyond where most theological and/or political philosophers have been willing to go—“The fusion of inside [Kierkegaardian inwardness] and outside [Marxist materialism] can only be attained if one is prepared to abandon the territory which holds Marx and Kierkegaard, even in their opposition, captive.”⁸⁶ Just what this attainment will consist in remains, at least in this early work, somewhat unclear.

What is left open as a possible alternative, however, is what had dropped out of Taubes’ argument after it was first introduced alongside the theistic–transcendental and the atheistic–materialist—the pantheistic–immanent, or that which he describes as an aesthetic–religious merger of God and the world that results in a “strange interchangeability [merkwürdigen Vertauschbarkeit] of ‘possible [möglich]’ and ‘real [wirklich]’. ”⁸⁷ This would be to discern a theology of immanence as perhaps reaching its greatest point of intensity within Judaic thought.⁸⁸ For the early Taubes, it is the contrast between the theistic–transcendental and the atheistic–materialist which necessitates a “leap [Sprung],” one that in turn formulates the very nature of what is considered to be imperative (“must [muß]”).⁸⁹ In this at times highly speculative treatise, the pantheistic–immanent (thesis) is brought into contrast with the separation of God and the world (antithesis) in order to posit freedom as the only manner in which God can become “all in all. ”⁹⁰ That is, to the world, humanity appears as divine; to the divine, humanity appears as worldly. In the synthesis of these opposing views, the union of God and the world occurs through the freedom granted to a humanity, which now becomes part of the “all in all” that is God.

Consequently, for Taubes, this unique dialectic takes place solely among the only race of people who remain covenanted with God and, yet, are the “restless element in world history [unruhige Element in der Weltgeschichte],” even going so far as to give birth to history as we know it.⁹¹ Opposed to the paganism of nationhood, Israel comes to typify an estrangement from the world (“wilderness [Wüste]” living) wherein revelation is able to take place.⁹² In truth, “Abraham is a stranger on this earth [Fremdling auf Erden], a foreigner to the lands and nations he meets. Abraham’s race regards itself not as belonging to the nations, but as a nonnation [nicht-Volk]. This is exactly what the name Hebrew means.”⁹³ Indeed, there are even utopian (“anarchical”) elements that Taubes detects as present within Israel’s quest to embody a theocracy with God as its sole authority.⁹⁴ These are what he refers to as Israel’s vision of immanence in contrast to the worldly transcendent notions of sovereignty that have functioned mainly throughout history to posit and legitimate the political powers that be. This is a major distinction to be sure—Israel is perceived here as a purely immanent reality because there is no king and not because there is no God.

One can sense through these conjectures, moreover, that Taubes is grasping a major line of Jewish thought. Aviezer Ravitzky, for one, likewise points to just such a reading of Jewish history as he describes the two major trends in contemporary Jewish messianic thought that run parallel to what Taubes is suggesting. These are trends, he suggests, conditioned by the internalization of messianic impulses themselves brought about through the failure of various historical messianic movements. On the one hand, lies a very political messianic religious Zionism and, on the other, a form of Hasidic thought known as Lubbavitcher (Habad).⁹⁵ As Ravitzky explains, both movements are characteristic of Judaic messianic trends on the whole and as both spring from a moment of tremendous crisis to Jewish identity that soon turns into a triumphant, “successful” messianism the moment some semblance of hope appears in the midst of an earlier despairing.⁹⁶ An intense dialectic of potential defeat and subsequent resurrection is consequently posited as the condition sine qua non of a messianic fervor that arises within a particularly intense historical event. Such was the case, as Ravitzky notes, for the Maccabean and Bar Kokhba revolts against Roman occupation, whenever Islamic rule was threatened during the medieval period (as in parts of Turkey, North Africa, and Italy), in the basic platform of Sabbatian belief during the seventeenth century and immediately following World War II in the aftermath of the Shoah.

To note, the two strands of contemporary Judaic messianism that Ravitzky singles out have both demonstrated a turn to instances of pantheistic belief as part of their worldview, more than a coincidental point of convergence with the line of thought being pursued here.⁹⁷ This turn would stand to reason for him since, if history is to be redeemed, and such is what the various Jewish messianisms sought to proclaim throughout history, then reality itself, in all its diversity and particularity, every inch of our material universe, is likely to be transformed as well, bringing divinity into each profaned object. “If the divine bounty encompasses and suffuses not only cosmic reality but also the historical sphere, how can there be any place left for an unredeemed person and for unredeemed time?” is how he puts it.⁹⁸ What these Jewish movements testify to is the reality that

. . . if one adheres to the transcendent concept of God, one is likely to speak of a catastrophic fall from divine favor, of a God who has distanced himself for a time from the people, from humanity, and from history. Yet this possibility has been closed to pantheists. Their God is supposed to be present here and now, within the cosmic and historical order, and not outside it.⁹⁹

This messianic portrayal of a divine immanence has, in Ravitzky’s words, “had a fertilizing effect on theology,” something which has extended itself toward the more traditional, orthodox branches of Judaism in an effort to revitalize them.¹⁰⁰ And, most profoundly, the dynamics most at stake for a meaningful theological articulation are opened to us—an orthodox, transcendent, canonical view of the divine is contrasted with an immanent, pantheistic model of messianic time—one wherein even the “objects” before us seemingly cry out to be heard (as a pantheistic model of our world would perhaps have it).

What we witness in Taubes’ work specifically is, in many ways, a simple variation on this theme, something that will forever unite him with Benjamin’s vision of a “weak messianic force” moving throughout history, liberating those oppressed by history. That is, Taubes suggests that any true revolutionary (messianic) spirit will only be locatable within this framework of an immanent resistance to the transcendent political powers of this world. This is a state, we should keep in mind, which truly says nothing about God’s existence or possible interference in our world—it is solely a critique of a very this-worldly “transcendent” sovereign power. It is only by viewing things as such that Israel gives birth to the “forward-looking” figures who live in expectation of an apocalyptic revelation beyond worldly power—Daniel, Jesus, Bar Kochba and Sabbatai Zevi (and one would be tempted to add Agamben as well, as we will later see), to name but a few.¹⁰¹

Like Paul, Taubes quickly expands the mandate given to Israel through its covenant to all peoples who experience something of this faith of the oppressed, and of exilic life, giving it an international flavor beyond what Judaic thought has often embraced.¹⁰² It is moreover the common foundation of an apocalypticism that embraces an immanent eschatology that, in the end, unites the various strands of the “Mandaean, Manichaean, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic” faiths.¹⁰³ To those persons estranged from the powers of this world, it is the apocalyptic message within each of these religious traditions which calls to them and offers them a sense of joy and comfort. This force working from within that calls each away from the transcendent sovereign powers that be is an immanent messianic force—the logic of the messianic that Taubes preached with an ever-increasing vigor.

If we seek a symbol for such an internal tension, we are returned to the figure of the Marrano, the person divided from their own self, forever estranged from the official structures of political and religious representation, though bound to them in unusual ways as well. Echoing this early strain of his thought, Taubes will in fact later recall the figure of the Marrano as illustrative of such an individual who is able to transcend any given, particular religious representation. As he renders it,

The Marranic experience [marranischen Erfahrung] was a constitutive step toward neutralizing the demarcation [Abgrenzung] between the established religious bodies of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Lurianic kabbalah and Sabbatian messianism recycled [wiederholen] the Marranic crisis of the religious consciousness in mythic terms. In the ideology [Lehre] of the apostate Messiah rings a melody that was expounded nonmythically in the radical critique of religion advanced by dissident Marranos. Cardozo and Spinoza were more than chronological contemporaries.¹⁰⁴

This is undoubtedly a replaying of the tension between law and grace on purely immanent terms—as a structural feature of canonical-legal processes and their messianic undoing—and hence their absolute religious applicability; but it is also indicative of the distance people today display toward religious traditional identifications, such as we find in the work of Jacques Derrida, for instance, who on occasion toyed with the idea of identifying himself as a Marrano figure, as we will see in the chapters that follow. What both Taubes and Derrida seem to be taking from this figure of the Marrano is the only possible identification of the modern subject left to us—the soul divided from within, once a part of the Judaic tradition, but now always-already the last of a dying lineage. This identification with the Marrano is also what will preserve something of the necessity for representation on Taubes’ part, as even the Marrano sits between contested representations, playing witness to the very failures of representation.

In a very real sense, the figure of the Marrano, if seen from these eyes, applies to us all, even those of us most fully immersed within a particular religious tradition, even one other than (but always also within) the structures of a Judaic faith.¹⁰⁵ Just as was the case with Lurianic kabbalah, Sabbatianism and (from Scholem’s and Taube’s viewpoint) Christianity, those practicing their faith within these traditions are more than simply adept at providing representational responses to the various historical crises that assault one’s sense of a unified identity, such as was the case for the first Marranos.¹⁰⁶ We, westerners, it would seem, were always-already Marranos of a sort from the beginning.

What is opened up through this merger of the viewpoints of both Scholem and Taubes on the logic of the messianic is, in the end, a profound witness to the perennial struggle between orthodox and antinomian religious views present in a variety of western monotheistic religions and the cultures they helped shape. What this convergence further reveals is that such a struggle not only exposes the divided nature (and failures) of our self-identifications, but also points us toward what many will perceive as a complete re-envisioning of the role of the divine in our world, a possible “theology of immanence,” as I will later call it. At the very least, this challenge to traditional transcendent (sovereign) structures should provoke us to question our basic alignment of western theological insights and ontological forms (the basis for any alleged “ontotheology”), from our historical definitions of transcendence to those challenging calls for an immanent ontotheology to counteract traditional (transcendent) claims. It is important to keep in mind, however, and as Taubes himself managed to do, that such challenges to tradition are not necessarily calls for an abandonment of said norms, but rather an attempt to further discern the very nature of the religious logic that governs the particular “development of doctrine” that takes place over time.

Whether Taubes’ exposition of these historical immanent, antinomian events within the Judaic heritage rings true or not, what is clear is that these debates have at least expanded into the terrain of philosophical thought. As I hope to make clearer in what follows, the contestations between representation and presentation—specifically through their co-opting of the language of canonical forms and messianic disruptions—have taken on a resonance that Taubes would no doubt recognize, though the argument has drifted further afield than he had perhaps suspected. What we will next witness in the series of debates that surround the oeuvres of both Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben is an unfolding of these Judaic legacies into the very fabric of contemporary philosophical reasoning (perhaps, one could argue, little more than an extension of the Jewish Enlightenment brought about by Sabbatianism!). At the same time, however, such philosophical thoughts are never far from their “theological origins,” if anything, they move us closer to a more profound discernment of what shape the theological takes (or could take) within a contemporary western context.

The debate between Derrida and Agamben, one that could be perceived to be at the heart of philosophy in the modern age, is one that actually reformulates these basic divisions between transcendence and immanence, sovereignty and weakness, representation and presentation, and—though they may appear at times to downplay them—both canonical forms and their accompanying messianic forces. By highlighting the roles which each of these concepts plays in their work, I aim to bring to the fore such intertwined conceptualizations, ultimately seeking to demonstrate how their woven fabric is not only essential to the future of philosophical and political thought, but to religious and theological formulations as well.