Jacob Taubes probably knew as many famous intellectuals as there were roaches in his filthy New York apartment. To list them all (the intellectuals, not the roaches) would take up this whole article, but they include Leo Strauss, Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, Herbert Marcuse, Martin Buber, Jürgen Habermas, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Rudi Dutschke, Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Carl Schmitt, and Jacques Derrida. The historian Jerry Z. Muller, who displays a rare ability to explain a thinker’s key ideas briefly and clearly, provides thumbnail sketches of many of these figures, and so his magnificent book about Taubes, Professor of Apocalypse, doubles as a guide to mid-twentieth-century European and American thought.¹ Muller also describes the most prominent among the innumerable women who became Taubes’s lovers.

The descendant of a line of rabbis, Taubes grew up in Zürich, where he studied the Talmud with Moshe Soloveitchik—a guiding light of European Orthodox Judaism—and wrote a doctoral dissertation at the University of Zürich entitled “Western Eschatology.” He familiarized himself with developments in Christian thought and biblical criticism. Early in his career he was mentored by Strauss and Scholem. With such a broad-based education, Taubes seemed destined make a stamp upon the world and, indeed, he aspired to be a new Hegel or even Saint Paul.

What did Taubes actually achieve? What books did he write, what new ideas did he generate, and what scholarly discoveries did he make? In short, what did he accomplish? Precious little,