From Cult to Culture: Fragments Toward a Critique of Historical Reason (Cultural Memory in the Present)

After launching his career with the 1947 publication of his dissertation, Occidental Eschatology, Jacob Taubes spent the early years of his career as a fellow and then professor at various American institutions, including Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia. During his American years, he also gathered together a number of prominent thinkers at his weekly seminars on Jewish intellectual history. In the mid-60s, Taubes joined the faculty of the Free University in West Berlin, initially as the city's first Jewish Studies professor of the postwar period. But his work and interest expanded beyond the boundaries of the field of Jewish Studies to broader philosophical questions, particularly in the philosophy of religion. A charismatic speaker and a great polemicist, Taubes had a phenomenal ability to create interdisciplinary conversations in the humanities, engaging scholars from philosophy, literature, theology, and intellectual history. The essays presented here represent the fruit of conversations, conferences, and workshops that he organized over the course of his career.

The book is the English edition of a collection of essays by Jacob Taubes, one of the most creative and idiosyncratic philosophers of religion in Germany of the second half of the twentieth century.

One of the great Jewish intellectuals of the twentieth century, Jacob Taubes (1923-1987) was a rabbi, philosopher of religion, and scholar of Judaism. Stanford published a translation of his Political Theology of Paul in 2004.