A few years before, a totally unexpected encounter with the Jewish Studies department at University of Virginia turned into a consuming intellectual passion. Now, three years and many experiences with Jewish life later, I have found that Jewish Studies has become much more than simply an academic pursuit for me. In the strange, twisted, but amazing trip that has been my college experience, Judaism has provided me with the friends, mentors, values, and spiritual community that I didn’t even know I had been seeking. What started as an avowedly intellectual interest has influenced the entirety of my life.

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I grew up in a very loving, very religious Irish Catholic family in the Philadelphia suburbs—the kind that flies a surprisingly tasteful flag featuring the scene of Jesus’s birth, illuminated by a spotlight, outside our front door during the Christmas holidays. During my childhood, my parents brought my three siblings and me to Mass every Sunday, where we squirmed and giggled our way through the weekly sermons. Cultural Catholicism pervaded our lives, from the elaborate religious rituals that we regularly observed to the social conservatism of our parents.

In ninth grade, I was enrolled in a strict, all-girls’ Catholic high school—a world of assigned lunch table seats and abstinence-only sex education. Rather than bulldogs or wildcats, we were, unfortunately, the Marians. Marians were required to observe all sorts of rules, the most undeniably humiliating one being the requirement to introduce formal dates to a welcoming line of benign but intimidating nuns.

We still had fun, of course. My friends and I invented imaginative games in our Latin class and threw the occasional breakfast tailgate at my parking spot before homeroom. We joked incessantly about our mandatory yearly assemblies with a local pro-life, chastity-promoting Catholic organization, from which we always received bright red stickers that asserted, “I’m Worth Waiting For!” But, though frustrated with Catholicism, by a large majority we identified with the politically and socially conservative views of our parents. I discussed with pleasure “building a wall” for the “illegals” and withholding taxes for the wealthy, and my government class contained one endearing but lonely liberal—a spike-collar-wearing Hillary Clinton devotee with multiple piercings and a pink streak in her hair.

When I started my first year at the University of Virginia, I felt ecstatic to finally experience freedom. Like so many of my peers’ college choices, my own decision to attend U.Va had been uninformed; I had no idea what I wanted to study or who I even was. My chance introduction to Judaism occurred when one of the first students I met, on one of my very first days at school, invited me to attend a Shabbat dinner at U.Va’s Hillel. Being a spacey 18-year-old with virtually no social inhibitions, I agreed.

At that time—before the Hillel’s new multimillion-dollar addition was completed—Shabbat dinners took place on long, crowded tables on old hardwood floors in two rooms featuring posters about Israel and ceiling-high bookcases filled with texts about Judaism. The warm lighting, the books, and the other students who seemed suspended in that hazy, magic time between the end of the school day and the weekend ahead—it all seemed so homey. I was utterly, inexplicably besotted. Of course, I was also utterly, comprehensively Catholic.

But, as I now realize, this new exposure to Judaism coincided with the emergence of some festering issues with Catholicism’s theological precepts. That fall, I enrolled in a course about the Hebrew Bible—during which it dawned on me that no one, including me, had to read the Bible as God’s Word. Still, I wasn’t sure what this meant for observance. During my Bible professor’s office hours, I would interrogate the petite, bewildered woman about her belief in God and Christianity. Repeatedly, she replied that she couldn’t share with me her own personal views, only the academic discourse.

The following semester I enrolled in a Jewish history course. I was astounded by the Jewish historical narrative and Jews’ contributions to intellectual and cultural life despite one horrendous instance of persecution after another. The American Jewish immigrant experience seemed particularly fascinating: Yiddish theater, Tin Pan Alley, you name it—for whatever reason, I was into it.

With the help of my obliging Jewish history professor, who took the time to respond to my theological queries during office hours with even more thought-provoking responses, I began to make peace with the religious teachings of my upbringing and explore new religious philosophies. And then he made an unexpected suggestion: that I consider majoring in Jewish Studies. Having no better ideas at the time, I decided to pursue it.

The next year, I became even more involved in Jewish life. I started going to Shabbat dinners every Friday night with my growing network of Jewish friends, several of whom I met in my quirky, close-knit beginners’ Hebrew class. One weeknight at Hillel, I was startled to find myself teaching a recent convert how to braid challah. I also took an incredible class about Jewish philosophy with a soft-spoken professor who explained the development of Jewish thought from Spinoza through post-Holocaust thinkers. From him, I learned for the first time about the compatibility between atheism and Jewish religious observance. Now, here was a philosophy that I could get behind! As a lifelong skeptic, I loved Judaism’s encouragement of theological inquiry, of questioning rather than knowing the answers. In addition, as I read more about Jewish thinkers who had existed on social and religious margins because of their Jewishness, I felt an odd affinity with them. In my (somewhat dramatic) perception, I was the ultimate Jew: a non-Christian, non-Jewish insider-outsider who perilously straddled the lines of membership in both communities. I didn’t fit anywhere.

***

Through Hillel, I also formed close friendships with several older, intellectual Jewish students, who began to influence my increasingly left-leaning views with their advocacy of typically liberal political causes and interest in tikkun olam.

Continue reading: Prerequisites

The son of a prestigious rabbi, Taubes was born in 1923 in Vienna but survived World War II in neutral Switzerland. There, he obtained his rabbinic ordination while completing his doctorate and attending the lectures of a famous Swiss Catholic theologian. But he had little desire to stay for long in a Europe drained of many of its best scholars and students. In the United States of the late 1940s and 1950s, he encountered a post-Holocaust generation of Jewish-born American intellectuals newly preoccupied with European ideas and craving reconnection with a lost Jewish tradition. For them, Taubes was a revelation, a youthful embodiment of the world of their fathers. He taught Talmud to the likes of Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol in New York and enraptured a young Susan Sontag with his Harvard lectures on how Christian ideas had been secularized and still determined the course of Western thinking.

Many of the students who wandered into Taubes’ orbit describe, in addition to his erudition, an uncanny and disturbing sexual power. “He was thin and short with a sallow complexion … seldom entirely clear of pimples,” the post-Holocaust theologian Richard Rubinstein remembered of his first Talmud teacher, “fascinating to a certain class of overly cultivated women who were perhaps more interested in exploring the hidden, the unusual, and the mysterious than in openly celebrating the uncomplicated joys of physical love.” Taubes’ appeal, it seems—both intellectual and sexual—lay in his willingness to cross boundaries. He was known to arrive to synagogue in an ostentatiously large prayer shawl and yet to speak constantly of the value of transgressing Jewish law.

Perhaps it was Taubes’ fascination with deviance that led his work time and again to the apostle Paul of Tarsus—that most famous of historical Jewish transgressors. It becomes clear as one reads Occidental Eschatology and From Cult to Culture that the apostle Paul was never far from Taubes’ mind, even when he wrote on such seemingly far afield subjects as surrealism and psychoanalysis. It was in Paul that Taubes believed he had found the key to the mystery of Western culture. And as he aged, Taubes grew closer and closer to the image of Paul he was creating in his scholarship. His version naturally did not correspond to the Christian interpretation; for him, Paul was not the first Christian but a radical and “zealous Jew,” or, as Taubes once said, an “arch-Jew.”

At first glance, Taubes’ Paul was not so radically dissimilar to our received image of the apostle. Paul was still the same Pharisee who initially condemned the Jesus cult only to do an about-face, rejecting the Mosaic law he knew so well and going on to found congregations of Jesus-followers around the Mediterranean world in the expectation that end-times were near. Taubes asked what remained Jewish in Paul after his turn. His messianism was clearly of Judaic origin, but what about the law? Traditionally, Paul is regarded as the figure who replaced law with faith, circumcision of the body with circumcision of the soul. But according to Taubes, it was crucial that Paul considered faith not only the annulment but also the fulfillment of Mosaic law; Paul believed that faith grew naturally out of the Mosaic tradition as its self-cancellation and that it was in fact unnatural for the message of the fulfillment of the law to be extended to non-Jews. In this reading, Paul was a messianic zealot for the law, an evangelical Jew.

This arguably had political consequences. “The horns of the dilemma cannot be escaped,” Taubes wrote in 1979. “Either messianism is nonsense, and dangerous nonsense at that,” or it “is meaningful inasmuch as it discloses a significant facet of human experience.” He fleshed out what that facet might be in what he called his “intellectual testament,” a series of lectures on Paul he gave in Heidelberg just months before his death in 1987. (He had taught in Germany since the 1960s.) It seems to have been important for Taubes that he delivered his testament to a German audience, not only so he could speak in his mother tongue but because he felt that a long history of Paul misinterpretation had encouraged disastrous consequences in that country when religious prejudice was translated into political practice. The transcript of these lectures was published in English as The Political Theology of Paul in 2004, and since then Taubes’ Jewish version of the apostle has been receiving some long-overdue attention.

There, he discussed the Jewishness of Paul’s Letter to the Romans in particular. Unlike the other epistles (to the Galatians, the Ephesians, and Corinthians, for instance), the letter to the Romans was addressed to a congregation of Jesus-followers composed of both Jews and gentiles and situated in the capital of the Roman Empire. When Paul wrote to them and told them to abandon “the law” (nomos), Taubes argued, he was undermining not only the authority of halacha but of the Roman state, whose law gentiles considered divinely ordained through the emperor, a representative of the gods on earth. In that sense, Taubes said, “the Epistle to the Romans is a political theology, a political declaration of war on the Caesar.” And it was a Jewish political declaration of war because it held a universal law higher than the arbitrary dictates of an emperor who claimed to be a god.

Taubes’ reading of Paul was undeniably shaped by the experience of National Socialism and by his lifelong bid to outsmart Carl Schmitt, the jurist who had presided over Nazi legal theory from 1933 to 1936 and who Taubes told students at the outset of the Heidelberg lectures was “the greatest state law theorist of our time.” This praise must not be misunderstood. On his sole meeting with the former Nazi in 1979, Taubes said that he and Schmitt were “opponents to the death” but got along “splendidly” because they were at least “speaking on the same plane.” That plane was “political theology”—a phrase Schmitt coined to argue that all theological metaphors have political implications, just as all legal orders are underpinned by articles of faith. During their visit, the two men sat down as a hevruta, a pair engaged in study, and read Romans chapters nine through eleven, the passages in which Paul addresses most explicitly the relationship of the Jesus-followers to the Jews who remain faithful to the old law. Schmitt made his career with the Nazis based on the argument, in no small part inspired by a Catholic version of the apostle as enemy of the Jews, that there were no legitimate legal orders that a God-like leader, in whom the people had faith, could not legitimately violate. Taubes suggested that he won the argument with Schmitt—“He always won,” Susan Taubes wrote of her ex-husband in her autobiographical novel Divorcing—but we will never be sure, because no transcript of the conversation exists.

Taubes’ engagement with the politics of theology has bothered some liberals who want to keep the two realms hermetically sealed off from one another. In a rather blithe review of recent Paul literature in the New York Review of Books, for instance, Mark Lilla blames Taubes for kashering thinkers such as Schmitt for left-wing German students in the 1960s and ’70s. Were he alive today, Taubes would most likely respond that if we banned all thinkers who saw a link between theology and politics, we would have to cut out most of the Western canon in our core-curriculum courses. If Taubes bequeathed anything in his intellectual testament, it was not the value of Schmitt but the redemptive potential inherent in the work of Sigmund Freud—the only person Taubes explicitly called a “direct descendent of Paul.” Freud’s psychoanalysis, he argued, self-consciously carried on the Jewish Pauline legacy by demonstrating the universal forces of guilt and repression at work in both Mosaic law and the laws of “bourgeois custom.”

For Taubes, being a Pauline Jew meant being a fanatic universalist. This did not mean trying to translate religious ideals into good government but rather preserving religiously inspired universalism as a realm of constant critique of authority. With any luck, the new English translations of his work will reignite some of the excitement that Taubes originally provoked when he arrived on America’s shores at a time when one’s relationship to Judaism was an existential matter of political principle.

Noah B. Strote is a doctoral student in history at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is completing a study titled The Returns of Exile: German Emigrés and the Creation of West Germany, 1933-1960.

• The assassination has become the top tabloid story in Israel, with many citizens bemoaning and criticizing the mission and work of Mossad, which is usually treated reverently. [NYT]

• And in London, Israel’s ambassador was called in for a discussion about the fake British passports. [NYT]

• A top U.S. diplomat met with Syrian leader Bashar Assad in Damascus as part of the thawing that will soon produce a new U.S. ambassador. [WSJ]

• Several prominent American, German, and Australian Catholic scholars privately asked Pope Benedict XVI to delay the sainthood of Pope Pius XII—the Holocaust Pope—for the sake of Catholic-Jewish relations. [JTA]

Predictably, stodgy viewers found Silverman’s approach offensive (come on, people—“house that is a city”—is sheer! comic! gold!). Among the scolds is Catholic League president Bill Donohue, quoted in an article in America, a Catholic weekly. He says Silverman is being anti-Catholic and that her “filthy diatribe would never be allowed if the chosen target were the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem and the state of Israel.” Really? Donohue’s obviously not following the comedian on Twitter, where she spares nobody, least of all her own kind, from insult. To wit: “Saw A Serious Man last night — a disgusting yet accuate portrait of us grossy jews down to, like our thicker-ish saliva.”

Sarah Silverman: Sell the Vatican? [America]