Jonas, Scholem, and the Taubeses in Jerusalem: From Metaphysical Antisemitism to a Jewish Gnostic Conspiracy

Abstract

This article addresses how Hans Jonas’s reconstruction of gnosticism as a historical movement in late antiquity gave rise to two parallel contemporary interpretations: Gershom Scholem’s “metaphysical antisemitism” and Susan and Jacob Taubes’s attempt at a revival of a Jewish—gnostic cultic revolt. While both reached very similar conclusions regarding the gnostic potential for modern Judaism, they could not be more different in the implications they drew from it. This, in turn, also explains the animosity that developed between all the people involved.

1. Introduction

With Taubes, the only thing to be said is that I will not have anything to do with him. It is easy to be a genius at other people’s (spiritual) expense, and I can’t congratulate him on this sort of career after I’ve already told him what I think about him. I think he’s better suited for America than he is here with us. He’ll introduce himself to Jonas as my friend—please, WARN Jonas on my behalf. But he’ll probably end up winning Jonas over anyway.1

In this letter sent to Hannah Arendt in August 1954, Scholem summarizes his contention with Jacob Taubes in a rather enigmatic formulation.2 It is well known and documented that Scholem’s quarrel with Taubes was also due to a personal issue: Taubes’s indiscretion regarding Scholem’s opinion on Joseph Weiss’s mental situation and his apparent scheming to create a rift between Weiss and Scholem.3 However, in this letter to Arendt written approximately three years after the event, Scholem does not find it crucial to warn Arendt that Taubes cannot be discrete or that he is a scheming “academic politician.” On the contrary, Scholem warns Arendt–and asks her to convey his warning to Hans Jonas—that Taubes is both spiritually and morally dangerous.

2. Taubes on Trial

Scholem’s words become mesmerizingly tragic when one reads through Susan Taubes’s novel Divorcing, published shortly before she committed suicide by drowning herself in the Atlantic in 1969.4 This autobiographical novel describes in painstaking detail Susan’s own experience of being psychologically, sexually, and spiritually abused by her former husband, Jacob Taubes. Quite amazingly, Susan connects this abuse with Scholem’s scholarship, giving us the key to unravel the complicated relationship between the three—or four—people mentioned in Scholem’s letter above.

Halfway through the novel, Sophie Blind (Susan’s pseudonym in the novel), stands trial. A mob of orthodox rabbis blame her for all sorts of uncleanliness, with a stress on sexual uncleanliness. They demand a divorce from Ezra (i.e., Jacob) and/or that Sophie would be proclaimed dead.5 Ezra tries to defend his wife and show how his and his wife actions can be understood as stemming from and perhaps necessitated by the contemporary state of Judaism. In this context, he says the following:

She was a virgin. I read to her the book of prophets Hosea: the parable of the sacred marriage between God and Israel, spoke of the sanctification of life, explained to her the paradox of the law Credo quia absurdum. … It’s all written in sacred texts (from which all pornographic handbooks are copied). … I wanted her to be a sacred whore. She was magnificent in her moments of complete abasement.6

Quite surprisingly, Ezra succeeds in convincing the rabbinic mob. They “signify their agreement with Ezra. The men put on prayer shawls, phylacteries; a Messianic psalm is sung.” And then they leave the court dancing and singing in joy. However, his wife would have none of it:

SOPHIE. (Aside to Ezra) You miserable ideologue! You know I never swallowed that rot about redemption through sin.7

“Redemption through Sin” was, of course, the English title of one of Scholem’s most influential works, and it translates the Hebrew expression (and theological formulation) of mitzvah ha-ba’ah ba-averah (literally, “a commandment which is fulfilled by means of a transgression”). This text, published already in 1937, would serve us as the key for understanding Jonas’s influence on Scholem and Taubes, and its important later repercussions on both scholars.

3. Redemption through Sin

In his memoirs, Jonas notes how Scholem followed closely the preparation of the first volume of his Gnosis und spätantiker Geist, eventually published in 1934.8 According to Jonas, Scholem read each and every chapter as it became available, and Jonas recalls him saying that “with each chapter my admiration for the work and its originality increased.”9 It is thus not surprising that in mitzvah ha-ba’ah ba-averah we find Scholem’s extensive quotation from Jonas’s book, translated into Hebrew, and this remains to this day the only part of this book to have been translated into Hebrew. Jonas’s understanding of gnostic “libertinism” provided Scholem with a key to understanding the praxis of Sabbatianism and Frankism not as a pathological trait, but as a system with defendable and creative inner logic. Scholem writes:

The desire for total liberation which played so tragic a role in the development of Sabbatian nihilism was by no means a purely self-destructive force; on the contrary, beneath the surface of lawlessness, antinomianism, and catastrophic negation, powerful constructive impulses were at work, and these, I maintain, it is the duty of the historian to uncover.10

Eventually, in his lectures on gnosticism given at the Hebrew University during the 1938–1939 academic year, Jonas would, in turn, use Scholem’s translation from his own Gnosis und spätantiker Geist, and would detail further the creative impulse within gnostic “antinomianism”:

The practical side of Gnosticism can be evinced in cult and moral behavior. Gnostic cult was a kind of mysterium … Sometimes it was of the sort of libertinism and fornication, at times even wild behavior expressing [the gnostic belief in] anarchy. … Its importance, however, lies in its purpose, which is not only meant to prepare the soul for its ascension after death, but also to expropriate the gnostic from the influence of the stars in their earthly life.11

That Scholem found Jonas’s understanding of gnostic antinomianism both convincing and alluring is evinced not only in its extensive use in one of his most influential and seminal works. It is no less important to note what kind of use we are dealing with: Scholem used it apologetically as it salvages both Sabbatianism and Frankism from pathological denigrations and underlines their creative possibilities. The potential relevance of this for Scholem’s own time seems to be stressed already in this early work, which ends by underlining how Sabbatianism and Frankism destroyed the old rabbinic world from within its own core and thus enabled a Jewish renewal:

The leaders of the ‘School of Mendelssohn,’ who were neither Sabbatians themselves, of course, nor under the influence of mysticism at all … found ready recruits for their cause in Sabbatian circles, where the world of rabbinic Judaism had already been completely destroyed from within, quite independently of the efforts of secularist criticism. Those who had survived the ruin were now open to any alternative or wind of change …12

It is thus no wonder that according to Jospeh Weiss, Scholem was pleased when a typing mistake changed the subtitle of mitzvah ha-ba’ah ba-averah from “lehavant hashabtaut” (=toward an understanding of Sabbatianism) to “lehaganat hashabtaut” (=In defense of Sabbatianism).13

4. The Taubeses and a Jewish Gnostic Conspiracy

Jacob Taubes studied with Scholem in Jerusalem intermittently between 1950 and 1952, during which time he was influenced by both Jonas and the use Scholem has put Jonas to in his early works, especially mitzvah ha-ba’ah ba-averah.14

As we have seen, this work is explicitly referred to in Divorcing. Divorcing, however, for all its autobiographical importance, is still a fictional novel and one that was published almost 20 years after the event at that. How can we corroborate this evidence? Luckily, the correspondence between Jacob and his then wife Susan during this crucial period was preserved. As such, this is first-rate documentary evidence for understanding how Jonas affected the Taubeses’ religious and cultic convictions.

Christina Pareigis, who published the correspondence, argued that it evinces a friction between Jacob, who had a more traditional mindset loyal to the Jewish tradition, and Susan, who was estranged from that tradition, a friction that eventually ended in their separation and divorce more than a decade later. However, that understanding relies mostly on one undated and unsent letter that was apparently written just after the couple’s marriage.15 From the very first dated letter, approximately a year after their marriage and just after their first joint stay in Israel, it is clear that the couple had reached an understanding regarding religious matters. That understanding was a neo-gnostic attempt to affect a gnostic revolt within the very core of Judaism. In September 1950, Susan writes to Jacob that:

It seems that wherever one raises the lid of a question the same old Gnostic serpent twists up its seductive head and gives me the key … I listen to the serpent, for he seduced us away from the source only to seduce us back to the source. And I trust the serpent who knows the secret of the passage and who embodies the mysterious necessity wherein “the way up and the way down are the same” and the way of going hence is the way of returning … 16

In many strands of gnosticism, the serpent is considered a revealer of gnostic truth to humankind.17 Quite fittingly, then, the serpent is here considered the one who turned the couple away from the source (traditional Judaism) in order to guide then back to the real source, a revolted renaissance of the true/original cult.18 Moreover, “the way up and the way down are the same” is a classic example of an (antinomistic) gnostic syllogism, which, of course, could be easily paralleled in Frankism.19 Thus, already at this early stage, the couple is far from representing a clash between the traditional Jewish mindset and estrangement from Judaism. On the contrary, it seems that here a gnostic revolution from within Judaism is a joint purpose that lies in deep spiritual agreement between them, and as we shall see shortly, not only between them.20

As Jonas noted regarding the ancient gnostics, the Taubeses were also synchronous morally and cultishly. The description of their “private cult,” in which at least one more person, whose name was abbreviated as J.C., participated, is spread throughout the 1950–1951 correspondence.21 I would like to bring here two vivid examples of this cult:

The night before … J.C. [and I] stayed in his room and I unclothed him and veiled both of us and I did service for him and afterward he for me (more one may not dare before there is an actual cultic community) and I told him that we were acting in deep and terrible danger, walking on a holy, a forbidden ground, before the “rules” have been established before the man-aiding gods have given us defenses and protections against the holy that is non- and in-human. That we must pray that our act be accepted as service – and even pray for forgiveness, for no action of man in forbidden regions is perfectly pure and without sin.22

Then, the devil took hold of [J.C.] and he seduced me, really like a serpent (I saw awful “mythological” spaces open up) and performed a wild almost cruel service–I think before very, very archaic gods. It was a little frightening because for once I was not “priestess“ holding “the light“ but sheer sacrificial beast. I think it is all right with the gods. I think they (the Chthonic Ones) watch me winding my “geist“ through the white silences of “geist“ and it is they who bedeviled J.C. toward me.23

While the exact form of the cult is enigmatic, its antinomistic sexual nature is clearly demonstrated in these and other descriptions.24 No less interesting is Susan’s explanation of the meaning of the cult, which one’s brave and daring decision to be involved in differentiates this person from an “arm-chair” gnostic:

Put even more boldly there is an “ontological“ lie in just I and thou – Susan and Jacob are only a fragment of the truth in the world broken through and through – and if our gnosis that the individual in his walled-in separateness is a lie, and that all life is one blood, is not to be a mockery, we must be able in a cultic act to smash the walls[,] make ourselves naked to each other, and mix our blood.—Or else confess ourselves as, humanists, individualists and “nice guys” and not talk so “big” and not be “arm-chair” gnostics.25

And as to cult this is the greatest problem: since the cult seeks to break-down the “exclusiveness” of love however “deep + absolute” and assert the community of blood–is not a service of one man and one woman … self contradictory? That is, beyond the holy marriage the service must be “public.” However, they that prepare the ground may have to wade through the marshes of sin. I embrace you dearest and kiss all your holy places. (Each Friday I kiss the candle deeply.)26

Both the “cult” contrived by the Taubeses and its meaning as detailed by Susan above have very strong roots in gnosticism, and specifically in Jonas’s explication of the gnostic phenomenon. We already saw above how his detailing of the deconstructing and reconstructing meaning of the gnostic antinomistic ritual has demonstrated the creative impulse of this religion, and how its explanation was wholeheartedly adopted by Scholem. It is now demonstrated that its praxis was adopted by the Taubeses, but the parallel goes much further. Susan above explicated how the ritual should symbolize that the “individual in his walled-in separateness is a lie, and that all life is one blood [and] we must be able in a cultic act to smash the walls[,] make ourselves naked to each other, and mix our blood.” She goes further to stress that if this accepted, “service of one man and one woman …[is] self- contradictory … [and thus] the service must be “public”.” In his Jerusalem lectures, Jonas stressed an important aspect of gnostic antinomianism, which just happens to parallel what the Taubeses were thinking and doing. Citing the 4th century heresiologist Epiphanius of Salamis’s description of a gnostic ritual popular in Egypt during his time, Jonas writes:

In one gnostic ritual, the ascending soul says the following about its earthly life: “I knew myself and collected myself from all places, I did not bear children to the archon, but rooted him and collected the spread members.”27

While Jonas is too polite to describe what actually happened in the ritual, and, as we saw above, only obliquely refers to it as “wild behavior expressing [the gnostic belief in] anarchy,” he does give the exact reference, so that anyone interested could find out. Perhaps an example would suffice here, and help us throw some light on what was going on in the Taubeses’ cult:

And the husband will move away from his wife and tell her—speaking to his own wife!—“Get up, perform the Agape with the brother.” … [and] after having made love with the passion of fornication in addition, [they] lift their blasphemy up to heaven, the woman and man receive the man’s emission on their own hands. And they stand with their eyes raised heavenward but the filth on their hands and pray … and offer that stuff on their hands to the true Father of all, and say, “We offer thee this gift, the body of Christ.” (7) And then they eat it partaking of their own dirt, and say, “This is the body of Christ; and this is the Pascha, because of which our bodies suffer and are compelled to acknowledge the passion of Christ.28

5. The Rift between Scholem and Taubes

Up to this point, it seems to have been well demonstrated how both scholars—Scholem and Taubes—were thoroughly influenced by Jonas’s understanding of the gnostic antinomistic cult and saw its potential within Judaism. Yet why did that cause such a bitter rift between them, so much so that Scholem would feel people should be “warned” of Taubes, and even 25 years later would refuse to renew the contact with him, writing that “what has irreparably separated us twenty-five years ago … belongs to the existential decision in my life (and of moral … life), along with experiences I have had … to understand the Jewish people and the Jewish phenomena”?29

While Scholem was thoroughly impressed with Jonas’s understanding of gnostic antinomianism, and with the key it provided him to understand and appreciate the creative impulse within Sabbatianism and Frankism, he apparently did not dare to think that its application as such was permissible or even conceivable today. In a poem he wrote, and inscribed as a dedication of his book Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism to Jonas in 1942, he clearly notes this alluring temptation, but decides against it. After describing his descent to the depth of Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalah, he ends by saying:

Time transformed cast us a fearsome glance,

For it is unwilling to turn back again,

The vision of redemption dissolves in pain,

What remains is depraved joy.30

Taubes, apparently, did not flinch from such “depraved joy,” and seems to have been certain that this would still, mutatis mutandis, incite a redemptive process that would hurl Judaism into a universal religion for the 20th century. This would clarify why Scholem believed Taubes was utterly irresponsible, and why, in addition to his anger at and derision of Taubes, he seems to have been also truly frightened of him. Thus, when Susan Sontag and David Rieff met Scholem in October 1973, Scholem “paled when [Susan] mentioned Jacob’s name [and said] it was Jacob Taubes who revealed to him the existence of moral evil.”31

6. A Jewish Metaphysical Antisemitism?

On the other hand, Scholem did not flinch from trying to locate a gnostic creative impulse within more “orthodox” trends of Judaism. While in the 1930s, it was he who coined the phrase “metaphysical antisemitism” to describe the most pertinent aspects of gnosticism. He later insisted on speaking of “Jewish gnosticism,” a phrase that seems to dismay many a scholar of gnosticism to this very day.32 Yet, at that stage of Scholem’s scholarship, it seems that all the troubling elements of gnosticism had been removed from his definition, so that what remained of gnosticism (except its prestige) was nothing of what gnosticism was for both him and Jonas during the time that mitzvah ha-ba’ah ba-averah was written.33 This apparently dismayed Jonas, who felt this use was both scholarly and politically irresponsible. Taking the opportunity to critique the work of Gilles Quispel, who argued that gnosticism both originated and existed at times within Judaism, Jonas produced a thinly veiled critique of Scholem himself, and especially of his Jewish Gnosticism book, in which Scholem’s own 1930s persona was brought into conflict with his contemporaneous one:

In short, and with the oversimplification excused by extreme shortness the nature of the relation of Gnosticism to Judaism – in itself an undeniable fact – is defined by the anti-Jewish animus with which it is saturated. “The greatest case of metaphysical anti-Semitism!” exclaimed Scholem once when we talked about these matters soon after the appearance of my first volume on Gnosis: that was in the thirties (and in Jerusalem) when one was very much alive to this aspect of things.34

For Jonas, to speak of “metaphysical antisemitism” within and from Judaism would not only be a scholarly fallacy and historical mistake. It would also have political repercussions that Jonas probably believed Scholem was not fully aware of, and this, no less than the scholarly blunder, may have been what horrified Jonas. Mutatis mutandis, Jonas may have felt that what Quispel did (with the unwitting help of Scholem) was similar to what Hannah Arendt did in comparing National Socialism to Zionism, and arguing that the first was influenced by the latter. While Arendt purportedly located the source of “racial antisemitism” within modern Judaism (specifically Zionism), Scholem rejoined by finding the source of “metaphysical antisemitism” within classical Judaism. In both cases, we end with the Jews themselves that are to be blamed for antisemitism, whether racial or metaphysical.35

It is unclear if Scholem understood the gravity of Jonas’s accusations.36 The correspondence between them evinces that he may have, and in order to exculpate himself he touted an almost impossible definition of gnosticism, in which its very core is missing. Jonas may have felt he had crossed a line and tried to reconcile with Scholem on personal grounds.37 His rapport with Arendt may have been enough for him.38 However, the acrimony remained strong until Scholem’s death.39

7. Conclusions

One of Jonas’s most brilliant and influential discoveries in his 1930s work on gnosticism—as evinced both in his first volume of Gnosis und Spätantiker Geist and in his Jerusalem lectures—was his understanding of the creative impulse of gnostic antinomianism. This thoroughly influenced Scholem, and later, his student Jacob Taubes. In contrast to Scholem, his student not only talked the talk, but apparently tried to walk the walk.40 The Taubeses seem to have learned from Scholem that gnosticism—with its baggage of metaphysical antisemitism—had definite potential to revolt and rejuvenate Judaism from within, and just as it did in the past, it would be able to prepare it for the new era that beckoned after two world wars, the Holocaust, and the Cold War.41 Scholem apparently found this gnostic potential alluring as well, but flinched from the idea of applying it now as it is to modern Judaism. Instead, he laboriously searched the more “orthodox” Jewish writing for some diluted (or purer, depending on the perspective) gnostic impulse that could accomplish the same purpose.42 This inevitably led to a rift with Taubes—whom Scholem believed to have been thoroughly irresponsible and downright morally evil—and with Jonas, who tried to warn him that in doing so, he may be collaborating in an Arendtian scheme to find the source of antisemitism within Judaism.

But what about Taubes and Jonas? Although Jonas’s memoirs include two embarrassing anecdotes regarding Taubes, it seems that Jonas was quite appreciative of him, both as a scholar and as a person.43 In fact, it seems that it was due to him that Jonas’s work on gnosticism so thoroughly influenced the English-speaking world:

I must add that to a large extent I have Jacob Taubes to thank for the fact that … I was encouraged to write an English version of my Gnosticism book. He got the Beacon Press in Boston, owned by the Unitarian Church, to commission me to write a book on Gnosticism.44

Considering what has been demonstrated in this article, I venture to suggest that Taubes’s interest in having Jonas’s book in English was not only academic, although this was probably completely unknown to Jonas himself. Thus, Scholem’s prescient letter to Arendt came to pass. Taubes did “win” Jonas in the end. And his spiritual irresponsibility is still spread throughout the lines of his former wife’s novel, Divorcing, in which the heroine is as dead as the author.