The Great Book — Taubes

The surname Taubes belongs to the onomastic repertoire of Ashkenazic Judaism in central and eastern Europe. Its origin falls within a well-attested category of Jewish names: patronyms known as metronymics, that is, names derived from a female given name. According to Jewish onomastic reference works, and in accordance with the Wikidata entry designating Yiddish as its language of origin, Taubes derives from the Yiddish feminine given name Taube (טויבע), itself meaning "dove" — a term cognate with the German Taube [Wikidata; Alexander Beider, A Dictionary of Ashkenazic Given Names].

The suffix -es (or -s) closing the name is one of the characteristic markers of patronymic formation in Yiddish: it expresses filiation or belonging, so that Taubes may be glossed as "(son, descendant) of Taube" — that is, the child identified by reference to his mother's or an ancestress's given name [Alexander Beider, A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from Galicia; A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire]. This metronymic practice, common in Ashkenazic societies where women frequently managed trade and where the maternal given name could establish itself as a social marker, accounts for the spread of the name across Galicia, Poland, Hungary, Bohemia-Moravia, and the broader Yiddish-speaking world.

The present volume retraces, insofar as the archive and research permit, the contours of a lineage and a name. It carefully distinguishes what belongs to established History — documented etymology, figures attested by the sources — from what belongs to transmitted Memory or to hypothesis. The reader will find, at the head of each section, an honest marker of the register and epistemic status of the content.

The philological analysis of the name Taubes rests on a foundation well documented by the great lexicographers of Jewish onomastics, foremost among them Alexander Beider. The root Taube is a Yiddish feminine given name belonging to the family of translation-names or affectionate names drawn from the animal kingdom, much like Faygl (bird), Hirsh (stag, for men), or Beyle (beautiful). Taube denotes the dove or pigeon, an animal laden in Jewish tradition with rich symbolism: the dove of Noah's ark, messenger of restored peace, and the dove as a figure of the soul of Israel in the exegesis of the Cantique des cantiques [Genesis 8; Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. "Dove"].

From the given name Taube derive several related patronymic forms: Taub, Tauber, Taubman, Taubenfeld, Taubenhaus, and, precisely, Taubes (sometimes written Taubess, Taubis, or Toybes). The ending -es is, according to Beider, one of the Slavic and Yiddish possessive suffixes (alongside -in, -son, -ovich) used to form patronymics from feminine given names; it recurs in names such as Gittes (from Gitl), Perles (from Perl), or Mirels (from Mirl) [Alexander Beider, A Dictionary of Ashkenazic Given Names; A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from Galicia

The distribution of the name Taubes follows, for the most part, the map of the great Ashkenazi settlements of central and eastern Europe between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Surname registers from Galicia — a crown province of the Austro-Hungarian empire corresponding today to southern Poland and western Ukraine — count Taubes among its attested names, placing one of the patronym's heartlands within the orbit of Lwów (Lemberg, Lviv), Brody, Tarnopol, and the surrounding Hassidic towns [Alexander Beider, A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from Galicia].

Other bearers appear in Hungary and in the lands of the Crown of Saint Stephen, notably in Budapest, as well as in the Austro-German sphere where nineteenth-century emancipation encouraged the migration of families toward the capitals. This dispersion follows the general movement of Ashkenazi Jews: from the Galician shtetl toward urban centers — Vienna, Budapest, Berlin — and then, from the end of the nineteenth century and especially following the upheavals of the twentieth, toward Western Europe, the United States, and the Land of Israel [Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. "Galicia" and "Migrations"].

The History of the patronym is, in this respect, inseparable from the catastrophes of the twentieth century. The Shoah struck with full force the communities of Galicia and Hungary where the name Taubes had taken root; many of its bearers perished in the ghettos and the camps, while survivors reconstituted family branches in Israel, in North America, and in Western Europe. The contemporary geography of the name — encountered today in the United States, in Israel, in France, and in the United Kingdom — thus bears the mark of this great translation [Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. "Holocaust"]. According to genealogical databases such as those compiled by Jewish research institutions,

The name Taubes figures, in the memory of Galician communities, among the patronyms borne by families of rabbinical erudition. The tradition and biographical repertories of Central European Judaism preserve the memory of rabbis and scholars who carried this name in the area of eastern Galicia, at the crossroads of the hassidique and mitnagged cultures.

The best-documented figure of this rabbinical lineage in the twentieth century is Zwi (Hirsch) Taubes (1900–1966), a rabbi trained in the Central European tradition, who served first in Vienna during the interwar period, then, after the Anschluss and the war, in Switzerland as rabbi of the Zurich community, before moving to Israel [Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. « Taubes »]. His career exemplifies the fate of a Galician rabbinical elite projected by history from the study benches of the East toward the great communities of Western Europe, and then toward the State of Israel.

Here, Memory and archive answer one another: the family tradition that lays claim to a yikhès (a lineage of rabbinical prestige) finds, in the case of the Viennese branch, documentary confirmation. For older or more obscure branches, however, the historian must exercise caution: the existence of a continuous "Taubes dynasty" cannot be asserted on the sole basis of homonymy. According to the conventions of rabbinical genealogy, sharing a common matronymic surname is not sufficient to establish a direct line of descent between two bearers, as distinct families may have independently adopted the name from ancestresses named Taube. The marker of this chapter — Intersection, Probable — reflects this balance between transmitted Memory and partial verification.

The most prominent intellectual figure of the lineage in the twentieth century is unquestionably Jacob Taubes (1923–1987), son of Rabbi Zwi Taubes. Born in Vienne and raised in the dual demands of Talmudic study and Western philosophy, he was in turn an ordained rabbi, historian of religions, and philosopher [Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. "Taubes, Jacob"].

His early dissertation, Abendländische Eschatologie ("Occidental Eschatology," 1947), published in Switzerland, remains his most celebrated work: Jacob Taubes unfolds therein a history of the eschatological idea from the prophets of Israel and Jewish apocalypticism through primitive Christianity, medieval messianic movements, and the thought of Hegel and Marx, up to modern philosophies of history. This work established him as one of the foremost thinkers of messianism and of the secularization of theological categories [Encyclopaedia Judaica].

His academic career was international in scope: he taught in the United States — notably at Harvard, at Columbia University, and at the Jewish seminary — before becoming holder of a chair in hermeneutics at the Freie Universität Berlin. A dialogical and provocative spirit, Jacob Taubes maintained celebrated intellectual exchanges with figures as diverse as Carl Schmitt, the controversial jurist whose thought he engaged while distancing himself from it, Gershom Scholem, the historian of Kabbalah with whom he experienced a resounding break, and the thinkers of the Frankfurt School. At the very end of his life, in 1987, he delivered at Heidelberg a series of lectures on Paul's Epistle to the Romans, published under the title Die politische Theologie des Paulus ("The Political Theology of Paul"), which exerted a profound influence on contemporary philosophy, reaching authors such as Giorgio Agamben and Alain Badiou [Encyclopaedia Judaica

Responding to the figure of Jacob Taubes is that of Susan Taubes (born Susan Feldmann, 1928–1969), his wife, writer and philosopher. Born in Budapest into a Hungarian Jewish family — her father, Sándor Feldmann, was a renowned psychoanalyst —, she emigrated to the United States in her childhood to flee the rise of Nazism [Encyclopaedia Judaica; university biographical notices].

Susan Taubes studied philosophy and the history of religions, defending at Harvard a dissertation devoted to the thought of Simone Weil, of whom she was one of the first academic interpreters in the United States. A close friend of Susan Sontag, with whom she maintained a deep intellectual friendship, she belonged to the cosmopolitan and demanding milieu of postwar European émigrés.

Her only novel, Divorcing (published in 1969), is an avant-garde work, fragmented and oneiric, which explores exile, loss, Jewishness and the dissolution of the self. Shortly after its publication — received at the time with a certain coldness —, Susan Taubes took her own life by drowning off Long Island, in 1969. Her work has undergone a belated rediscovery: the reissue of Divorcing in the twenty-first century led to her being recognized as a singular voice in the literature of exile and trauma [Encyclopaedia Judaica; contemporary critical editions]. With her, the name Taubes — by marriage — becomes attached to one of the most poignant literary adventures of the Jewish diaspora of the twentieth century.

Beyond the figures attested by scholarly archives, the name Taubes lives on in the transmitted memory of the families who bear it. As with most Ashkenazic lineages, this memory blends the pride of a yikhès rabbinique, the recollection of small towns in Galicia and Hungary, and a keen awareness of the rupture caused by the Shoah.

Oral tradition preserves, in these families, the account of a founding ancestress named Taube — the "dove" — whose given name is said to have become the surname of all her descendants. This memory, which cannot be documented act by act, nonetheless remains faithful to the general onomastic truth: the surname derives indeed from a feminine given name, and thus carries within itself the trace of a woman [Alexander Beider, A Dictionary of Ashkenazic Given Names]. In this sense, the name Taubes is a metronymic monument: it recalls, against the grain of dominant patrilineal custom, the role of women in the transmission of Jewish identity.

The posterity of the name unfolds today across several continents. Descendants and namesakes live in Israel, where many Galician families reconstituted themselves after 1945; in the United States, land of refuge for the great migrations and the exiles of the intelligentsia; and in various communities throughout Western Europe. Whether the name evokes, for some, a lineage of rabbis, and for others, the brilliance of philosophy and literature, Taubes remains the witness of a Jewish history made of rootedness and uprooting, of study and exile. That part of this chapter which belongs to family legend — the eponymous ancestress, the supposed continuity of lineages — is here embraced as Memory, precious and transmitted, without any claim to documentary certainty.

The patronym Taubes offers, in condensed form, a shortcut through Ashkenazi history. Its etymology — a Yiddish feminine given name, Taube, "dove," followed by the possessive suffix -es — roots it in the metronymic practice of Central and Eastern European communities, and most particularly in the sphere of Galicia and Hungary [Beider; Wikidata]. Its geography follows the trajectory of Jewish migrations, from the shtetlekh to the capitals, and then to the shores of exile after the catastrophes of the twentieth century.

Its intellectual posterity, finally, lends it a singular distinction: from Rabbi Zwi Taubes to the philosopher Jacob Taubes, thinker of eschatology and political theology, and to the writer Susan Taubes, tragic voice of the literature of exile, the name traverses rabbinical erudition, philosophy, and letters. The Great Book has endeavored to distinguish, on every page, what is established by research from what remains probable or transmitted. What emerges is a faithful portrait: that of a lineage modest in number, yet which, from the forgotten given name of an ancestress to the chair at Berlin, carries within itself the full density of a Jewish history — that of the dove which, as in the story of the ark, never ceased to seek a land where it might set down its foot.