As a young boy in the 1930s, Jacob Taubes (1923-1987) and his family left Austria for Switzerland to escape Nazism. In Switzerland, Taubes received both ordination as a rabbi and a classical education in philosophy (culminating in a doctorate), before going on to further study with Leo Strauss in New York and Gershom Scholem in Jerusalem. Taubes held teaching positions at Harvard and Princeton before attaining permanent academic positions at Columbia and the Free University of Berlin, the last of which he held until his death in 1987. Ranging widely from Biblical hermeneutics to the philosophy of Heidegger to the interpretation of Hobbes to the political thought of Carl Schmitt, Taubes’s works take up an impressive range of issues in political theory, the sociology of religion, and the politics of his own time.