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Review Essay

! The Theological-Political Problem in Leo Strauss’s Writings on Moses Mendelssohn

Je!frey A. BernsteinCollege of the Holy Cross, Worcester, !"

jbernste@holycross.edu

Leo Strauss on Moses MendelssohnTranslated, edited, and with an interpretive essay by Martin D. Ya#fe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. xxxiv + 322pp.

It is impossible to do justice to Martin Ya#fe’s edition of Leo Strauss’s writings on Moses Mendelssohn in the present context. It amounts to a philosophical optic that allows readers to glimpse, as if for the $%rst time, the fundamen-tally theological-political character of Strauss’s thinking. This character is so stark that it can be said to function as the horizon on which all of Strauss’s other distinctions (ancients/moderns, philosophy/polis, philosophy/poetry, esoteric/exoteric) come into view. In translating all of Strauss’s introductions and annotations contained in the Moses Mendelssohn Gesammelte Schriften Jubiläumsausgabe—the Jubilee Edition of Mendelssohn’s collected writings (with additional correspondence between Strauss and Alexander Altmann and relevant primary source material by Lessing and Mendelssohn),& Ya#fe has not only succeeded magisterially in presenting readers with a “whole picture”

* I would like to thank the journal’s two anonymous reviewers for their feedback. In order to assist readers of the journal, I have incorporated their suggestions largely into footnotes.

' In addition to the materials contained in Leo Strauss on Moses Mendelssohn, Ya#fe has pro-duced English renderings of Strauss’s German translations of two texts that Mendelssohn

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of Strauss’s relation to Mendelssohn, he has also allowed readers to perceive the depth of this relationship as it opens onto Strauss’s overall work.

This quality of Ya#fe’s achievement can be pictorialized in the following way: If one were to imagine this project as a sheet of paper, it would contain (1) a central column of text dealing with Mendelssohn’s philosophical, theological, and political relationship with Jacobi and Lessing; (2) a slightly thinner col-umn on the left dealing with Mendelssohn’s and Jacobi’s respective relations to Lessing and Spinoza; (3) a narrow band of text on the top dealing with Mendelssohn’s relation to Leibniz and Plato; and (4) a narrow band at the bot-tom dealing with Strauss’s relation to Lessing. If one now turns the paper side-ways, one notices (5) the almost imperceptible traces of a narrative about the theological-political situation of Weimar Germany. Finally, if one rotates the paper 180 degrees, one detects (6) some microscopic notes and fragments deal-ing with Maimonides as the premodern alternative to Mendelssohn. The whole picture presented therein allows readers to see what Strauss would later come to formulate as the obscuring of the relation between Jerusalem and Athens.

Why should the narrative about Weimar Germany occupy such an idiosyn-cratic place in this work? First, Strauss is writing these introductions at the behest of the editors of the Mendelssohn Jubilee Edition. Second, he is compos-ing them (primarily) in the 1930s in Germany, when open critique of the current situation would have been di#$%cult at best.C As will see, however, Strauss does manage to address the political situation (albeit in a guarded manner). Most importantly, he is not primarily concerned with the historical moment, but with providing a historical analysis—under the aegis of philosophy— regarding how this moment was able to occur. I believe that the properly philo-sophical moment of this project emerges when Strauss’s construal of the theological-political problem is seen, with a view to the whole of Strauss’s work, from its point of greatest intensity: namely, the tension between “Jerusalem and Athens”—i.e., forms of life dedicated respectively to the unproblematic obedience to (divine) law and to a philosophical adherence to such law that simultaneously allows for freedom of thought. Although Strauss’s writings on Mendelssohn were undertaken largely prior to his $%rst mention of

wrote in Hebrew: selections from Commentary on Moses Maimonides’ “Logical Terms” and The Soul. These can be found at www.press.uchicago.edu/sites/strauss/.

D Indeed, so inhospitable was the climate in general to the kind of project in which Strauss was participating that, as Ya#fe notes, the Gestapo “seized and eventually destroyed most of the [then published] copies” of Mendelssohn’s Jubiläumsausgabe (222).

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“Jerusalem and Athens” (in a 1946 letter to Karl Löwith),F one can pro$%tably view the “raw materials” of that discourse in these writings from the prior decade.

Readers of Strauss have the right to ask: What makes Leo Strauss’s appar-ently arcane and scholarly introductions to Moses Mendelssohn so worthy of consideration? Anyone familiar with Strauss’s interest in what he will later come to call the “theological-political problem” can turn to numerous other primary and secondary sources. In short, why is this Strauss material di#ferent from all other Strauss material? The answer can be gleaned by brieGHy consider-ing Strauss’s relation to other, more “permanent,” objects of research.I Strauss’s interest in Spinoza, which spans much of his earlier years (from the 1920s through the 1940s), is tightly bound up with his search for the moment in which premodern thought lost the battle with modern thought; as with his interest in Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, it can be construed as somewhat transitional in character (at least insofar as it remains indexed to historical concerns). His interest in Greek philosophy, which occupied much of his middle and later years (from the 1940s through the 1970s), forms a crucial part of his abiding concern with the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns as well as his $%nal concern with the relation betweeen Jerusalem and Athens; however, Strauss’s writings on the Greeks do not always easily yield a sense of the path on which he travelled to get to the Greeks. The situation is similar with Maimonides (the one $%gure with whom Strauss remained philo-sophically engaged during all periods of his philosophical career). Paradoxically, although Strauss’s engagement with Mendelssohn is brief (not to say GHeeting), it functions as a meter on which all of his more permanent interests are registered.

In his interpretive essay, Ya#fe holds that as Lessing

seems to have taken Leibniz as a role model in his philosophical indepen-dence as regards current opinions and doctrines, so Strauss seems to have taken Lessing. His Mendelssohn introductions cross-examine the give and take of opinions and doctrines that he brings forward as a philological- historical editor, so as to present these for the rational or philosophical

J See Leo Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3, Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft und zugehörige Schriften—Briefe, ed. Heinrich Meier and Wiebke Meier (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2002), 663.

K Rémi Brague claims, rightly in my view, that Maimonides was the object par excellence for Strauss. See Rémi Brague, “Leo Strauss and Maimonides,” in Leo Strauss’s Thought: Towards a Critical Engagement, ed. Alan Udo#f (Boulder, LM: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1991), 93.

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consideration of the thoughtful reader whose theologico-political start-ing point Strauss analyzes in his autobiographical retrospective. (317)

Ya#fe thus compels the reader to revisit two texts of Strauss’s, written in the 1960s, that together form the context for Strauss’s work in the present volume.N

O One of the most interesting methodological discussions in Strauss research (as a subset of humanities research in general) is the question as to whether one should adopt a synchronic approach (which attempts to understand a given text by Strauss with reference to his other writings and to the $%gures about which he wrote) or a diachronic approach (which attempts to understand the same text by reference to its historical context). It may help the reader if I state that I take Ya#fe’s approach in this particular text (as well as my own approach in this particular essay) to be of a synchronic nature. This approach is open to the criticism that it sacri$%ces a close historical reading of the text (as set within its particular web of social, politi-cal, and cultural contexts) for a sort of conceptual “shorthand.” Why, for instance, should interpreters understand Strauss’s writings of the 1930s by means of concepts, categories, and accounts taken from his own later works? It would seem, from the perspective of the dia-chronic approach, that this bestows an authority on Strauss as the privileged interpreter of his own work—an authority that itself is in need of further justi$%cation. To the extent that one cannot presuppose a perfectly transparent presentation of a writer’s ideas, this critique is certainly justi$%ed. However, the diachronic approach faces some questions too: While there can be good reasons for turning to the historical context in order to gain clarity and insight into what may have motivated a writer, the diachronic approach risks taking for granted a reductive interpretation of the relation between political views/opinions and phil-osophical ideas—i.e., the diachronic approach appears to presuppose the very historicism that Strauss (along with a number of his Marburg associates) ultimately desires to reject. This problem is made even more complicated (and, in a certain respect, seductive) in the case of Strauss’s writings in the 1930s. It is tempting to suppose that his political views at that time (which, according to his own remarks, were on the Right) determine all his philosophical views. However, the view that one’s philosophical or literary production does not exceed one’s political viewpoint (at a given moment) is also an assumption in need of further justi$%cation.

What makes this methodological conversation philosophically more interesting in the case of Strauss is that both sides understand themselves as exhibiting a certain kind of $%del-ity (be it genuine or ironic) to Strauss’s dictum that we ought to read or understand an author the way the author reads or understands himself. The synchronic approach takes itself to accomplish this by means of an attempt at presenting Strauss’s thought from the perspective of a transhistorical “whole”; it therefore uses Strauss’s published works from di#ferent peri-ods, as well as his seminar transcripts and correspondence, as di#ferent lenses through which to view the same phenomena in di#ferent respects. The diachronic approach presumes to accomplish this by presenting Strauss’s thought from the perspective of a historically grounded close reading that attends to the circulation of ideas, opinions, personal refer-ences, and events occurring in close temporal and spatial proximity to Strauss at the time of

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In his autobiographical preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, Strauss maintains that the inability of the Weimar Republic to stop the emergence of National Socialism had to do with an inherent limitation of liberalism in gen-eral and of German liberalism in particular—although German Jews were publically granted civil rights, the private hatred of Jews was allowed to stand. For their part, the German Jewish desire to assimilate to German culture and society at large amounted to a failure to take notice of the remaining private hatred of Jews by non-Jewish Germans.P Thus, “the political dependence [of German Jewry] was also a spiritual dependence. This was the core of the pre-dicament of German Jewry.”Q This dependence created the illusion of security and occluded the possibility that private hatred of Jews might eventually $%nd

the text in question. This historical approach (more recent in Strauss research) has focused more speci$%cally on Strauss’s early writings, attempting to access a “Strauss before Straussianism” (to use John Gunnell’s phrase)—i.e., the Strauss prior to his formation of a school. The diachronic approach thus tends to accord greater signi$%cance to the early cor-respondence (as published in volume 3 of Strauss’s Gesammelte Schriften) and far less signi$%-cance to the later published works and to the seminar transcripts (from the University of Chicago). The diachronic approach understands itself to have thereby avoided the risk of creating a “hermetic” and “internalist” Straussian edi$%ce. The synchronic approach under-stands itself as avoiding the “externalist confusion” between correlation and causality.

In the end, both approaches risk an inevitable “externalism” (with respect to the text in question)—whether one proceeds by means of textual or contextual juxtaposition, there always remains a gap between the text and the means through which it is evaluated. The best examples of both approaches acknowledge this risk and proceed in a manner that express a modesty and realism about their goals. Ultimately the two approaches have much to learn from, and to teach each other, (even if the “wholes” in which such interaction would occur are themselves partial and plural). This is only the case, however, when each approach focuses on presenting the best elements granted by its respective methodology rather than attempting to suspend a Damocletian sword over the other approach. I therefore make the following suggestion: Readers interested in the methodological topics discussed here might pro$%tably read together representatives of each approach—for the purpose of seeing how each treats the early Strauss and/or Strauss’s relation to Judaism—in order to come to their own conclusions. In this capacity, see Sharon Portno#f ’s Reason and Revelation before Historicism: Strauss and Fackenheim (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), and Eugene R. Sheppard’s Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile: The Making of a Political Philosopher (Waltham, !": Brandeis University Press, 2006). In the meantime, we have reason to antici-pate what the diachronic approach will contribute to the discussion of Strauss’s writings on Mendelssohn presented in Ya#fe’s present volume.

R Leo Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought, ed. Kenneth Hart Green (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 137–141. Hereafter, /:L!.

S /:L!, 140.

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a political instantiation. While German liberalism was seen as a solution to a problem, it was actually an obfuscation of the profundity of that problem:

The German-Jewish problem was never solved. It was annihilated by the annihilation of German Jews. Prior to Hitler’s rise to power most German Jews believed that their problem had been solved in principle by liberal-ism: the German Jews were Germans of the Jewish faith, i.e., they were no less German than the Germans of the Christian faith or of no faith. They assumed that the German state (to say nothing of German society or cul-ture) was or ought to be neutral to the di#ference between Christians and Jews or between non-Jews and Jews. This assumption was not accepted by the strongest part of Germany and hence by Germany.T

Were we to understand this claim as simply a particular description of the Jewish experience, Strauss quickly corrects us:

From every point of view, it looks as if the Jewish people were the chosen people, at least in the sense that the Jewish problem is the most manifest symbol of the human problem insofar as it is aU.U.U.Upolitical problem.V

I can state the point (albeit in summary fashion) this way: insofar as the Jewish problem is the clearest particular iteration of the general human problem, it is a philosophical problem; insofar as this philosophical problem—the human problem—is given its most lucid signal by the particular religious context of the Jewish problem, it is a theological problem; insofar as this general human problem—made manifest through the particular instance of the Jewish problem—involves the relationship between individuals in groups, it is a political problem; $%nally, insofar as this general political problem—which is the human problem—$%nds its lucidity within the particular religious context of the Jewish problem, it is a theological-political problem. The theological-political problem is, therefore the concern par excellence for Strauss. Thus, in the preface to Hobbes’ Politische Wissenschaft, Strauss writes:

The reawakening of theology, which for me is marked by the names of Karl Barth and Franz Rosenzweig, appeared to make it necessary to inves-tigate how far the critique of orthodox theology—Jewish and Christian—

W /:L!, 141; my italics.X /:L!, 143; compare 327.

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deserved to be victorious. Since then the theological-political problem has remained the theme of my investigations.&Y

The Enlightenment critique of religion undertaken by Jews (in the German context, for the purposes of assimilation)—with its political correlate in the German liberalism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—raised for Strauss the question as to the e#$%cacy of the alternative (orthodoxy). That Spinoza’s Critique of Religion was dedicated to Franz Rosenzweig functions both as a tribute to a thinker attempting to think past the Enlightenment premises as well as a critique of the Enlightenment limitations of that thinker: “In fact, Rosenzweig’s return [to biblical revelation] was not unquali$%ed. The Judaism to which he returned was not identical with the Judaism of the age prior to Moses Mendelssohn.”&& Mendelssohn thus constitutes the horizon in which thinkers like Rosenzweig (as well as Cohen and Buber) continue to operate despite their attempted return to premodern Judaism. The limitation inherent in Rosenzweig’s thought amounts therefore to a recent variant of the limitation inherent in Mendelssohn’s thought.

Given that the greatest part of Strauss’s scholarly work on Mendelssohn concerns his relation to Jacobi and Lessing, we need to provide a brief discus-sion of Strauss’s interest in both thinkers.

First, Jacobi: that Strauss’s 1921 inaugural dissertation (with the very Cassirerian title, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der philosophischen Lehre Friedrich Heinrich Jacobis), deals with the problem of knowing in Jacobi suggests that (when viewed from within the perspective of Strauss’s overall philosophical trajectory) this $%gure occupies a pivotal space in Strauss’s attempt to ques-tion the premises of the Enlightenment critique of religion. We $%nd here an intellectual predecessor to the impulses in Barth and Rosenzweig that so com-pelled Strauss:

Jacobi defends the possibility of an immediate experience of God as well as the possibility, based on that experience, of measuring all historical religions in terms of meaning and of truth itself. In opposition to ideal-ism and rationalism, he upholds the transcendence and the irrationality of God.&C

'Z /:L!, 453; compare 460.'' /:L!, 151.'D Leo Strauss, The Early Writings (1921–1932), trans. and ed. Michael Zank (Albany: State

University of New York Press, 2002), 57. For an original reading of Strauss’s Jacobi, which argues that he was an atheist who hid his true views by practicing a sort of “Straussian”

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While he later disavows the “disgraceful performance”&F that was his disserta-tion, the aforementioned remark illustrates the fact that (for Strauss) Jacobi articulated the clearest alternative to the Enlightenment rationalist critique of religion—i.e., what Strauss articulates in his writings on Mendelssohn as Jacobi’s “salto mortale” (death-defying leap; 71, 126). In the later work, he elabo-rates on Jacobi’s position and sets it within the context of late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German philosophy:

The result to which Jacobi was led by his critical study of modern phi-losophy may be summarized as follows: the ontological proof of God is the most extreme expression of the tendency to prove everything, to take nothing for granted; if one follows this tendency forthrightly, i.e., without misgivings, then it leads to Spinozism, i.e., to atheism and fatalism; since Leibniz-Wol#$%an philosophy rests on the principle of demonstration, of clear and distinct concepts, it is “no less fatalistic than the Spinozist one and leads the persevering investigator back to the basic principles of the latter”; since “each avenue of demonstration” ends up “.U.U.Uin fatalism” and atheism, and therefore leads to absurd consequences, one must hold $%rmly to the original, prescienti$%c knowledge existing prior to and at the basis of all demonstration, the knowledge of sound commonsense, one must risk the “salto mortale” of “believing” the truth or, what is tanta-mount to the same thing, of “presupposing” it in the “knowledge of igno-rance.” (71)

Jacobi’s rejection of philosophy is therefore philosophically motivated—it “consists in ‘inferring immediately from fatalism against fatalism and against everything connected with it’[” (73). We might say that, for Strauss, he exhibits an intellectual honesty in the face of the modern tendency to prove everything. This philosophically motivated intellectual honesty is, however, not identical to philosophy simpliciter; learned ignorance itself amounts to a dogmatic stance in Jacobi’s hands. It is in this context that the distinction between Jacobi

exotericism, see William H. F. Altman, The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National Socialism (Lanham, !\: Lexington Books, 2011), 29–74. Altman’s polemic about Strauss notwithstanding, what makes his reading of Jacobi interesting is that, by showing how one might read him as a practitioner of exotericism who hid his own atheism, he gives an entirely new signi$%cance to the ensuing Pantheism Controversy concerning the thought of Spinoza—i.e., rather than bequeathing to German philosophy a genuinely critical stance towards Spinoza’s purported atheism, Altman’s Jacobi started o#f a controversy that ultimately propagated his own atheistic philosophy.

'J /:L!, 460.

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and Lessing comes to light: “If Lessing is Jacobi’s model in anything, it is in the sort of polemical thinking to which there belongs an, as it were, constant switching of sides, partly actual, partly apparent” (75). While Strauss admires Jacobi’s unmasking of the modern conceit against religion, he halts at Jacobi’s subsequent dogmatic pivot that results from that unmasking.

In sharp contrast, it is the $%gure of Lessing that stands signi$%cantly behind Strauss’s engagement with both Jacobi and Mendelssohn. Strauss had origi-nally planned to write a book entitled A Reminder of Lessing; while we only possess his preliminary remark (written in 1937) to this book, it is as telling as a remark can be for the present context:

[The] Jewish author [of this book], instead of tidying up his own door-step, attempts to make a Christian-born philosopher’s confrontation with Christianity more familiar to Jewish readers. Let it therefore be noted from the outset that, to be sure, much is altered in detail, but little in principle, if wherever Christianity is spoken of in the present writing, one thinks of JudaismU.U.U.UThe author had the weakness of preferring to give his attention to a Jew. But despite searching in earnest among the apostate or suspect Jews of modern times, he found not one man with Lessing’s intellectual freedom. Besides, the author was not unmindful of the obligation of thanks that is owed by his nation to the great son of the German nation, especially at this moment of farewell. (162)

From this passage, we discern the following things: (1) Strauss believes that Lessing has much to teach modern Judaism;&I (2) despite a search, Strauss $%nds none of the modern Jewish thinkers to exhibit the freedom of thought characteristic of Lessing; and (3) Strauss believes that Lessing’s intellectual freedom is such as to merit thanks from the “Jewish nation” (162n2) to this individual of the German nation. Whether Strauss intends “this moment of farewell” to refer to the German nation’s slide into National Socialism or his own hoped-for departure from Great Britain (or both) is unclear.&N What is

'K For elucidations of this manner of intellectual freedom in Strauss as it a#fects his relation to Judaism/“Jerusalem,” see David Janssens, Between Athens and Jerusalem: Philosophy, Prophecy, and Politics in Leo Strauss’s Early Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 194; Benjamin Lazier, God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars (Princeton, ]/: Princeton University Press, 2008), 131; Daniel Tanguay, Leo Strauss: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Christopher Nadon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 215.

'O This ambiguity is not solved even if one takes into account Strauss’s acknowledgment (in his correspondence with Altmann) of his desire to “present, either in a concluding part of

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clear is his admiration for Lessing. Little wonder, then, that (in his correspon-dence with Altmann) Strauss admits that, in lieu of the completion of his vol-ume on Lessing, “The only thing I could do was refer my better students strongly to Lessing and say at a $%tting opportunity what I owe to Lessing” (5). This statement, unsurprisingly, $%nds con$%rmation not in Jacobi’s, but in Mendelssohn’s genuine appreciation for Lessing’s intellectual freedom:

The most erroneous proposition, the most absurd opinion, need only be contested with shallow reasons and you could be certain that Lessing would have come to its defense. The spirit of investigation was for him everything. He used to say that truth maintained with shallow reasons is prejudice, no less harmful than outright error and at times even more harmful since such a prejudice leads to laziness in inquiry and kills the investigative spirit.&P

Whether or not Mendelssohn was able to intellectually live up to his character-ization of Lessing, it would not be unreasonable to suggest that Strauss attempted to do so as well.

If Jacobi’s interest in Lessing was purely polemical, and if Strauss’s interest in Lessing discloses the former’s preference for the latter even when compared to Mendelssohn, what is it precisely in Lessing that compels Strauss? Simply put, it is Lessing’s “radical, i.e., undogmatic style of thinking” (77). This undog-matic thinking shows up in great measure, for Strauss, in Lessing’s appreciation of the esoteric/exoteric distinction and in his appreciation for the ancients. According to Strauss, “Lessing asserts that all the ancient philosophers, and Leibniz, made use of exoteric presentation of the truth,” which “makes use of statements which are considered by the philosopher himself to be statements, not of facts, but of possibilities” for reasons of “prudency or expediency.”&Q If Lessing were simply a modern thinker adopting exoteric presentation,&T

the introduction [to the Lessing book] or in a separate article (under the title “Taking Leave of Germany”), the center of Lessing’s thought de Deo et mundo”(4–5)—is it Lessing or Strauss who is “taking leave of Germany”? It would not be unreasonable to think that the reference might be to both.

'R Moses Mendelssohn, Morning Hours: Lectures on God’s Existence, trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom and Corey Dyck (New York: Springer, 2011), 96.

'S Leo Strauss, The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss, ed. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 66.

'W This is not meant to suggest the contrary—i.e., that Lessing was simply a premodern adherent of esotericism. I think one does best to conceive of Lessing’s writing (on Strauss’s reading) as a “mode of transmission” for premodern esotericism. Hannes Kerber notes

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the reason (for Strauss) would be the desire for self-protection—i.e., “prudence or expediency” would refer to the writer. If Lessing is attempting to recover premodern thought (as Strauss believes), the cause would be the desire to pro-tect the nonphilosophical members of the community. In his 1948 Hartford Theological Seminary lecture “Reason and Revelation,” Strauss suggests the lat-ter (with respect to Lessing):

In conclusion, I would like to name that man to whom I owe, so to say, everything I have been able to discern in the labyrinth of that grave ques-tion [i.e., whether reason or revelation can refute one another]: Lessing. I do not mean the Lessing of a certain tradition, the Lessing celebrated by a certain type of oratory, but the true and unknown Lessing.U.U.U.UHe decided in favor of philosophy—Why he took this step he has indicatedU.U.U.U[most] clearly in this (Antiqu. Briefe 45 end) with which he concludes his discus-sion of the di#ferent treatment of perspective in ancient and in modern painting: “We see more than the ancients; and yet our eyes might possibly be poorer than the eyes of the ancients; the ancients saw less than we; but their eyes might have been more discerning than ours.”—I fear that the whole comparison of the ancients and the moderns would lead to this result.&V

that Strauss’s early handwritten plans for “Esoteric Teaching” contain (in the title of the penultimate section) versions of a sequence of esoteric writers that works back from modern $%gures (e.g., Lessing, Leibniz, Hobbes [replaced in one draft by Descartes], Spinoza, and “RMbM”). Strauss’s decision to place Maimonides in parenthetical brackets in a later version of the plan perhaps indicates Strauss’s own ambivalence about includ-ing Maimonides in that sequence. This ambivalence, however, is also not a rejection tout court of the sequence. See Hannes Kerber, “Strauss and Schleiermacher on How to Read Plato: An Introduction to ‘Exoteric Teaching,’[” as well as Kerber’s translations of the ear-lier and later plans of that lecture, and of Strauss’s lecture notes for “Persecution and the Art of Writing” [1939], in Reorientation: Leo Strauss in the 1930s, ed. Martin D. Ya#fe and Richard S. Ruderman (Palgrave McMillan: 2014, 203-214; 287-304.). For an instance in Lessing’s own writing that suggests at least an awareness of the premodern conception of esotericism (as Strauss conceives it), readers might wish to reGHect upon the question that Falk poses to Ernst (in the second dialogue of “Ernst and Falk: Dialogues for Freemasons”): “What if it were the Freemasons who had made it part of their business to reduce as far as possible the divisions which so much alienate people from one another?” See Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Philosophical and Theological Writings, trans. and ed. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 197.

'X Leo Strauss, “Reason and Revelation,” in Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, trans. Marcus Brainard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 178–179.

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In other words, Strauss’s interest in Lessing does not concern the latter’s polemical-oratorical skill (so attractive to Jacobi); it is, rather, the fact that Lessing returns to the ancients within the context of the theological-political problem because he believes that the ancients see both the problem itself and the need for prudence regarding communication of the problem. For Strauss, Lessing understandingly brings together the esoteric/exoteric distinction and the ancient/modern distinction within the horizon of the theological-political problem. This, nothing else, is the reason for Strauss’s preference. It is also not irrelevant to the present discussion that Strauss also holds that “the recollec-tion of the man Maimonides was probably one of the motives underlying Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, the outstanding poetic monument erected in honor of Jewish medieval philosophy.”CY

If Strauss acknowledges both Jacobi’s intellectual honesty about religion and Lessing’s recovery of the premodern approach to the theological-political problem, we might be able to guess what Mendelssohn’s role in this narrative will be. Yet, as Ya#fe points out, Strauss is not simply critical of Mendelssohn’s advocacy of Enlightenment liberalism and rational(ized) religion. Rather,

Strauss writes as Mendelssohn’s theologico-political heir. He seeks to illu-minate the combined private and public perplexities that Mendelssohn bequeathed to subsequent Jewish thought and life—which, even or espe-cially under the pressure of his controversy with Jacobi, Mendelssohn never quite succeeded in illuminating for himself. (229)

Strauss’s relation to Mendelssohn is, therefore, diagnostically critical—i.e., he seeks to $%nd the philosophical reasons for Mendelssohn’s inability to come to grips with the theological-political problem in order to recover that problem as a genuine problem. Careful readers will thus be able to discern, through these genealogical analyses, the similarities between the Mendelssohn/Jacobi rela-tion and the Jew-/non-Jew relation as it comes into view in Weimar Germany. In this particular respect, Strauss’s writings on Mendelssohn bear a certain resemblance to Benjamin’s pseudonymous publication (in 1936) of a series of letters by well-known Germans from the years 1783–1883 entitled “German Men and Women.”C& In the latter case, however, Benjamin intended to silently communicate a return to the values of a Germany no longer existent. For

DZ /:L!, 470.D' Walter Benjamin, “German Men and Women: A Sequence of Letters Selected and Intro-

duced by Detlef Holz,” translated by Edmond Jephcott in Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 3, 167–235.

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Strauss, the intention is rather to tacitly diagnose an intellectual situation that, from the beginning, was problematic.

Strauss wrote ten introductions to Mendelssohn’s texts; the most substantive is far and away the introduction to Morning Hours and To the Friends of Lessing. While I will dedicate the most space to this introduction, discussion of the others is necessary to elucidate the interpretive path on which Mendelssohn treads and at which Strauss balks. Simply put, one can say that (for Strauss) Mendelssohn’s interpretations of previous thinkers su#fer from something like the “idealizing interpretation” that Strauss attributes to Hermann Cohen,CC and that is most clearly articulated by Kant when he states that

when we compare the thoughts that an author expresses about a subject, in ordinary speech as well as in writings, it is not at all unusual to $%nd that we understand him even better than he understood himself, since he may not have determined his concept su#$%ciently and hence sometimes spoke, or even thought, contrary to his own intention.CF

This corrective reworking or idealization (Strauss refers to this as a “softening” [36–37])CI shows up in Mendelssohn’s interpretations of Plato, Leibniz, and eventually (in the struggle with Jacobi) Spinoza as well.

One hears the $%rst announcement of this mode of interpretation in Strauss’s introduction to Mendelssohn’s Phädon:

From the beginning, it was $%rmly established for Mendelssohn that his task would not be a translation of the Platonic dialogue, but only a reworking that took advantage of the “progress” of philosophy in the recent centuries. From the beginning, he wanted “to borrowU.U.U.Unothing from Plato really except the arrangement, which in fact is excellent.” (30)

DD /:L!, 269.DJ Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 396 (A314/B370). Compare Leo Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy? and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 66–67, 76; Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 143.

DK For a critique of Strauss’s reading of Mendelssohn on this score, see Allan Arkush, Moses Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 88. Compare Michah Gottlieb, Faith and Freedom: Moses Mendelssohn’s Theological-Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 6–7.

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In Mendelssohn’s statement, one sees both his tendency to “correct” Plato in light of subsequent philosophy as well as the fact that his interest in Plato appears (like Jacobi’s interest in Lessing) more concerned with Plato’s rhetori-cal style than with his arguments. This impression is only con$%rmed by Mendelssohn’s own preface to the dialogue:

[Plato’s] long and intense declamation against the human body and its needsU.U.U.Uhad to be moderated extensively due to our improved concep-tions of the value of this divine creatureU.U.U.U[but] nevertheless it will sound strange to many of today’s readers. I confess, that I have kept this section simply to pay homage to the winning eloquence of Plato. From then on, I found it necessary to diverge from Plato totally. His proofs for the immateriality of the soul seem, at least to us, so shallow and capri-cious, that they scarcely deserve a serious refutation.CN

Mendelssohn’s pivot away from Plato’s conceptions of body and soul is, for Strauss, more than simply an arbitrary interpretive whim; instead, it discloses a systematic (if hidden) Enlightenment presupposition in Mendelssohn’s thought both with respect to Greek philosophy and biblical thought:

Here we confront the presupposition of the doctrine of immortality which is at the root of Mendelssohn’s orientation as such; this presupposition is the belief in God as a God that is only benevolent, only “tenderly loving,” “softly dispensing” the means for happiness. The entire Enlightenment, insofar as it maintains the connection explicitly or implicitly with the tradition found in the Bible, is characterized by its combating the tra-ditional doctrines and sentiments that it combats by recourse to God’s benevolence. More exactly: the unequivocal elevation of God’s benevo-lence over His power, His glory, and His punitive anger is peculiar to the Enlightenment. (35)

Whether or not one believes the Greeks to have held to a conception of divin-ity on par with that of the Bible, it remains clear that the divine order of the cosmos is not directed towards anthropocentric ends.

Strauss’s characterization of Plato’s original thought bears this out:

DO Moses Mendelssohn, Phädon, or On the Immortality of the Soul, trans. Patricia Noble (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 42.

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The Platonic assertion of immortality is not to be separated from the phi-losopher’s reGHection on his philosophizing. In the implementation of his philosophizing, the philosopher experiences that he can reach his goal, Being, Truth, only if he has freed himself from the body, that he reaches Truth more, the more he frees himself from the body: the freeing of the soul from the body, dying, is the ideal condition of philosophizing as dis-closed in philosophizing itself. Mendelssohn does away with this connec-tion explicitly. (36)

Mendelssohn does this by softening the tone of the Platonic statements. As a result,

A philosopher who dies as Mendelssohn’s Socrates does cannot believe, as Plato does, that all who grasp philosophy in the correct manner care for nothing else but dying and being deadU.U.U.Uhe must rather opine “that one who genuinely gives himself over to the love for wisdom applies his whole lifetime to becoming more familiar with death, to learning how to die.” He does not devote himself to contemplating something, but he “makes himself ready to embrace the truth.” (39)

In softening the Platonic position, Mendelssohn shifts the philosophical bur-den away from contemplation to (the characteristically modern emphasis on) practice. Mendelssohn’s interpretive project of “ ‘re$%nement,’ i.e., a softening of the Platonic sternness” (36) amounts to an admission that philosophy (what-ever else it may be or do) must provide relevance for our actual lives. This was, for Strauss, the foundational move of Hobbes and Spinoza (and, as Strauss will eventually hold, of Machiavelli’s new modes and orders of political science) that, with Bacon, inaugurated modern philosophy more generally.CP

DR Cf. Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy?, 42–45; Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 165–251. Strauss’s critique of Mendelssohn’s Plato may be understood as containing quite determinate Heideggerian overtones con-cerning the emphasis on dying. It has been clearly established by Rodrigo Chacón and Richard Velkley that Strauss was a close and continuous reader of Heidegger; see respec-tively Rodrigo Chacón, “Reading Heidegger from the Start: On the Heideggerian Origins of ‘Political Philosophy,’U” European Journal of Political Theory 9, no. 3 (2010): 287–307; Richard L. Velkley, Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy: On Original Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). It would, however, need to be shown that the reading of Plato (that Strauss juxtaposes to Mendelssohn’s Plato) owes more to Heidegger than to the actual Platonic Phaedo (which Mendelssohn was creatively reworking). Put di#ferently, does Strauss apply Heidegger’s conception of Sein-zum-Tode to Plato, or does

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This same interpretive move occurs in Mendelssohn’s treatment of Leibniz. Mendelssohn’s reworking of Leibniz’s Causa Dei (contained at the end of his Theodicy)—entitled God’s Cause, or Providence Vindicated—exhibits the same interpretive pattern evident in his reworking of Plato; the same softening of sternness acts as the vehicle for the same transformed conception of philoso-phy from contemplative to practical discourse: “Leibniz expressed the thought of the unconditional priority of the beauty and order of the whole over hap-piness of the part” (156). It is for this reason that Leibniz’s conception of the present world, as being the best of all conceivable worlds, is not identical to Voltaire’s presentation of the same idea in Candide. This emphasis on contem-plative issues becomes intolerable for Mendelssohn, however, when it comes to the issue of divine justice:

Mendelssohn’s concept of God’s benevolence results especially in the denial of a merely mercenary punitiveness: God always punishes each individual whom He punishes for his own betterment as well, therefore He punishes no sinner eternally. (155)

“Leibniz, on the contrary, thanks to his conviction concerning the priority of the universe and thus of contemplation” (155), can accommodate both correc-tive and punitive conceptions of justice.

For Strauss, this had quite clear practical (even political) consequences:

by the dissolution of the classical conception of justice, in which the orig-inal sense of justice as obedience to law had been preserved [this being one similarity between Greek philosophy and biblical thought], he had considerably advanced the process that aimed at the suppression of law as obligation in favor of right as claim. What distinguishes Mendelssohn from Leibniz on this point is, rather, merely that he, the author of Jerusalem [which argues for, among other things, freedom from ecclesias-tical and political coercion], was incomparably more strongly interested in the practical consequences that had to result from the change of the

he simply draw out an element from the Platonic text? This very interesting question is unfortunately far too large to be pursued in the present context. One issue that would certainly merit consideration in such a discussion, however, is the question of whether it is Plato or Heidegger who ultimately provides the impetus for Strauss’s claim that (for Plato) philosophy requires the maintenance of a distance from bodily concerns.

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basic concepts, i.e., in reclaiming the rights of man, than was his teacher. (161; my additions)CQ

It is not Mendelssohn’s attempt to support a livable situation for Jews that troubles Strauss; rather, the problem is that, in changing the de$%nition of jus-tice (as a part of the change in the conception of philosophy), Mendelssohn has done nothing more than occlude the fundamental theological-political problem that humans in general face (and that the German Jews in particular faced)—i.e., the question of how di#ferent groups can live among each other when they disagree profoundly over laws and their authoritative grounding.

Readers might be puzzled by the two, apparently unconnected, parts comprising Strauss’s introduction to Morning Hours and To the Friends of Lessing. As alluded to above, Ya#fe addresses this issue by pointing out that his attempt at “illuminat[ing] the public and private perplexities that Mendelssohn bequeathed to subsequent Jewish thought and life” necessitated Strauss’s treatment of “the historical and philosophicalU.U.U.U[as] two sides of a single, more far-reaching inquiry. They are united by Strauss’s wish to clarify Mendelssohn’s inherently controversial defense of Lessing’s Spinozism as such” (229). What, on the surface, appears in part 1 (“History Of Their Emergence” [Entstehungsgeschichte]) as scholarly arcana turns out to be essentially of a piece with the more philosophical treatment in part 2 (“Analysis Of The Content”).

In the present context, I can a#ford to be sparing in my remarks concerning the personal aspects of this struggle: it was a battle between two thinkers who were both highly sensitive (and in Mendelssohn’s case, “self-certain” [106]), greatly engaged in the intellectual causes for which they stood—for Jacobi, the intellectual honesty concerning Enlightenment philosophical rationalism; for Mendelssohn, the embrace of said rationalism in the service of a practi-cally viable living situation for German Jews. Both of them attempted to enlist Lessing in their respective causes; ironically, the polemical name that became associated with Lessing was that of the most conceptually di#$%cult and radical modern philosopher, who also happened to be “the greatest man of Jewish origin who had openly denied the truth of Judaism and had ceased to belong

DS See in this context Leibniz’s argument against eternal damnation (in section 79 of God’s Cause), to the e#fect that humans have, “as it were, a legal claim” to their in$%nite further progress toward perfection. See “Moses Mendelssohn’s Sache Gottes, oder die gerettete Vorsehung (God on Trial, or Providence Aquitted),” trans. Bruce Rosenstock, a digital appen-dix to Mendelssohn’s Last Works (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2012), https://www .ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/27714/GodonTrial.pdf?sequence=4.

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to the Jewish people without becoming a Christian”CT—i.e., Baruch Spinoza. Neither Jacobi nor Mendelssohn comes o!f looking exemplary in Strauss’s retelling:

On the whole it will have to be said that Jacobi’s presentation of the quar-rel is more trustworthy than Mendelssohn’s—as far as the particulars go. Jacobi’s dishonesty shows up only in general, that is, when it becomes clear why he communicated the content of his discussions with Lessing to Mendelssohn privatim instead of unambiguously taking the responsibil-ity from the start for announcing it to the public, and when one considers the mode in which he put the communication to work on Mendelssohn. He had devised his game so minutely, he had from the start maneuvered the guileless and self-certain Mendelssohn into such an unfavorable stance, that after the latter had committed the imprudence of involving himself in the private communication at all instead of hauling Jacobi into the public forum right away, hardly any other choice remained for him except to resort to tactics and dishonesty in turn. (107)

In short, Jacobi devised a superior strategy, but embodied (on Strauss’s terms) “moral cowardice [stemming from]U.U.U.Ua mixture of self-pity with a brutal dis-regard for others. Its root is an unrestrained self-esteem that takes on the appearance of freedom” (107). Thus, Mendelssohn is the arrogant, rigid practi-tioner of modern Jewish thought, and Jacobi is the arrogant, polemical tacti-cian of the leap of faith. On the personal level, what decided this battle was Jacobi’s claim (which Strauss $%nds mostly trustworthy) not only that Lessing was a Spinozist (which, Strauss notes, is true in a quali$%ed respect only), but that he did not believe he could con"#de this secret to Mendelssohn. The passage in question (from Jacobi’s Über die Lehre des Spinoza) runs as follows:

[I asked] whether he [Lessing] had ever propounded his own [Spinozist] system to Mendelssohn. “Never,” Lessing answered.U.U.U.U“But once I did speak to him about approximately the same things that caught your attention in my Education of the Human Race (§73). We could not reach any agreement and I left it at that.”CV

DW /:L!, 154.DX The Spinoza Conversations between Lessing and Jacobi: Text with Excerpts from the Ensuing

Controversy, trans. G. Vallée, J. B. Lawson, and C. G. Chapple (New York: University Press of America, 1988), 80. It is crucial, in this context, to note the uniqueness of Strauss’s interpre tation of the pantheism controversy. Whereas the late-eighteenth- and early- nineteenth-century German battle that concerned the thought of Spinoza is usually

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It is at this point in Strauss’s text that he manages to address (however obliquely) the situation of Judaism in Weimar Germany within the context of an impassioned description of the e#fect that Lessing’s admission to Jacobi had on Mendelssohn. Its importance merits quoting it at length:

The pure expressions of the pain of the friend are more perceptible to our ear than the strained outbreaks of the annoyances of the outsmarted whose carefully devised tactic has come to naught. The pain over the bar-rier that separated him from Lessing, of which he had only now become aware, was so deep that words failed him for properly describing the bru-tality with which Jacobi had brought this barrier to his awareness. Not merely had there fallen on his friendship, which was the greatest hap-piness of his life, a shadow that, in a truly forgivable manner, crushed his self-esteem. Together with this, his trust toward the non-Jewish world had been shaken: after all, unreserved friendship with Lessing was at the same time also the oldest and most trustworthy bridge that connected him with that world at all, the testimony most precious to him of the possibility of complete understanding between men of the opposite background. One can appreciate again by now how great the hurdles must have been, despite which Mendelssohn kept working on his trust in non-Jewish friends—he who was as free of pathological sensitivities as a mere human can be, who bore no greater distrust than what is justi-"#ed su!"#ciently by the experiences of the Jews at all times. Without assum-ing such a justi"#ed distrust toward the non-Jewish world, one cannot, as things stand, understand his behavior in the quarrel with Jacobi, nor for that matter, his behavior toward Bonnet in the quarrel with Lavater. To be sure, the same natural hatred against the Jews did not then yet have the principle of nationalism at its disposal; but even so, the anti-Jewish theory and practice of the Christian Churches supplied it with weapons scarcely less e#fective.U.U.U.UFor the proper understanding of his reaction to Jacobi’s public communication,U.U.U.Uone has to keep in mind Mendelssohn’s

understood as a battle over metaphysical and theological ideas (e.g., monism, panthe-ism, human freedom), Strauss construes it as a theological-political struggle between the adherent of faith (Jacobi) and the adherent of Enlightenment reason (Mendelssohn) over the ownership of Lessing’s legacy. For Strauss, what both Jacobi and Mendelssohn obscure is Lessing’s intellectual freedom which, I claim, leads the careful reader back to the premodern alternative of Maimonides. For a more standard treatment of the panthe-ism controversy, see Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, !": Harvard University Press, 1987).

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experience of the distrust of the non-Jewish world toward the Jews, no less than his own distrust as a Jew toward the non-Jewish world. (104–105; my emphasis)

Had this passage simply addressed the context and e#fect of Lessing’s admis-sion on Mendelssohn, it would still merit a unique place in Strauss’s otherwise somewhat rhetorically moderate corpus of writings on Mendelssohn; perhaps it would merit a similarly unique place in Strauss’s work overall. Truly amazing is that he addresses—in mid-1930s Germany—the contemporary situation of German Jews in its transhistorical connection to the analogous situation of Jews in the Germany of Mendelssohn’s time. What Mendelssohn does not see, what he cannot see (because he is so tied to the Enlightenment narratives of public rationality and progress) is the “natural hatred against the Jews.” As a particular manifestation of the theological-political problem of humankind, blindness to this hatred becomes a stumbling block concerning the reality of political association. One can put the point di#ferently: Mendelssohn was a tireless advocate of communication with non-Jewish society. This he tried with Lavater, Dohm (both of whom desired his conversion), and $%nally Jacobi. The realization that his attempts could not even bridge gaps with Lessing (his closest friend) was too much for Mendelssohn. Altmann sums up the situation well:

Was Mendelssohn, then, the victim of a morbid obsession caused by the traumatic experience inGHicted upon him long ago by Lavater, whose inGHuence on Jacobi could not be gainsaid, and whose very name revived dark shadows of the past? This may have been the case to some extent, but there was a certain substance to his imaginings.FY

Mendelssohn’s traumatized reaction to Lessing’s statement is certainly a cause for sorrow; the more important issue, for Strauss, is that this episode is symp-tomatic of philosophical limitations in Enlightenment thinking.

How does this personal battle come to be seen as such a symptom? While Mendelssohn undertook this debate with Jacobi in order to protect Lessing (121), we see the same interpretive reworking of Spinoza’s thought as we saw with respect to Plato and Leibniz. Recall that for Mendelssohn, philosophy is, $%rst and foremost, a practical endeavor—this means that contemplation is inferior to guidance for life (27). On Strauss’s account, this reduction of theory to practice permeates all aspects of modern philosophy from political issues to

JZ Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (London: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1998), 733. Cf. Spinoza Conversations, 137.

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concerns about nature. What makes Spinoza such an interesting candidate for the debate between Mendelssohn and Jacobi, as Ya#fe points out, is that

in the wake of the modern (Machiavellian) project of Bacon, Descartes, and Hobbes to make human beings the masters and owners of nature—that is to say, to make philosophy or science essentially practical—Spinoza aims to restore the dignity of speculation or contemplation.U.U.U.UYet Spinoza’s restoration is based on the modern-scienti$%c conception of nature, including its denial of natural ends, or $%nal causes. (312)

There is, therefore, an essential ambiguity in the overall debate between the two German thinkers insofar as the object of their debate (Spinoza) manifests the modern emphasis on practicality while the “real motive” (121) for the debate (Lessing) does not. Mendelssohn and Jacobi, therefore, are both operating within a modern horizon:

both Jacobi’s “salto mortale” and Mendelssohn’s retreat to sound com-monsense are, in equal measure, the expression of (1) the knowledge that modern metaphysics’ attempts at justifying belief ’s concept of God by means of unbelieving speculation have collapsed, and (2) the identi$%ca-tion of metaphysics in general with modern metaphysics. (126)

Di#ferently stated, if modern metaphysics (here erroneously identi$%ed with metaphysics as such)—in its inability to rise to the level of practical application—is insu#$%cient for dealing with religious matters, it deserves to be nothing more than an object of critique. Jacobi’s critical approach is sim-ple—Spinozism is atheism in its highest form. Mendelssohn’s inability to both (1) acknowledge this point; and (2) level the critique in an unambivalent man-ner is of a piece with his interpretive strategy of reworking (i.e., “softening”). Lessing’s “puri$%ed” Spinozism amounts not to atheism but rather to pantheism/ acosmism (in fact, Mendelssohn vacillates on whether to even call it Spinozism or simply pantheism [139–140]):F&

Mendelssohn cannot for a moment disregard his own presupposition that the ultimate cause of the world is an in$%nite understanding. Just this presupposition had been denied by Spinoza in that, to be sure, he granted “thinking” (cogitatio) to the in$%nite substance, but denied under-standing (intellectio). And recognition of the necessity by virtue of which

J' See Mendelssohn, Morning Hours, 83.

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Spinoza had been led to this dark thesis was nothing less than the center of Jacobi’s Spinoza interpretation: he took the trouble to “retrace” this thesis back to its source—according to his assertion, the basic principle “a nihilo nihil "#t”—and, going forward from there, to grasp how Spinoza, though granting to the in$%nite substance the two attributes of thought and extension in an equal manner, nevertheless in fact claimed priority for extension over thought and so arrived at materialistic consequences. (91–92)

In denying in$%nite understanding to God (i.e., allowing for an autonomy of that which is immaterial), on Strauss’s account, Spinoza had given tacit prior-ity to extension over thought; in seeing this, Jacobi acknowledges what Mendelssohn cannot. It therefore becomes unclear, at any point, whether Mendelssohn is critiquing genuinely “atheistic” Spinozism, or his own “U‘puri-$%ed’ acosmic Spinozism” (92). The claim that Lessing never revealed his true position to Mendelssohn amounts therefore to an admission that Lessing was a closet atheist. Mendelssohn was thus in the position of having to defend his own conception of rational ( Jewish) religion against a polemically driven non-Jewish thinker ( Jacobi) who persuasively claimed that Lessing (the paragon of undog-matic intellectual freedom) was actually a product of the dogmatic rejection of religion characteristic of the Enlightenment in general and Spinoza in particular.

There is more. Mendelssohn construes the relation of the Spinozan indi-vidual mode to God/Nature’s thoughts of said mode as one of “archetype” to “image”:

Since now in God, as we all grant, no mere capacity occurs, but every-thing must far more be in the most active actuality, since further all God’s thoughts are true and accurate, then no thought in God can be distin-guished from its archetype, or rather God’s thoughts that can be found in him as alterations of him will be at the same time their own archetypes themselves. The inner, constantly acting activity of the divine power of representation produces in God himself everlasting images of contingent beings.FC

Construing the God (Nature/substance)-mode relation as one of image- archetype shows, for Strauss, that “a certain equality between God and manU.U.U.

JD Mendelssohn, Morning Hours, 85; translation slightly modi$%ed in accordance with Ya#fe’s text.

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[is] the authoritative presupposition” (123) of Mendelssohn’s idealizing inter-pretation. Much in the same way that “the rights of man” was Mendelssohn’s inGHuence on his interpretation of Leibniz,

what shows up in [his] confrontation with Spinozism isU.U.U.Uno routine theological interest, but interest in the substantiality of the I: that is why the undemanding benevolence of God is privileged, since only it is com-patible with the demands of the autonomous I. (125)

One can summarize Strauss’s account of Mendelssohn’s philosophical concep-tion of the Jewish religion in the following way: Mendelssohn sees the function of philosophy as to usefully contribute to the happiness of human lives. This happiness is expressed in religious terms through an emphasis on God’s benev-olence: insofar as humans are created (as archetypes) in God’s image(s), they are expressions of this divine benevolence and are accorded certain rights con-sistent with such benevolence. This conception of religion, however, does not actually address the theological-political problem—i.e., such a conception of the Jewish religion appears to non-Jewish believers either as atheism or as a religion woefully inferior to other religions. Strauss does not raise this ques-tion, but his line of reasoning leads us to ask whether this conception of Judaism actually aided (rather than negated) the modern European stereotype of Judaism as a “state within a state”; at the very least, it did not successfully combat the European hatred of Jews. This, for Strauss, is the ambivalent legacy that Mendelssohn has bequeathed to modern Judaism.

What is the alternative to this narrative of modernity? Ya#fe does not explicitly say; however (as stated above), he provides some microscopic notes pointing toward the alternative for Strauss—namely, Maimonides. Insofar as this alternative is premodern, it is by de$%nition contemplative rather than practical. This is the sober meaning of Strauss’s statement that the Jewish problem has no worldly solution. But Strauss’s claim should not be understood as a moment of despair; rather, it is an assessment of “the limitations of liberalism.”FF This means only that liberalism, as a philosophical movement emphasizing practicality, was unable to address the natural hatred of Jews by Europeans; it was, therefore, unable practically to prevent the Nazi geno-cide (as the most extreme form of such hatred). This inability not only com-promised the physical security of the Jews, it also left Judaism intellectually without resources for dealing with hatred. If Judaism is to maintain such intel-lectual resources, it cannot simply be based on liberalism as a philosophy.

JJ /:L!, 143.

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If we recall Strauss’s comment that Lessing’s Nathan the Wise was both a monument to Jewish medieval philosophy and a recollection of Maimonides, we begin to see the alternative. This is given further con$%rmation if we recall that Lessing is, for Strauss, the modern who recovered ancient philosophy—with its emphasis on speaking/writing di#ferently to di#ferent audiences—within the context of the theological-political problem. Lessing leads Strauss to Maimonides. This raises an additional question about Mendelssohn’s shift to modernity. Mendelssohn, as Strauss has argued, “softened” Leibniz’s stern understanding of divine punishment for evil (as a contemplative explana-tion of cosmic perfection) and replaced it with a practical emphasis on divine benevolence (characteristic of Enlightenment thought). Where, though, did Leibniz get his understanding of punitive justice? In other words, what becomes occluded in Mendelssohn’s redescription of Leibniz? For the answer, it su#$%ces merely to recall a few remarks from Leibniz’s Theodicy:

Man is himself the source of his evils: just as he is, he was in the divine idea. God, prompted by essential reasons of wisdom, decreed that he should pass into existence just as he is.FI

Maimonides adds that the cause of [most people’s] extravagant error is their supposition that Nature was made for them only, and that they hold of no account what is separate from their person; whence they infer that when something unpleasing to them occurs all goes ill in the universe.FN

Insofar as Leibniz maintains some connection to premodern thought, concerning the questions of divine justice and evil, it comes largely from Maimonides. Mendelssohn’s alteration of Leibniz is identical with his obscuring of Maimonides and, therefore, of premodern philosophy and Jewish thought.

Strauss addresses this point obliquely when he notes that Mendelssohn’s knowledge of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed was mediated

chieGHy [through] its (Neo-) Platonic form. Now this metaphysics is, in [Mendelssohn’s] view, utterly inferior to modern metaphysics. Characteristic

JK G. W. Leibniz, Theodicy, trans. E. M. Huggard (La Salle, ^_: Open Court, 1997), 218. JO Leibniz, Theodicy, 288. See Moses Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, 2 vols., trans.

Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 2:442 (part 3, chap. 12). It should be noted, in this context, that Spinoza’s critique of $%nal causality (and, as a result, of divine justice), in the appendix to book 1 of the Ethics, is also based on Maimonides’ critique of anthropocentrism.

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of the distinction between the two is, e.g., that modern metaphysics is equipped with better concepts of the value of the human body than Pla-tonic metaphysics; it hasU.U.U.Ushown that this world is no prison, no vale of sorrows, but a potential paradise. (110)

If premodern metaphysics erred in its life-denying tendency, then (for Strauss) Mendelssohn errs in the opposite extreme; concomitant with Mendelssohn’s error is his obscuring of Maimonides as a resource for philosophy and Judaism. Mendelssohn’s obscuring of Maimonides is not, however, total; his commen-tary on Maimonides’ Logical Terms does (to an extent) transmit Maimonides’ “defense of philosophy before the bar of revelation.”FP In this respect, it is for Strauss

interesting as a counterpart to Jerusalem: whereas in Jerusalem the jus-ti$%cation of Judaism is undertaken before the forum of philosophy, this preface has the task of justifying philosophy, especially logic, before the forum of Judaism. (18)

The case is similar for the justi$%cation of Mendelssohn’s composing God’s Cause and Morning Hours, both of which emerged out of Mendelssohn’s attempt in 1784 “to ‘guide’ his son Joseph ‘at an early age to the knowledge of God’U” (151). This is about as explicit a reference as could be to the preface of The Guide of the Perplexed (in which Maimonides lets his readers know that the text was written speci$%cally for his student Joseph).

Ultimately, Mendelssohn was unable to approach Maimonides as (Strauss intimates) Lessing did. Mendelssohn was too tied to the Enlightenment proj-ect of public and practical philosophy aiming at happiness to appreciate Maimonides’ contemplative and prudential engagement with the theological- political problem as it took place within the context of medieval Judaism. Writing as Mendelssohn’s “theological-political heir,” Strauss enables his read-ers to trace (alongside him) the Mendelssohnian legacy of German Judaism and to glimpse the fundamental alternative to it. In so doing, Strauss has also shown the transmissibility of philosophical insight, even despite the appar-ently radical rejection of premodern thought by modernity. We owe a debt of gratitude to Ya#fe for bringing such an in-depth treatment of these issues to the wider English-speaking world.

JR Leo Strauss, Philosophy and Law: Contributions to the Understanding of Maimonides and His Predecessors, trans. Eve Adler (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 81.