Why We Remain Jews: The Significance of Leo Strauss for a Contemporary Anti-Zionism

Origins

“I believe I was about five or six years old in some very small German town, in a village, when I saw in my father’s house refugees from Russia, after some pogroms which had happened there, women, children, old men, on their way to Australia. At that time, it could not happen in Germany. We Jews there lived in profound peace with our non-Jewish neighbors. There was a government, perhaps not in every respect admirable, but keeping an admirable order everywhere; and such things as pogroms would have been absolutely impossible. Nevertheless, this story which I heard on that occasion about pogroms in Russia made a very deep impression on me, which I have not forgotten until the present day. It was an unforgettable moment. I sensed for a moment that it could happen here. That was overlaid soon by other pleasing experiences, but still it went to my bones, if I may say so.”¹

“It could not happen in Germany”—”it could happen here.”  The contradiction evokes the foreboding that occasionally disturbed the normal course of Jewish life during the Belle Epoque. A number of developments from around this time testified to the depths of hostile sentiment not only in backward Russia, but in the heart of civilized Europe. The Dreyfus affair in France, the emergence of avowedly anti-Semitic populist parties in Austria and Germany and the pogroms that periodically shook the Pale of Settlement in Czarist Russia from the 1880s, all contributed to the emergence of modern Zionism. Although America would be the intended destination for most, the westward mass movement of refugees from the Pale brought smaller influxes of Yiddish speaking Ostjuden to Central and Western Europe as well. These strange newcomers attracted the hostile attention of locals but also gestures of solidarity from the predominantly middle-class Jews of these lands, putting the latter into contact with their own past and to the cultural and political ferments of the East. At the grassroots level, modern Zionism arose out of Jewish philanthropic efforts to assist these victims of persecution but it soon evolved into a nationalist movement. 

Zionism took as its fundamental premise the inevitability and naturalness of anti-Semitism. One of its founders, Theodor Herzl, writing as journalist covering the trial of Captain Dreyfuss for a Viennese paper, noted the profound impact of the affair on his outlook.

“In Paris, as I have said, I achieved a freer attitude toward anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all, I recognized the emptiness and futility of trying to ‘combat’ anti-Semitism.”² 

Over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nationalism took root among many subject peoples in Central and Eastern Europe. Zionists could claim that the Jews were a nation without a state in the same way that Italians or Germans had been and that Poles, Magyars, Czechs and countless others still were. At the same time, they would anguish over differences that set the Jewish case apart. For it was not evident the Jews were still a people although the associations around the name itself suggested that it remained one in some sense. In contrast to other nations—if that is what they were—they did not inhabit a shared territory nor did they speak a common language. No already existing part of Russia or Austria-Hungary would fall into their hands upon the break-up of these empires. When the latter did collapse in the aftermath of the First World War, this predicament became all the more conspicuous. True, in contrast to other oppressed and mistreated peoples, the top most layer of European Jewry belonged to the ruling classes of the Great Powers (though subject even in these circles to some discrimination) providing Zionist leaders with the opportunity to make their case to heads of state, pow-wow with dignitaries and win a sympathetic hearing from co-religionists in finance and the press. This public visibility sustained hope in the new cause even as the impediments to statehood made the prospect of this whole enterprise initially seem vanishingly remote.

Aside from the support it enjoyed in some powerful quarters, the main thing the Zionists had going for them was the resonance of the biblical promise that a Jewish state would one day be restored by God’s anointed. For over a millennium, rabbinical authorities had interpreted this promise as forbidding any effort to bring about this restoration by their own efforts. Opposing the traditional understanding, a thoroughly secular Zionist leadership would play on this messianic expectation, and began attracting a following in Jewish communities from Kiev to New York City among those who were religious if no longer wholly Orthodox. Remote biblical precedent also made the Zionist message legible to Gentile sympathizers. But Gentile detractors were always far more numerous. While other nationalists had to contend only with the hostility of proximate parties, Zionists confronted public suspicion in many lands. This suspicion stemmed from hostilities towards the Jews that had no exact equivalent in attitudes towards other peoples, being grounded in an older Christian grudge against the alleged Christ-killers, but then assuming a racial aspect in a context where traditional religious belief was on the decline. Unlike groups with more recognizable characteristics, the Jews were said to be a race in a more mysterious sense.      

It is perhaps hard to recall how forbidding the path to statehood would have seemed before First World War, being wholly dependent on unforeseeable geopolitical circumstances. Most Jews were at best skeptical and were often opposed on principle. For patriotic, middle-class Jews or those who looked to the workers movement to abolish the material bases of anti-Semitism, Zionism could seem like utopian dreaming. The rabbis, for their part, still regarded the Zionist struggle for a Jewish nation-state as blasphemy although opposition from this quarter began to waver as the traditional world of the Pale came crashing down.

Yet at the very apogee of inter-imperialist slaughter there occurred a miracle, so to speak, in the form of the Balfour Declaration of 1917. The latter promised British sponsorship of a Jewish colonization of Palestine, still in the hands of Germany’s Ottoman ally that now threatened its control of the Suez Canal. The decision was intended to win over Jewish opinion in America at a moment when great uncertainty hung over the future course of hostilities, with Washington still holding back from throwing its weight behind the Entente due to considerable domestic opposition. Realpolitik, however, was not the whole motive: the thinking that went into the Balfour Declaration spoke to the influence of an early form of Christian Zionism that went back to the time of Cromwell and began to make inroads across the Atlantic from the 1920s.³

British support for Zionism put the whole project under suspicion from a German nationalist point of view. When the enemy had been the Tsarist regime, Berlin’s wartime propaganda held out the promise that victory would liberate the Jews from the Russian knout, but the revolutions of 1917 followed by national defeat would alter the picture. Those on the Right who might have once looked with equanimity on the prospect of German Jews decamping to Palestine would now be more likely to regard such an emigration as potentially aiding a hated foe. After the Balfour Declaration, the leadership of the Zionist Organization (ZO) passed into the hands of Eastern European, mostly Polish Jews allied with the British and increasingly influential America supporters. The official representatives of German Zionism remained loyal to this new dispensation and its activists were still the dominant intellectual force within this now international movement. But the outlook of the German Zionist intelligentsia would itself be transformed by contact with activists and communities from the alien world of the ghetto. One response in the ranks of the movement to these changes from above and below was to deemphasize the immediate struggle for a Jewish state and embrace various projects of cultural renewal. While British sponsorship of the Jewish settlement of Palestine created the space for less political and more idealistic visions of Zion to emerge in Germany, its main themes were hardly new, often just a rehashing of the pre-war romantic outpourings of the Jugendbewegung. As we shall see, the young Leo Strauss was a stalwart defender of the Herzl legacy against criticisms coming from this quarter, though he came to recognize the need for a more intellectually compelling form of political Zionism.

After the Russian Revolution, the Entente’s main concern was the destruction of Bolshevik rule, and the Zionist leadership knew that the goodwill of the British depended on the movement’s strict compliance with their administration of Palestine, but also on maintaining a low profile in eastern Europe where Jews had emerged as large, vulnerable minorities in the fledgling nation states formed from the wreckage of the Hohenzollern, Romanov and Hapsburg Empires. As the Civil War in Russia raged on, the ZO held back from denouncing the Ukrainian pogroms and the atrocities of the Whites while attempting to derive what benefits they could from these misfortunes. The operative calculus of the Zionist leadership was that the worst things got for the Jews in Europe the better it would be for bolstering settlement in the Levant. 

The disproportionately Jewish origins of Russia’s new rulers sparked a firestorm of counter-revolutionary conspiracy theorizing. In a piece combining lurid, anti-Semitic fantasy with Christian Zionist hopes for Jewish national uplift, Churchill laid out the stakes: “The struggle which is now beginning between the Zionist and Bolshevik Jews is little less than a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people.”⁴

It is now hard to believe the extent to which the Zionists of that time accepted the views of the most extreme anti-Semites. The Zionists believed the Jews of the diaspora formed a parasite in the body politic of their hosts. They saw them as weaklings who needed to toughen up and learn the law of the jungle. They dreamt of subjecting those of them who could be salvaged to a collective boot camp where they would be transformed into productive and patriotic technicians, workers and soldiers. Actors, peddlers and free-floating intellectuals need not apply. The Hungarian cultural critic and deputy to Herzl in the leadership of the prewar ZO dreamt of a new breed of “muscle Jews”. Having been in antiquity a nation of kings and warriors, the Jews, on this view, were not racially destined to permanent inferiority. They tended to see anti-Jewish sentiment as an understandable reaction to their collective degeneration in the galut where they had no occasion to cultivate the virtues of patriotism and honor characteristic of full-blooded members of territorially rooted, independent nations. This rootlessness found its complete expression in the internationalism of the socialists and communists who these would-be tough guys saw as vainly appealing to the humanitarian sentiments of the world’s workers.

While Jewish intellectuals were everywhere in the leadership of the Russian Social-Democracy, the Jewish multitude of the ghettos of the Czarist Pale of Settlement in today’s Lithuania, Poland, Belarus and Ukraine in large part attached itself either to traditional rabbinical authorities, if still religious, or else to the autonomists of the socialist Bund if no longer. Zionism began to make inroads into both camps, in some contexts taking on a socialist aspect, elsewhere appealing to the now simmering messianic expectations of the Orthodox but always in more direct competition with the former, who like them were also atheists.

“…for the next several decades Zionism and Bundism competed to win over the millions of Jews then living in the Russian Empire and what would become an independent Poland. Where Zionism emphasized the ever-present threat of European antisemitism and the need for a Jewish homeland, Bundism stressed do’ikayt, or “hereness”—the right for a Jew to be free from threat wherever one lived. In contrast to Zionism, which called for the rebirth of Hebrew as a modern language and the assimilation of Jews of different backgrounds into a new polity, Bundism rooted itself firmly in the Yiddish of the Ashkenazi working class in the Pale of Settlement.”⁵

Post-war Zionist settlement of a Palestine now under British control, the predicaments of Jewish minorities in the newly established nation-states of Eastern Europe, the panicked reaction to Bolshevism as a Jewish conspiracy, an ongoing civil war in Weimar over the future of a defeated Germany: such were the main elements of the historical context that shaped the outlook of the young Strauss. But these larger European dynamics were refracted through the concerns and disputes of the university based Zionist scene of his early formation. Here the polarization of Left and Right had more to do with attitudes towards biblical religion than with capital and labor, and yet disputes within Zionism echoed with the clamor of this wider context. 

The premise of what follows is that the contextualization and analysis of the inter-war writings of Strauss opens up new perspectives on Zionism and the so-called Jewish Question. In its intellectual boldness and coherence, Strauss’s views hold up a mirror to what calls itself Zionism today and hopefully the prospect that this intellectual portrait might be of a contemporary significance will coax readers who have little prior familiarity or interest in his life and work. All historical thinking is shaped by contemporary concerns but some of the best historical thinking on controversial topics is motivated by a desire to exit the circle of one’s own moment, to stop talking like they do. One can turn to the young Strauss for a perspective less compromised by today’s conformist pieties, perhaps courting the small danger of making the discourse of a certain European past look better than is strictly speaking warranted. Approaching the current state of Zionist ideology from behind, from an unfamiliar past, will hopefully provoke intelligent responses from the other side. 

The ideological plates are shifting and this will hopefully create a situation in which the whole subject will come to appear in a new light. Progressive criticism of Israel has long denied the latter’s claim to represent the Jews and so ends up having to disassociate Zionism from what was once called ‘the Jewish Question’, i.e., the historical particularities of the case. The empirically justified terms ‘apartheid’ and ‘colonial settler state’ dispute the Jewish state’s claims to uniqueness and thus speak to an unavoidable polemical necessity for supporters of the Palestinians. But the escalation of accusations of anti-Semitism directed at these progressive critics is creating a new polemical situation that highlights the uniqueness of the case. In what follows, the possibilities that this has opened up will be explored, and its conclusion will survey the indeterminate politics of a negation: what is anti-Zionism, and what is its significance?  The presence of thoughts that resist articulation, ones connecting the fate of the Jews to the shattered dreams of the last century, was evoked in Godard’s Filme Socialisme where the name and image of Palestine flickers as a signifier of this unresolved history. I think those images may have been the seed of these reflections on Leo Strauss. 

The Enigma of Strauss’s Zionism  

A certain obscurity surrounds Strauss’s early career as a Zionist theoretician that is in part due to the efforts of his followers to downplay these intellectually formative years. Jerry Muller points out that even the best recent scholarship on the young Strauss read him through the interpretive filter of the mature Strauss. As an example, he quotes Steven B. Smith: “Strauss was not originally a student of political theory or political philosophy. . .  It was from Schmitt that Strauss learned that conflict, not just between individuals, but between states and peoples, is the core of political life.”⁶ Some Straussians go so far as to propose that his Zionism was merely an adolescent infatuation. This view will be shown to be false. On the contrary, Strauss’s distinctive conception of Zionism not only framed his response to Schmitt but set the course of his entire subsequent intellectual development. The Straussians have cast a discrete veil over their mentor’s Zionist writings from the Weimar years (1925-32) but one might wonder why. Are they trying to hide something? It’s true that back in the ‘50s, when Strauss began making a name for himself at the University of Chicago, ardent Zionism did not fully square with the image he and his students carefully sought to cultivate of a right-thinking émigré, harboring no divided loyalties—a sensitive point for German Jews. But while the rationale for such inhibitions disappeared long ago, the distinguishing features of the Zionism of the young Leo Strauss have remained strangely out of focus. 

Recall that Strauss is known for having recommended that writers conceal their most disturbing views under a haze of diversionary rhetoric that reveals its mysteries only to the most attentive. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his own followers have never suspected that he might have resorted to such subterfuges with them. What aspects of his earlier Zionism might Strauss have wanted to dissimulate even from the faithful? Basic facts about his sympathies for the European Right from the early 1930s to the early 1940s have long been known. Unsympathetic commentators cite them to cast suspicion on Strauss’s loyalty to liberal democracy, but for these critics Strauss’s Zionism is not the issue but rather loyalty to liberal democracy. It would seem then that the illegibility of Strauss’s inter-war Zionism stems neither from any embarrassment on the part of the Straussians, nor from the preoccupations of his critics. What then is its cause? Perhaps it’s simply a manifestation of a more a general problem: intellectual historians are supposed to be on their guard against anachronism but they are better at explaining the typical cases of past forms of thought than the mavericks. And far from being a garden variety Zionist—as his followers would have it—he was, in fact, a singular figure in this milieu, its most promising and original intellectual, and moreover the only noteworthy theoretician of its right-wing, distinctions that often elude contemporary academic commentators. These are admittedly the value judgments of an admirer but a deeper look into this past should make it apparent that Strauss’s Zionism is at least more interesting than has been heretofore suspected. As we Straussians like to say, where there is smoke there is fire.  

Two Kinds of  Historicism

In his mature work of the 1950s Strauss advanced a powerful refutation of German historicism, which alongside the pretention to a value-free social science constituted the main exhibits of his formidable case for the superiority of classical to modern thought. Reflecting back on his German past, Strauss suggested that while he was once an ordinary card-carrying Zionist, intellectually speaking he was a historicist, but he would never explain the connection between the two. One reason why scholars may struggle to comprehend Strauss’s earlier Zionism is that they fail to recognize its dependence on these historicist assumptions. In consequence, they succumb to the misleading impression—encouraged by Strauss himself—that his earlier alignment to Zionism lacked serious intellectual foundation, that his historicism had no direct connection to his Zionism, that his break with historicism eventually led to his mature conception of political philosophy, and that this move to the latter ran parallel to the later attenuation of his Zionism yet nonetheless had no organic connection to it. But this tale begs the questions: what did his earlier Zionism entail such that it would be left behind in rejecting modern historicism for the political philosophy of the ancients? And what did his later Zionism (for he remained a Zionist) entail such that it could be paired with Plato and Aristotle, or at least present no cause for embarrassment before such lofty judges? 

Strauss’s later conception of the history of philosophy hinges on a confrontation between what he understood to be the deepest assumptions of modern and ancient political thought, revisiting a long dormant quarrel of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Strauss that one encounters in his best-known English language works from the 1950s and 1960s held that the classical philosophers—the Platonic Socrates first and foremost—aimed to pursue a life of detached contemplation with a few interlocutors and followers, only turning to the political to defend themselves from the permanent, uncomprehending hostility of the unphilosophical multitude. In sharp contrast to the outlook of the moderns, the ancients held that collective life rested on a bedrock of unquestioned myths and opinions.⁷ The moderns rejected this view, holding that traditional suspicion towards the life of the mind could be neutralized if the enlightened committed themselves to a great civilizing uplift of the entire human estate. To the extent that the philosophers of antiquity could contemplate such a dominion over nature they recoiled from it in horror. They looked beyond the burning controversies of their own time and place in contemplating timeless problems posed by the whole order of being. In this classical view political philosophy was assigned the subordinate, practical task of securing the freedom of the few to philosophize while outwardly upholding the various conventions and myths that bind human beings together. The philosophers of old did not despair of their benighted fellow man because they regarded human society as being of no great significance when seen in the light of nature as a whole which they gazed upon in wonder. Free of our modern belief in progress, their attachment to their own communities and to humanity writ large was attenuated by their awareness that civilization went down in eternally recurring cataclysms, followed by natural rebirths and fresh beginnings.   

But this opposition of the everlasting to the merely historical is misleading. The categorical distinction Strauss drew between the historically specific present and the timeless problems of the political begins to waver upon closer examination. An attentive reader of Strauss’s work will have already suspected that far from being subordinate to a higher interest in the contemplation of being, his very method of reading testifies to the priority he accorded to political philosophy over metaphysics and cosmology. He wrote no commentary and taught no course on Plato’s Parmenides or Timaeus for example. His numerous post-war remarks on Heidegger’s ontology are solid but unoriginal, and what he does say of interest is all about the latter’s politics, the intellectual significance of his Nazi affair. Courses on Hegel at Chicago closely followed the argument of the Lectures on the Philosophy of History not that of the Phenomenology or Logic. This priority given to political works qualifies the sharp opposition Strauss drew between philosophy’s engagement with supposedly permanent problems of political order and the historicist view that these problems are specific to different times and places. For if philosophers are compelled to turn to the political by the unphilosophic multitude it is surely the burning controversies of the moment that they must address. Such permanent problems—the two main ones being the nature of justice within and between political communities and the role of religion in civic life—are but general templates of unique historical controversies.  

Straussians might respond that the present, even when conceived epochally (Ancient, Medieval, Modern) can only be a point of departure for a form of thinking that returns to the permanent problems characteristic of all political situations. Greek philosophy with Plato at its summit, they would say, arose out of an attempt to grapple with these problems in their primordial, i.e., natural and yet ever-elusive form. Only by opening up the books of this foundational thinking and attempting to understand it as it understood itself could the ideals of liberal civilization—bourgeois society—be evaluated impartially, i.e., without unknowingly assenting to the ideals common to the opposing camps of modern politics. Strauss and his students promised that a deep and careful reading of the ancients would free one from the progressive prejudices of the moderns, those dubious Enlighteners who dared to declare war on prejudice. 

But this very prospect of a return to origins itself clearly rested on unarticulated historicist assumptions regarding the relationship of the present to the past and to the Greek inception of philosophy more specifically. The thesis developed here is that Strauss did not break with historicism in turning to the ancients but rather came to the latter from the intellectual impetus of the former. One reason why the historicist logic of his return to the ancients may not be apparent is that the term ‘historicism’ is not well defined. In Germany, historicism came to be understood as the enterprise of objective documentary research into past forms of life. But underlying its methodology was a specific view of the principal objects of this research—unique cultural worlds that every age and every consequential people makes for itself. It was more or less calmly conceded that the recognition of the plurality, incommensurability and transience of such worlds led to relativism. But this conception of historicism fails to represent the issue at stake for the young Strauss who, like many in his Weimar milieu, ardently professed to reject relativism. The more advanced form of historicism to which Strauss subscribed looked to the future as much as to the past and from the vantage point of a distinctive notion of the present. The experience of the hollowing out of beliefs, the evident descent of political and moral reasoning into empty rhetoric opens up the possibility of a radical criticism of long unquestioned assumptions, and it is by actualizing this possibility that contemporaries constitute a historical present in the fullest sense of the word. This criticism seeks to uncover and put into question the original thinking behind these value commitments and so necessarily takes a historical-hermeneutic form of going back to the sources. One did not return to the past, any past, merely because the old is venerable, the task was rather to retrieve an originary past when new groundbreaking ways of thinking emerged. All subsequent thinking within a tradition thus established—even the attempted breaks from it—represented responses to this authoritative beginning and hence were derivative of it. 

In brief, there are two variants of historicism, one that leads to relativism, and the other, to a return to origins. The first is the product of the German nineteenth century, but the second arguably goes back to beginnings of modern thought. A historicism in this sense was implicit in Machiavelli’s call to invent modern modes and orders via the restoration of ancient modes and orders. Strauss’s later account of the successive waves of modernity (Hobbes—incipient bourgeois society, Rousseau—French Revolution, Nietzsche—fascism) as movements of return to variously conceived ideological antiquities certainly belongs to the pattern of his earlier historicism. 

Despite the primacy Strauss would later ostensibly accord to detached contemplation, he rarely shirked from taking sides first as a scholar and Zionist activist in Weimar Germany, later as an émigré researcher in inter-war Britain and finally as a professor of political philosophy and patriotic citizen of Cold War America. Contrary to the Straussian view that he left behind his German formation in coming to America, the mold was arguably cast in Weimar even as his new surroundings compelled him to change his tune and to a lesser extent, his mind. His American students were with a few exceptions taken in by Strauss’s noble rhetoric of eternal treasures safeguarded in the canon of the Great Tradition. Those who know his writings and have enjoyed in depth discussions with followers of his school might suspect that back in the day he perceived his new pupils and colleagues with an ironic bemusement that recalls the academic satires of Nabokov: to Strauss’s initial astonishment these rubes had heard nothing of the decline of the West. 

What was the place of Zionism within this historicist understanding of the present as groundless, intellectually recursive, doomed to decline, and yet open to renewal? For Strauss, the Jewish Question was the key to understanding modernity as an epochal movement away from the biblical religion set into motion by Hobbes and Spinoza’s scientific criticism of the scriptures. The story of this formative phase of his intellectual career reveals a Strauss of unsettling, radical convictions, a partisan of an Enlightenment of a distinctively Nietzschean aspect—quite at odds with what became a carefully cultivated, classicizing façade of moderation, beneath which continuities of outlook can be detected. Strauss’s variant on the Spenglerian theme of the going down of Western civilization formed the underlying historicist assumption of his earlier Weimar and his later American writings, though post-war conditions in the USA gave him reason to hope for a modification of this destiny. But now we are getting ahead of ourselves.    

Der Kampfplatz

Leo Strauss was a product of a great ferment in the German universities of the Weimar era in which debates within and over Zionism played a noteworthy role. The German Jewish university graduates, who took over the Zionist movement after Herzl’s death, followed in the footsteps of their nationalist fellow students who dominated the German campuses before 1914 and would continue to set the tone through Weimar. The few left-wing academic centers and circles of the Weimar era were more aligned with the newest intellectual developments in philosophy, theology, the social sciences and the arts and so stood out, intellectually speaking even then. At German universities, the small Zionist scene occasionally overlapped with a disproportionately Jewish academic Left. For example, in the Frankfurt branch of the Zionist student organization, the KjV, our subject contended with Erich Fromm and Leo Löwenthal, later associates of the Institute for Social Research.  

From the early 1920s Strauss was abreast of the latest developments, soon passing from Max Weber to more philosophical inspirations. But his actual academic specialization was what we now call Jewish Studies, then known by its German name, Wissenschaft des Judentums. Established in the early nineteenth century, this field was a product of the historicist spirit of that time in both its commitment to archival research and its aspiration to uncover the spiritual essence of peoples. Over the course of the nineteenth century, this new discipline devoted itself to rehabilitating Judaism from the long prevailing Gentile view that its traditions and beliefs had been superseded by the course of history at a time when the civic emancipation was posing the question of why Jews should remain Jews and in what sense. One of its pioneers spelled out its vocation in the following terms: “The scientific study of Judaism must decide on the worth or unworthiness of the Jews, their fitness or unfitness to be held in the same esteem and be given the same status as other citizens. The Jews…must prove themselves as robust collaborators in the common work of humanity; they must lift themselves and their principle to the level of science, for that is the stance of the European world.”⁸ Strauss was far from enamored of this scholarship but it will become clear that he took up, radicalized and transformed its founding injunction into a new Zionist mission of national redemption.      

As a student and scholar, Strauss attended the universities of Marburg, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin and Hamburg. Though initially drawn to contemporary philosophy, his political interests would set the intellectual agenda. From 1923-28, he wrote exclusively for Jewish publications: the Zionist Jüdische Rundschau; the KjV magazine Der Jüdische Student; and Martin Buber’s Der Jude. Obviously, Zionism was not a side pursuit but the main course, intellectually speaking. Scholars who discuss these writings typically downplay their author’s actual politics as academic norms compel them to put Strauss into conversation with figures who loom large in the canon of contemporary Jewish studies.   

“Those who write about Strauss’s Jewish thought tend to come from departments of religion or philosophy. Within those precincts, the abstract work of thinkers such as Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, or Martin Heidegger are regarded as legitimate objects of reflection. By contrast, the more prosaic thought of the founders of modern Zionism as a political movement—Pinsker, Herzl or Jabotinsky—is assumed to be too far below the philosophical concerns of Strauss.”⁹

Like many other national movements, Zionism was not just about group interests, it was also a matter of dignity. As Strauss put it later, quoting Herzl: “‘We are a nation—the enemy makes us a nation whether we like it or not.’ In the last analysis this is nothing to be deplored, for ‘the enemy is necessary for the highest effort of the personality.’ Only through securing the honor of the Jewish nation could the individual Jew’s honor be secured.”¹⁰ This state was originally conceived as a modern, liberal, secular but not necessarily democratic order. “Political Zionism, then, strictly understood was the movement of an elite on behalf of a community constituted by common descent and common degradation, for the restoration of their honor through the acquisition of statehood and therefore of a country—of any country: the land which the strictly political Zionism promised to the Jews was not necessarily the land of Israel.”¹¹

The case for a Jewish state came up against the absence of an already existing national culture or even shared vernacular. Official Zionism had nothing to say about these shortcomings which were felt more keenly at universities. Though loyal to the political orientation of the movement’s leadership, Strauss would later have occasion to reflect on the more specifically German-Jewish dimension of this wider spiritual heteronomy:      

“The emancipation of Jews in Germany coincided with the greatest epoch of German thought and poetry, the epoch in which Germany was the foremost country in thought and poetry. One cannot help comparing the period of German Jewry with the period of Spanish Jewry. The greatest achievements of Jews during the Spanish period were rendered possible partly by the fact that Jews became receptive to the influx of Greek thought, which was understood to be Greek only accidentally. During the German period, however, the Jews opened themselves to the influx of German thought, the thought of the particular nation in the midst of which they lived—a thought which was understood to be German essentially: political dependence was also spiritual dependence.”¹²

Weimar contemporaries were fascinated by this ominous parallel between the present and the fate of the Jews of Spain a half millennium earlier, and Strauss drew on it here to underscore the greater peril posed by Germany. Their intellectual dependence on German culture had made them powerless in the face of the movement from the latter part of the nineteenth century of that culture towards irrationalism, anti-emancipationism and the new racially-based hostility towards them.¹³ Political Zionism did not have the means to address this paralyzing attachment to a deeply beloved German tradition. Given the anomalous conditions of the Jews lacking both territory and even language, how could they plausibly claim to be a viable candidate for nationhood if they did not, in compensation for these apparent deficits, represent some independent national world-view?  

“In this capacity, I occasionally met Jabotinsky, the leader of the Revisionists. He asked me, “What are you doing?” I said, “Well, we read the Bible, we study Jewish history, Zionist theory, and, of course, we keep abreast of developments, and so on.” He replied, “And rifle practice?” And I had to say, “No.” But the main point is that this Zionism was strictly limited to political action. The mind was in no way employed, or even the heart was in no way employed, in matters Jewish.”¹⁴

In relating this delightful anecdote, Strauss neglected to mention his earlier political sympathies for Jabotinsky’s wing of the movement as this probably would not have gone down well with the largely liberal Jewish audience in attendance at Hillel that evening in 1963. The founder of the Jewish Legion and the Haganah (Defence), Ze’ev Jabotinsky is now a revered figure in the Israeli pantheon of founders, but he died in the Catskills in August 1940, defeated and widely despised. From 1923 he had led the right-wing opposition within the ZO, determined to revise what he saw as the overly accommodating stance of its leadership—henceforth his supporters were the Revisionists. Jabotinsky initially calculated that the Zionists were still too weak to hold down the Arabs without British support, but when he concluded that they would not permit Jewish settlement on a scale that would make statehood a possibility, he flirted with Fascist Italy, itself seeking a revision of the post-war distribution of spoils in the Mediterranean. Jabotinsky called for the most pitiless measures of expulsion and subjugation but he regarded the natives of Palestine as a people who would understandably resist tooth and nail. Unlike Zionists then and now, he called a spade when he saw one.  “Compromisers in our midst attempt to convince us that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked by a softened formulation of our goals, or a tribe of money grubbers who will abandon their birth right to Palestine for cultural and economic gains. I flatly reject this assessment of the Palestinian Arabs. Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement.”¹⁵ Strauss hardly stood out in being completely silent on the colonial logic of Zionism. He may have believed—perhaps taking his cue from the Revisionist leader—that attempts to justify on moral grounds the expulsion of a people from their own homes and land is unseemly. Best just be done with it. 

From the 1920s, this hardboiled realism was challenged by alternative currents of Zionism calling for more principled, more spiritually uplifting, more distinctively Jewish goals. Strauss’s Weimar writings on the Jewish Question are attempts to establish a compelling defense of political Zionism against criticisms that the narrowly political goal of establishing a normal nation-state existence for Jews evaded the more important task of reviving the cultural and religious heritage of the Jewish people degraded by a century of assimilation and a long preceding history of dishonor. Adapting to these new circumstances, the spokesmen for these alternative forms of Zionism tended to regard the behind-the-scenes maneuvering and compromises of the leadership of the ZO with big money Jews and whichever Great Power would lend support to their colonizing enterprise as demeaning to the cause. Unsurprisingly, the official leadership of a now more British aligned, Polish-led Zionism had little time for such high-minded qualms. In their indifference to Jewish traditions, pre-war Zionist leaders of the Herzl school had seriously considered the option of setting up a colony in Uganda, Argentina or wherever else a suitable territory might be made available by a colonial patron. Even the ancient language of the Jews initially had no sentimental significance for the Zionist leadership and the very idea of reviving Hebrew a millennium and a half after it had ceased to be a vernacular seemed hopelessly utopian. Yiddish, a Medieval German dialect spoken by a large majority of European Jewry, was looked down upon as a corrupted ghetto tongue by Western and German Jews and so wholly unfit to be a language of national rebirth. Early on Herzl had proposed that German be the official language of a future Jewish state at a time when the Kaiser seemed like Zionism’s most likely backer and best positioned to apply diplomatic pressure on Berlin’s Ottoman ally, still ruler of the Holy Land, if Palestine it was to be. With the Balfour Declaration and Germany’s defeat, political Zionism would confront new intellectual challenges as the biblical site of new Jewish settlement enterprise made it possible to contemplate the resurrection of the Hebrew language amid a broader reinvention of tradition.  

The leading theoretician of cultural Zionism, Ahad Ha’am, rejected Herzelian Realpolitk for an ambitious agenda of renewal, centered on the mythic significance of the call to return to Palestine. Those devoted to the forging of a new secular Hebrew high culture, he foresaw, should settle in Jerusalem where they could exercise a broad, uplifting influence on the flatlands of the diaspora. The transformation of educated bourgeois Jews into a Zionist aristocracy of the spirit began with a principled rejection of the universalism of liberal and socialist Jews. Ha’am accused the latter of coping with the permanent stateless condition of the Jews by spinning it as a mission to preach justice and world peace to the nations. While Strauss rejected Ha’am’s prioritizing of cultural renewal over the practical work of nation-building, the latter’s polemic had identified the intellectual vacuum at the heart of official Zionism. Since the Balfour Declaration had made Palestine of biblical legend the inevitable site for a settlement the principled confrontation of Enlightenment with biblical religion was now more imperative than if, say, Uganda had been chosen. 

Heavily focused on debates within the Zionist scene in German universities of the 1920s and early 1930s, Strauss accorded great, perhaps undue significance to the often fluid distinctions between cultural and religious Zionism (the latter term having a different connotation than it currently does, now designating the armed religious zealots of the settler movement of Greater Israel.) Against the grain of a pervasive German valorization of Kultur, Strauss regarded the very term as a mystification: of what after all did the culture of the Jews consist other than their traditional religion? When it understands itself, cultural Zionism must become religious Zionism, he reasoned. Accordingly, the only consequential opposition within Zionism was between its political and religious poles. In this conflict, Strauss professed to see a theologico-political Kampfplatz of wider European historical proportions pitting the spirit of science against revelation. The stridency of the young Strauss’s atheism does not often register with those who write about him, so at odds with how he would later cast the opposition of reason and revelation, of Athens and Jerusalem. Schematically, Strauss’s later thought revolved around the relationship within and between the terms of two oppositions: ancient versus modern philosophy, on the one hand, and philosophy and the biblical religion, on the other. But in this earlier period, a return to ancient philosophy was only beginning to come into consideration and the biblical religion was regarded as only worthy of the respect that one owes to the dead. 

Strauss accused the cultural and religious Zionists of pretending to believe in the biblical God, his miracles and his Law. The principal representatives of Zionism so conceived were none other than Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig. Their subjectivist reinterpretation of the experience of revelation, he held, was a desperate effort to ward off the disenchanting conclusions of modern objectivist science and biblical scholarship. Strauss denounced the new messianic vogue as a diversion from the harsh realism involved in forging a Jewish national people, movement and state. Contra Buber and Rosenzweig, legendary tales of encounters with the Absolute Other on the magic mountains of the Promised Land were not the relevant experience upon which Zionism could base itself. The Enlightenment, he insisted, had long ago shattered the credibility of biblical miracles. Zionism confronted not the legendary world of the early Israelites but the later one of the rabbinical Judaism of the diaspora where the Jews had long clung to a semblance of collective existence by forfeiting normality in defiance of the current of history, until this whole strange world began to dissolve in the nineteenth century. Strauss held that Zionism was a product of this dissolution and had an interest in accelerating it. 

But the cultural and religious Zionism of the Weimar era repudiated normalization via the attainment of statehood as a faded bourgeois ideal, a betrayal of the Jewish spirit and thus little better than assimilation. These alternative Zionists were calling for a return to the great traditions of messianic deliverance and prophetic denunciations of injustice and idolatry, long ago buried by the old rabbis and their assimilated successors. Confronting these criticisms under the pressure of menacing domestic developments, Strauss eventually became more critical of the Herzelian solution of nationalist normalization. Aspiring to the standard of modern, liberal civilization became dubious in a context in which that civilization, i.e., bourgeois society, was entering a supposedly terminal crisis state. 

Why was it not possible to respond to the demythologizing implications of biblical criticism with a new conception of God “within the limits of Reason” (Kant) or grounded in some authentic experience of an encounter with a transcendent higher power (Buber)? Strauss professed that only an uncompromising atheism could be truly respectful of the noble delusions of one’s forefathers. “Our respect for a tradition stretching back thousands of years today forbids us the use of the word God.” On the whole, it must be conceded that the young Strauss was no great respecter of the old religion. Contemporary consciousness at its height shouldered an uncompromising will to truth and Zionism could only hope to advance if it joined the next, coming wave attack of Enlightenment—as it turned on itself, opening up a plateau above any merely polemical negation of the credibility of the Bible. But the young Strauss evinced a healthy respect for the old party of Enlightenment too, as it still had much work to do in his opinion. He had the following to say about the leading journal of German Orthodoxy: “After a glance at the Israelit, one once again feels the need for Voltaire.”¹⁶

Voltaire’s hostility to the Church, and Christianity more generally, is well-known but today we are troubled by the particular vehemence of his denunciations of the Jews. A representative quote: “The Jewish nation dares to display an irreconcilable hatred toward all nations, and revolts against all masters; always superstitious, always greedy for the well-being enjoyed by others, always barbarous—cringing in misfortune and insolent in prosperity.” Fascinated by the anti-Jewish views of thinkers he admired, Strauss recommended to his fellow Zionists an acquaintance with the scholarship of the distinguished Orientalist Paul de Lagarde. The world’s hostility to the Jews had a rational core around which formed empoisoned, febrile myths and Zionism had to address that core.     

In this Voltairean spirit, Strauss called on Zionism to make a clean break from those factions within the movement that represented the traditional believers who constituted the majority of the non-socialist Jewish masses that the movement depended on for its colonizing of Palestine. “The party alignments of German Jewry no longer correspond to the intellectual situation of our generation. The coalition of Zionism-liberalism must take the place of the coalition of Zionism-Orthodoxy. The enemy is to the Right!”¹⁷ The Left whom Strauss saw as potential allies of Zionism were actually liberal nationalists, university educated supporters of the DDP, a party that could claim Max Weber and Hugo Preuss as founders. (It would eventually drift rightward near the end of the Weimar Republic and ditch its Jewish business and professional supporters who then shifted their votes and financial backing to the SPD.) Despite his realist pretensions, this call for a break with more traditional religious supporters of Zionism defied pragmatic calculation. But immediate issues were not Strauss’s main concern. The more pressing problem for him was that Zionism was intellectually shallow and incoherent. Its new atheist head was stitched to a body of old believers. This strange, composite being was patched together as an improvised response to anti-Semitism, and hence lacked a positive justification. And if Zionism could not justify itself before the highest intellectual standards of probity and rigor, it would deserve the scorn the Marxists poured on it. The latter, he warned, rightly attack movement’s deference to religion as dishonest and incoherent. While the Marxists make shrewd alliances with peasants and oppressed nations, they never compromise their core conceptions of politics and history, unlike the Zionists who pander to the religious on the pretext that religion, while untrue, is necessary for happiness and is, in any event, a private affair.¹⁸ 

In the face of such criticisms, the only respectable option for Zionism was to abandon a now purely sentimental bond to the religious traditions of the past and reestablish a national identity forged in confrontation with scientific truth, the critical method. This stance was forcefully conveyed in a highly sympathetic review of Freud’s The Future of an Illusion.  “The earlier critique of religion was convinced that with the downfall of religion an earthly paradise would arise. It promised this. Freud promises nothing, only an insight into the real human condition.”¹⁹ But as a political movement, Zionism needed a promise and the bourgeois normality that the psychoanalyst had seen no alternative to seemed itself to be now slipping away. Strauss professed to see a new, higher plateau in the radicalization of the Enlightenment ideal. Strauss believed that by submitting unconditionally to this lofty ideal of modern times—according to Nietzsche, its last great ideal—political Zionism could defend itself against the charge of seeking a mere normalization of Jewish existence. Tying the national destiny of the Jews to the progress of science and criticism, Zionism would live up to the boast of their ancestors and transform the Jews into an elect nation, or in a more modern, secular idiom, into a world-historical people. For only the world-historical peoples truly have a right to exist. On the other hand, unconditional submission to criticism exposed a people to the risk of dissolving itself but that came with the territory of becoming a people again.

Leo Strauss saw a ruthless collective self-criticism as a path to subjective authenticity and national greatness. Over the whole period under consideration Strauss would interpret Pinsker’s call for dispassionate reckoning with actual conditions through the prism of Nietzsche’s ideal of the will to truth, but his understanding of Nietzsche had been stamped by Max Weber’s stirring characterizations of science and politics as vocations.²⁰  

“Integrity, however, compels us to state that for the many who today tarry for new prophets and saviors, the situation is the same as resounds in the beautiful Edomite watchman’s song of the period of exile that has been included among Isaiah’s oracles: ‘He calleth to me out of Seir, Watchman, how long the night? The watchman said, The morning cometh, and also the night: if ye will enquire, enquire ye: return, come.’ The people to whom this was said has enquired and tarried for more than two millennia, and we are shaken when we realize its fate. From this we want to draw the lesson that nothing is gained by yearning and tarrying alone, and we shall act differently.”²¹

The great sociologist had denounced the hankering of the young for new prophets and spiritual revivals, their yearning and tarrying for deliverance, alluding to the historic misfortunes of the Jews who long ago supposedly succumbed to these temptations. Strauss’s argument for the uselessness of the Hebrew bible as a political guide for the present should be understood in these terms. “We no longer take it as a given that the prophets were right: we ask ourselves in all seriousness whether, perhaps, it was the kings who were right.”²² This opposition of prophets to kings is a placeholder for a more general contrast of a this-worldly ethic of responsibility to one’s own people, to an opposed, other-worldly ethic of conviction to God or some abstract, secular substitute for God like Humanity or Justice.

The challenge of this concrete situation of crisis imposed a new intellectual task on political Zionism which was to clear the way for atheist renewal of the chosen people via an uprooting return to its origins. As a Zionist theoretician Strauss would seek to reframe the Jewish Question away from the preoccupation with anti-Semitism towards an epochal conception of ‘the theologico-political problem’ that would make apparent the world historical stakes of this movement. While the nations of Europe might leave behind biblical religion and reinvent themselves as purely secular peoples, it was not clear how a stateless people, living in Europe but not of it, historically defined by that belief, and indeed its originator, could do likewise. Strauss’s Zionism represented an attempt to identify the specificity and national raison d’être of this people in an era when belief in the biblical god had ceased to be tenable while the liberal solutions to the consequences of mass disbelief were failing.

Against Messianic Waiting 

It was in the context of the so-called ‘relative stabilization’ of the Weimar Republic of the mid-1920s that Strauss began and completed his study of Spinoza’s critical-historical reading of the Hebrew bible. Over much of the nineteenth century Spinoza’s uncompromisingly scientific attitude had inspired German Jews, even as those at the forefront of the new scholarly Judaica rejected the philosopher’s call to abandon the observances of their religion. They found a more accommodating solution in a liberalism that relegated religion to the private sphere and an up-to-date Judaism that abandoned literal belief in the Bible and the old ritual observances. With the collapse of monarchy many Jewish intellectuals began to question this compromise that had made it possible for their fathers and grandfathers to assimilate while still preserving a connection to the ancestral faith. The Jewish Writings of the neo-Kantian philosopher Herman Cohen set a new tone by openly celebrating the ethical genius of the prophets against Spinoza’s denigration of them as superstitious and emotionally unstable. While Spinoza would be dethroned by this thunderous denunciation, Cohen’s own rationalism would soon be rejected by a young generation attracted to the messianic and mystical currents of the Jewish tradition that had been an embarrassment to the older generation. Strauss stood apart in rejecting both Cohen’s secular as well this new more otherworldly valorization of the spirit of Judaism.          

His first book, Die Religionskritik Spinozas als Grundlage seiner Bibelwissenschaft²³  was completed by 1928, but its publication was delayed by the Akademie für Wissenschaft des Judentums, probably due to the misgivings of his academic superior who may have wanted him to adopt a more affirmative attitude towards the Jewish tradition in line with the new anti-Spinoza sentiment. “The book, in other words, was Strauss’s first experience of writing under conditions of censorship.”²⁴ Despite Strauss’s attempt to accommodate the now prevailing view that Spinoza had betrayed his own people by denigrating its scriptures, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that at the time of writing he himself was a Spinozist of a kind, as he comes close to confessing in the preface to the later English translation of the book. 

“What the change effected by strictly political Zionism means, one sees most clearly when, returning to the origin, one ponders this sentence of Spinoza: ‘If the foundations of their religion did not effeminate the minds of the Jews, I would absolutely believe that they will at some time, given the occasion (for human things are mutable), establish their state again.’”²⁵ 

Strauss understood Zionism as a principled rejection of this rabbinically sanctioned stance of pious waiting for divine help. Herein lay the epochal significance of Spinoza’s biblical criticism, the subject of Strauss’s first deep foray into political philosophy. 

“Spinoza was of the opinion that the strength to endure suffering is not the same strength that is required to establish and maintain a state, without which no society can exist. And just as his teacher Machiavelli held Christianity responsible for the decay of Roman virtue, so Spinoza made Judaism responsible for the impossibility of any restoration of the Jewish state.”²⁶ 

Any restoration of Jewish statehood was predicated upon the abandonment of their religion, and this is exactly how Strauss saw it at the time. 

For all its startling novelty at the time, the Theological-Political Treatise belonged to a philosophical counter-tradition going back to Epicurus. The contribution of Spinoza must be seen in the light of a preceding break from the assumptions of this ancient discourse against religion. Beginning with Spinoza’s older contemporary Thomas Hobbes, the critique of religion assumed a new aspect in the context of the religious civil wars of the seventeenth century. “The ancient Epicurean motive, opposition to religion in the name of human peace of mind, took on, in the age of the Inquisition and of the wars of religion, a compelling topicality which Epicurus himself could never have foreseen. It must however be borne in mind that the original Epicurean motive was concern for peace of mind—and this concern is the prevailing one also in the case of Lucretius, whereas in later centuries criticism of religion aimed predominantly toward peace within society.”²⁷ 

Most of Strauss’s study is devoted to Spinoza’s intellectual antecedents. It might be hard to detect the degree of his sympathies for Spinoza’s method of reading scripture, concealed under a mass of erudition that never gets around to representing the argument or acknowledging the accomplishments of the Theological-Political Treatise. Strauss by and large avoided even quoting the text. In a lecture course from 1959,²⁸ he made up for these defects of the earlier study and offered the following summary: 1) By their own account, the Jews had ceased to be God’s chosen people when they abandoned the theocracy established by Moses at Sinai and opted for monarchy, putting their faith in kings above those who claimed to speak for God. 2) By clear textual evidence, Moses could not have been the author of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, the Torah, as the tradition claimed. 3) The miracles described in the Bible are simply not possible and/or not knowable. 4) These scriptures do not contain the authentic record of revelation because its various books were written by people in different times and settings who could not have been eyewitnesses, to say nothing of the fact that they are poorly preserved and carelessly redacted by a later scribe of mediocre learning. 5) While this Bible of uncertain composition is nonetheless authoritative in its moral teaching, its moral teaching can be reduced to the commandment to love thy neighbor as thyself. It follows that the old ceremonial law, including circumcision, is abrogated.    

Spinoza could bolster this last claim with passages from Isaiah and the later prophetic books of what the Christians call the Old Testament that denounced the Temple centered sacrificial system and called for the establishment of a new covenant of more universal dimensions. On this textual basis, Spinoza slyly aligned himself with the Christian view that the terms of this new covenant of peace could be found in the New Testament. This was the claim that Herman Cohen furiously rejected as blatant Christian propaganda—what’s more revolting, after all, than a Jew for Jesus. But here he unfairly failed to recognize Spinoza’s need to contend with the censor. Cohen actually agreed with Spinoza that the expectation of a new universal covenant is undeniably present in the later prophetic works of the Hebrew Bible, but refused to acknowledge that while Christians have latched on to this motif, the Jews of a later Rabbinical era would downplay its vision of the messianic age which came to seem suspiciously Christian. At the behest of his academic superiors in the Akademie für Wissenschaft des Judentum, Strauss probably felt compelled to defend, if only half-heartedly, Cohen’s diatribe against Spinoza as a traitor to the Jewish people. 

Another passage from the Theological-Political Treatise would surely have provoked Cohen’s ire. In it, Spinoza improbably contrasts the great success of the assimilation—after their forcible conversion—of what remained of Spanish Jewry to the misfortune of their erstwhile Portuguese co-religionists furtively clinging to their old ways.  

“That the Jews have maintained themselves so long in spite of their dispersed and disorganized condition is not at all to be wondered at, when it is considered how they separated themselves from all other nationalities in such a way as to bring upon themselves the hatred of all, and that not only by external rites contrary to those of other nations, but also by the sign of circumcision, which they maintain most religiously. Experience shows that their conservation is due in a great degree to the very hatred which they have incurred. When the king of Spain compelled the Jews either to accept the national religion or to go into banishment, very many of them accepted the Roman Catholic faith, and in virtue of this received all the privileges of Spanish subjects, and were declared eligible for every honor; the consequence was that a process of absorption began immediately, and in a short time neither trace nor memory of them survived. Quite different was the history of those whom the king of Portugal compelled to accept the creed of his nation; although converted, they continued to live apart from the rest of their fellow-subjects, having been declared unfit for any dignity. So great importance do I attach to the sign of circumcision also in this connection, that I am persuaded that it is sufficient by itself to maintain the separate existence of the nation forever.”²⁹

It is fair to say that here Spinoza exhibits a lack of elementary sympathy for his fellow Jews.³⁰ But this would not have deterred Strauss from identifying with him if one recalls that Zionists at the time were not to be outdone when it came to icy judgements on the failings of the Jews.

What was Spinoza’s political objective in subjecting the Old Testament to ruthless historical criticism? “The liberal society with a view to which Spinoza has composed the Treatise is then a society of which Jews and Christians can be equally members, of which Jews and Christians can be equal members. For such a society he wished to provide. The establishment of such a society required in his opinion the abrogation of the Mosaic law in so far as it is a particularistic and political law.”³¹ 

But the best regime as Spinoza conceived it was not simply an association of self-interested individuals. Spinoza’s republicanism addressed what Strauss later characterized as the chief limitation of these English proto-liberal philosophers—Hobbes, Locke, Hume—namely that they based their political reasoning on a low and mercenary understanding of the individual. “But through his influence on Rousseau, who gave the decisive impulse to Kant, Spinoza became responsible for that version of modern republicanism which takes its bearings by the dignity of every man rather than by the narrowly conceived interest of every man.”³²

To the extent that he respected liberal democracy—the Weimar Republic and later, with fewer reservations, the American republic, he would have to credit Spinoza as its deepest theoretician. The latter had, he acknowledged, supplemented an individualistic liberalism with a civic-minded modern republicanism and not much better could be done than that in modern times. But Strauss’s relationship to Spinoza and indeed to liberal democracy was more fraught. In opposition to Spinoza, he preferred a monarchy. The kings-versus-prophets motif running through his earlier writings prefigures the regard he would later pay to the preference of the ancients for the rule of the one best man. Secondly, liberal democracy could only offer an inconclusive half-way solution to the theologico-political problem, a problem that explosively surfaced in the religious-civil wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The modern state rested on an intrinsically unstable foundation because instead of dissolving biblical religion via popular enlightenment it simply neutralized the claim of churchmen and sectarians to speak on behalf of a power higher than the state by relegating matters of creed and belief to a private sphere. This relegation of religion to a private sphere established the mold for the separation of the state from an increasingly restless civil society that from the eighteenth century became a cauldron of social movements wielding a new kind of prophecy.  Strauss’s conception of this theologico-political predicament emerged over a decade-long ‘hidden dialogue’ with Carl Schmitt whose political theology connected this division to a dialectic of the rule of law with the state of exception. 

Strauss identified two motives for modern atheism that drove the early modern critique of Biblical religion:

1. Social: “Liberated from the religious delusion, awakened to sober awareness of his real situation, taught by bad experiences that he is threatened by a stingy, hostile nature, man recognizes as his sole salvation and duty, not so much ‘to cultivate his garden’ as in the first place to plant a garden by making himself the master and owner of nature.” 
2. Subjective: “A new kind of fortitude which forbids itself every flight from the horror of life into comforting delusion, which accepts the eloquent descriptions of ‘the misery of man without God’ as an additional proof of the goodness of its cause, reveals itself eventually as the ultimate and purest ground for the rebellion against revelation. This new fortitude, being the willingness to look man’s forsakenness in its face, being the courage to welcome the most terrible truth, is ‘probity,’ ‘intellectual probity.’”³³ 

Strauss rejected the first ideal, but in the name of the second. In other words, he came to reject the goal of human emancipation through the conquest of nature, facing up to the dystopian consequences of continued progression towards this goal in the hope of redirecting civilization towards other destinations. 

Nietzsche’s radicalization of Enlightenment turned Enlightenment against itself, charging it with having failed to affect a more radical break with the biblical tradition. The Enlightenment had mocked the belief in miracles but failed to dispel the lofty hopes and abject fears that lay behind it. Only that those already convinced were secured in their disbelief. Its critique of religion thus failed to touch the subjective core of this belief. “But this means no more than that the Enlightenment was itself only imperfectly ‘enlightenment’; it is no radical objection to the intent of the Enlightenment because the objection is itself made in accordance with that intent, but above all since every age suffers the same fate.”³⁴

The significance of Heidegger’s interpretation of Dasein for Strauss came belatedly but he eventually concluded that it offered the only compelling atheist account of the experience of what in the Bible is understood as the miraculous in all its sublime terror. Heidegger set forth the opposition of philosophy’s originary thinking experience of this mind-blowing otherness with the fearful imaginings of the prophets in a reflection on Hölderlin from 1943. “The ‘prophets’ of these religions [sc. Judaism and Christianity]…says Heidegger according to Buber, ‘do not begin by foretelling the word of the Holy. They announce immediately the God upon whom the certainty of salvation in a supernatural blessedness reckons.’” Philosophy arose out of a confrontation not with a consoling plenitude but rather with a terrifying absence. By contrast, the biblical prophets could not face the awful truth that there is no happy ending, no divine shepherd. The experience of the Other is subject to two different interpretations: “one recognizes in the Wholly Other either the personal God of the Bible or nothingness.”³⁵ 

Buber’s claim that the biblical prophets were in fact greater enemies of any this-worldly security seeking than the logocentric philosophers was an exercise in futility. Strauss: “The controversy can easily degenerate into a race in which he wins who offers the smallest security and the greatest terror. It would not be difficult to guess who would be the winner. But just as an assertion does not become true because it is shown to be comforting, so it does not become true because it is shown to be terrifying.”³⁶ 

Even as a radical historicist, the young Strauss had little time for the abyss. “Whether a life of serious and responsible belief can be lived without God can only be determined by the experience of humanity called to unbelief, and capable of an unbelief that has opened up the view to its possibilities, not those who in their deepest doubts hold out the possibility of belief….But every time when a flame is extinguished, those who know only this flame as the light believe that the sun has gone down.”³⁷  

It would be hard to put a label on this improbable combination of Zionism and historicism. Perhaps it could best be described as a national existentialism of the Jewish people. Even when he left this grandiose notion behind, he would continue to see existentialism as an intellectually compelling response to modern godlessness, in fact the only alternative to his later agenda of a re-anchoring of the life of the mind to the Great Tradition. “Philosophy is for the first time trying to deny the possibility or necessity of any eternals. The momentary peaks, one can say, are the highest; momentary and unpredictable loci are the highest. A historical decision, either in the simple political sense or even in the sense of the individual, is the highest manifestation of being.”³⁸

Left vs. Right

In the mid-1920s, Strauss’s vision of Zionism as a radicalization of Enlightenment remained within the horizon of liberalism. What was Strauss’s assessment of the intellectual-political situation of the late Weimar years? His Nietzsche-inspired criticism of Enlightenment as a failed break with Judeo-Christianity led him to take an increasingly oppositional stance towards modern liberal civilization. But what was the alternative? Even the creeds that claimed to represent one—the communist’s leap from necessity to freedom, conservative stabilization or even some romantic nationalist alternative modernity—were spiritually dependent on what they professed to reject. A stage of modernity had been reached where the most advanced conceptions of rationality—as either value-free, instrumental, or culturally-historically specific—did not provide the criteria for adjudicating between these contending claims and consequently a dispiriting relativism prevailed.     

Late in the game, the crisis of the Weimar Republic and the modern European state was conceived in terms that owed much to Karl Mannheim even as the latter’s value pluralism was firmly rejected. The diagnosis of the sociologist was that no generally binding solution to the question of the best way of life is possible and so a polytheism of values reigns. While this groundlessness is regarded not just as necessary but as intellectually liberating by liberals and the non-Marxist Left, Strauss held that the more astute recognize it as a calamitous situation. Conservatives chock up the decadent character of these times to its being too reflexive—historical consciousness playing a role in our era that it would not in a healthier, less self-questioning age. We decline as the owl of Minerva takes flight.³⁹ This opinion assumes that we have reached an intellectual peak of self-questioning, an assumption that itself is highly questionable, Strauss insisted. “And here lies the paradox: the present is more compelled to question itself than any previous age, but is unable to.”⁴⁰

The fact that there were many political and philosophical parties committed to opposed ultimate values does not distinguish the present from earlier times when those who divided over principle came to blows. For it had once been assumed that a new way to the truth binding for all men and all times could nonetheless be forged. For Strauss classical Athens had become the exemplary setting of such spiritual strife. For then and there a new idea of nature and of human nature arose out of a reflection on the great diversity of conventions between peoples but also in response to seemingly irreconcilable opinions about the nature of justice—who gets what and on what grounds—that divided Greek cities. Against the claim of the sophists that justice was purely conventional and that injustice was in accordance with nature, Socratic-Platonic philosophy inquired into the nature of a justice in accordance with nature. Under later circumstances, modern philosophers sought to establish more certain solutions to this search for a just order grounded in reason being inspired by the promise of modern science to know nature by mastering it. Down opposing paths both ancients and early modern philosophers had sought out definitive truths. The nineteenth and twentieth century historicism that sees itself as looking down on philosophy from a new peak of self-reflexivity discourages this search as it regards all such solutions as historically or culturally relative—perhaps even its own. Relativism rules out the very possibility of philosophy as inquiry into the truth. The self-dissolution of modern philosophy—the progress of science and technology, whose premises it established, now no longer depending upon it—is the primary manifestation of the decline of the West.  

The only solution compatible with thoroughgoing historicism is believed to be a synthesis of the ideals of the currently most decisive contenders for hegemony. But such a synthesis is impossible, because the present is not defined primarily by a pluralism of contending values, but of a fundamental opposition of Left and Right, of communism and class society whose exemplary form is not bourgeois society but the classical city based in slavery. From the side of the Right that struggles against the communist culmination of modernity, the condition of the present cannot be understood from within the horizon of the present as a synthesis of its contending ideologies. A return to the outlook of a pre- and non-Biblical antiquity was called for but understood now in the light of Nietzsche’s thought. Strauss never shared the latter’s hatred of Plato, and it was as a Nietzschean that he looked to Plato’s Republic for an alternative to the relativism and warring dogmatisms of the present. The solution to the antagonism over the best way of life is the inquiry into the nature of the best regime, i.e., the natural relations of ruler and ruled.⁴¹ The death of God does not plunge us into a relativist whirlpool provided we find our way back to a harsh and wondrous nature, as the ancients understood it.  

While the Republic was read by Strauss in the last years of the Weimar Republic as a framework for addressing apparently irreconcilable left and right-wing principles of justice, he would later come to see Plato’s Laws as the more fundamental reflection on politics in that it frames what he came to see as a deeper theologico-political problem of the conflict of philosophy and revelation, of philosopher-kings versus prophets. The latter dialogue had provided Medieval Jewish philosophers with the key to understanding this ultimate problem of the political in the long shadow cast by the destruction of the Davidian kingdom of the Hebrews.

Nietzsche had understood the obstacle that the biblical morality of brotherly love posed to any reevaluation of the modern in the light of the sounder morality of Greek tragedy, one that would open up the brilliant prospect of a higher modernity that would be a return to and a surpassing of the ancients. The Enlightenment had shred biblical history as primitive myth but it did so only in the name of this secularized biblical morality.

“Because of three errors.—One has promoted science during the last centuries partly because it was through science that one hoped best to understand God’s goodness and wisdom—the main motive in the soul of the great Englishmen (such as Newton); partly because one believed in the absolute usefulness of knowledge, especially in the most intimate affiliation between morality, knowledge, and happiness—the main motive in the soul of the French (such as Voltaire); and partly because one believed that in science one had and loved something selfless, harmless, self-sufficient, and truly innocent in which the evil drives of humanity had no part at all—the main motive in the soul of Spinoza, who felt divine in attaining knowledge—in sum, because of three errors.”⁴² 

Upon defeating the Church, the once noble errors of this party of Enlightenment devolved into a humanitarian sentimentality that modern Europeans dogmatically equated with morality. This complacent and hypocritical humanitarianism now has to be done away with in the name of probity. It was Nietzsche who shattered the foundations of this complicity of modern thought with the Judeo-Christian slave revolt in morality. “The Jews—a people ‘born into slavery’ according to Tacitus and the entire ancient world, ‘the chosen people’ as they themselves say and believe—the Jews brought about that tour de force of a reversal of values that enabled life on earth to acquire a new and dangerous fascination for one or two thousand years: the first to mint the word ‘world’ as a curse word—the Jewish people: the slave revolt in morals begins with them.”⁴³

Strauss explicitly mapped this opposition of master and slave morality onto the modern Right vs. Left opposition in a letter to Karl Löwith from 1933.

“You attack my anti-historicism without recognizing that it’s also the result of a foregrounding the current situation as you do. Except I don’t believe the battle lines are as confused as Jaspers and you seem to. I see before me the struggle of Left and Right and the interpretations of this struggle from both sides: the progressive and the Marxist Left on the one side, and the Nietzschean, Kierkegaardian, Dostojewskian Right on the other. I attempt to come to correct conception of the battle lines and specifically the stance of the Left…The discovery of Nietzsche was the good versus the bad as opposed to the good versus evil—the so-called moral conception. This was a rediscovery of the classical ideal of humanity, of the manly virtue of courage, whose exaggerated expression in Nietzsche was a consequence of the denial and forgetting of this ideal.”⁴⁴

This portrayal of liberalism, of “the Left,” is plainly at odds with his earlier valorization of probity, the will to truth as the last great modern liberal ideal. Its spirit is conveyed in Kant’s slogan, dare to know. Perhaps Strauss thought that this ideal had now migrated over to the Right. A utopian Left versus a Right of heroic sobriety was how he put it in a letter of August 1932 to Krüger.⁴⁵ After the Nazis came to power, Strauss would dismiss “the appeal to the imprescriptible rights of man” as “risible and jammering.” The new regime could only be properly evaluated from the principles of the Right, “fascist, authoritarian, imperial principles…Roman principles.”⁴⁶

In the same year this letter was written, Jabotinsky began looking to Fascist Italy as an alternative to the British who he saw as putting up too many obstacles to the increased Jewish settlement upon which an eventually viable bid for statehood depended. Perhaps it was the Roman principles of Italian Fascism that Strauss hoped to call upon in scorning Hitler’s crude replica. For his part, Jabotinsky may have come to sympathize with the radical Right from anticommunism, though this had little to do with lofty authoritarian principles and rather more with the brutal exigencies of settler colonialism. Communist support for the national liberation of Arab peoples might prove fatal to the Zionist enterprise.

In 1933 Jabotinsky responded to a young man asking him to explain his thinking. 

“Communism incites and must incite the Eastern Nations and this it can do only in the name of national freedom. It tells them and must tell them: your lands belong to you and not to any strangers. This is how it must speak to the Arabs and the Arabs of Palestine…For our Zionist lungs, Communism is suffocating gas and this is how you must deal with it.”⁴⁷ 

A Horizon Beyond Liberalism

Passages from the text of a 1929 speech by Carl Schmitt “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations” take us close to the center of Strauss’s counter-revolutionary historicism of the late Weimar period, whose assumptions persisted in modified forms thereafter. A brief distillation of Schmitt’s thesis provides a key to understanding Strauss’s agreement with and criticism of Schmitt’s conception both of liberalism, and of the theologico-political problem as it developed from the end of the Weimar Republic to the beginning of the second World War. It is important to recognize that Strauss shared Schmitt’s historicist understanding of the vantage point of the present, not as it understood itself but properly understood.        

Schmitt: “That all historical knowledge is knowledge of the present, that such knowledge obtains its light and intensity from the present and in the most profound sense only serves the present, because all spirit is only spirit of the present, has been said by many since Hegel, best of all by Benedetto Croce…Thus we must first be aware of our own historical situation…Our present situation can be understood only as the consequence of the last centuries of European development; it completes and transcends specific European ideas and demonstrates in one enormous climax the core of modern European history.”⁴⁸

The last centuries of European development had witnessed a succession of efforts to contain ideological warfare by establishing a neutral intellectual region where dispute could take place on shared assumptions and therefore potentially be resolved. The first stage of this epochal saga was the attempt to neutralize the contentions over religion with naturalistic metaphysical systems that ruled out the very possibility of miracles and thereby legitimated the rationality of the modern secular state against the claims of both Protestant sectarians and the Catholic Church to represent a higher authority. The pacification that led to the modern sovereign state in turn led to the formation of an individualistic civil society governed by the laws of untrammeled production for exchange. The contradiction at the heart of these economic laws led, in turn, to a new politicization pitting the bourgeoisie against proletariat. Vague hopes then arose that this conflict could be neutralized by the further progress of technology, by man’s domination of nature. The political possibilities of this technology were barely suspected. The climax of modern European history manifesting these possibilities was the Russian Revolution.

“We in Central Europe live ‘sous l’oeil des Russes.’ For a century their psychological gaze has seen through our great words and institutions. Their vitality is strong enough to seize our knowledge and technology as weapons. Unbelief has emerged as a militant, new belief. The Russians have taken the European nineteenth century at its word, understood its core ideas and drawn the ultimate conclusions from its cultural premises. We always live in the eye of the more radical brother, who compels us to draw the practical conclusion and pursue it to the end.”⁴⁹

What stance could men of the Right adopt, what horizon could they look to on this fateful peak of modern European history? Strauss wholeheartedly subscribed to Schmitt’s conception of a present pregnant with the possibility of renewal through harrowing trials: “every genuine rebirth seeking to return to some original principle, every genuine ritornar al principio, every return to pure, uncorrupted nature appears as cultural or social nothingness to the comfort and ease of the existing status quo.”⁵⁰ Western civilization’s final neutralization leads either to a world state or to a radical re-politicization in the form of a destructive questioning of the authoritative ideals of Western civilization. 

The evidence and logic leading to and from this stark alternative is laid out in his “Comments on The Concept of the Political’’ counterposing the latter to the “Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations” text. Strauss could be said to have put his finger on the neuralgic point. What was the main enemy, he inquired, that Schmitt had in his sights: was it what “the Russians” stood for or was it liberalism? Strauss suggested that Schmitt himself recognized that liberalism was not the main enemy but rather a faltering effort to neutralize the danger of open conflict with the main enemy. In this conflict with the extreme Left, the Right had to find its bearings in a revived idea of a natural order of ruler and ruled. The twentieth century climax of history opens up a passage out of history back to the classical standard of nature.  

“Schmitt’s task is determined by the fact that liberalism has failed. The circumstances of this failure are as follows: Liberalism negated the political; yet liberalism has not thereby eliminated the political from the face of the earth but only has hidden it; liberalism has led to politics being engaged in by means of an antipolitical mode of discourse. Liberalism has thus killed not the political but only understanding of the political, sincerity regarding the political.”⁵¹ 

On the one hand, Schmitt identifies the political as an autonomous sphere of an open cultural, or social whole whose existence is not in danger, not in question. This is the nineteenth century liberal conception of the totality that Marxism adopted. On the other hand, for Schmitt, the political also designates the endangered whole itself whose existence is put into question by its enemies, other such closed wholes. The whole conceived as political points to the problem of human nature, of the state of nature—raising the question of what it is and whether it is to be suppressed or liberated.

“Hobbes had presented the state of nature as in itself impossible: the state of nature is the state of war of all against all; in the state of nature, everyone is the enemy of everyone else. According to Schmitt, the subjects of the state of nature are not individuals but totalities; furthermore, not every totality is the enemy of every other totality, but alongside the possibility of enmity the possibilities of alliance and neutrality also exist. The state of nature so understood is in itself possible. That it is real, however, is proved by the whole history of humanity up to the present day.”⁵² 

Hobbes looked forward to the suppression of an underlying natural war of all individuals against all others. By contrast, Schmitt affirms the perpetuation of a state of potential hostilities between collectives. On what grounds did Schmitt affirm the political? “The political is thus not only possible but also real; and not only real but also necessary. It is necessary because it is given in human nature.” “If the political is necessary because it stems from human nature why does Schmitt have to affirm the political?” “Politics and the state are the only guarantee against the world’s becoming a world of entertainment; therefore, what the opponents of the political want is ultimately tantamount to the establishment of a world of entertainment, a world of amusement, a world without seriousness.” The problem must be that politics could be done away with, could wither away as the Marxists say. 

Schmitt, Strauss reasoned, must have other, less apparent grounds then for affirming the political: “warlike morals seem to be the ultimate legitimation for Schmitt’s affirmation of the political, and the opposition between the negation and the position of the political seems to coincide with the opposition between pacifist internationalism and bellicose nationalism.” “It thus becomes clear why Schmitt rejects the ideal of pacifism (more fundamentally: of civilization), why he affirms the political: he affirms the political because he sees in the threatened status of the political a threat to the seriousness of human life. The affirmation of the political is ultimately nothing other than the affirmation of the moral.” “For Schmitt, “moral”—at least as used in the context here—always refers to “humanitarian morality”. But that usage means that Schmitt is tying himself to his opponents’ view of morality instead of questioning the claim of humanitarian-pacifist morals to be morals; he remains trapped in the view that he is attacking.” 

The ultimate quarrel occurs then not between bellicosity and pacifism (or nationalism and internationalism) but between the “authoritarian and anarchistic theories.” “Thus, what ultimately matters to Schmitt is not the battle against liberalism. For that very reason the affirmation of the political as such is not his last word. His last word is “the order of the human things.” “For a pure and whole knowledge is never, unless by accident, polemical; and a pure and whole knowledge cannot be gained “from concrete political existence,” from the situation of the age, but only by means of a return to the origin, to “undamaged, noncorrupt nature.” “The critique introduced by Schmitt against liberalism can therefore be completed only if one succeeds in gaining a horizon beyond liberalism.”⁵³ 

What was the significance of National Socialism in this horizon beyond liberalism? What follows is the argument of a text of a speech from 1941 delivered in New York at the New School before German invasion of the Soviet Union when Britain alone stood against Hitler’s new European order. In it, Strauss recalls the late Weimar experience of an intellectual generation to which he himself belonged, the main formation of which were German nationalists of the radical Right, kindred spirits of the political Zionism he came to espouse. Here the political implications of a ‘return to origins’, of ‘a horizon beyond liberalism’ is made more apparent. What follows is a streamlined reconstruction of this talk, almost entirely in his own words, but with a few changes added for clarity.

“German nihilism is a phenomenon much broader than National Socialism. It can be described provisionally as the passionate reaction of a certain type of young atheist to the communist ideal. That protest proceeds from the conviction that the internationalism inherent in modem civilization, or, more precisely, that the establishment of a perfectly open society which is the goal of modem civilization, and therefore all aspirations directed toward that goal, are irreconcilable with the basic demands of moral life. The societies of the West which claim to aspire toward the open society, actually are closed societies in a state of disintegration: their moral value, their respectability, depends entirely on their still being closed societies. Certain basic facts of human nature which have been honestly recognized by earlier generations who used to call a spade a spade, are at the present time verbally denied, superficially covered over by fictions, by the belief that one can abolish war by pacts not backed by military forces. The open society is morally inferior to the closed society also because the former is based on hypocrisy.”⁵⁴

“The conviction I am trying to describe, is not, to repeat, in its origin a love of war: it is rather a love of morality, a sense of responsibility for endangered morality. The historians in our midst know that conviction, or passion, from Glaukon’s, Plato’s brother’s, passionate protest against the city of pigs, in the name of noble virtue. They know it, above all, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s passionate protest against the easy-going and somewhat rotten civilization of the century of taste, and from Friedrich Nietzsche’s passionate protest against the easy-going and somewhat rotten civilization of the century of industry. It was the same passion let there be no mistake about that which turned, if in a much more passionate and infinitely less intelligent form, against the alleged or real corruption of post-war Germany: against ‘the subhuman beings of the big cities,’ against ‘cultural bolshevism.’” (From Max Nordau’s denunciation of Entartung, Zionism would often strike the same notes.)  

Strauss went on to dismiss the very threat of revolution that had preoccupied the counter-revolutionaries of ten years earlier. Perhaps he thought that the Nazis had banished that specter back in 1933. Invoking the near civil war, late Weimar setting, he referred to it as a time “when certain people asserted that the conflicts inherent in the present situation would necessarily lead to a revolution, accompanying or following another World War a rising of the proletariat and of the proletarianized strata of society which would usher in the withering away of the State, the classless society, the abolition of all exploitation and injustice, the era of final peace. It was this prospect at least as much as the desperate present, which led to nihilism. The prospect of a pacified planet, without rulers and ruled, of a planetary society devoted to production and consumption only, to the production and consumption of spiritual as well as material merchandize, was positively horrifying to quite a few very intelligent and very decent, if very young, Germans. They simply took over the communist thesis that the proletarian revolution and proletarian dictatorship is necessary, if civilization is not to perish. But they insisted rather more than the communists on the conditional character of the communist prediction (if civilization is not to perish). That condition left room for choice: they chose what according to the communists was the only alternative to communism. In other words: they admitted that all rational argument was in favor of communism; but they opposed to that apparently invincible argument what they called ‘irrational decision.’” 

His assessment of the predicament of the young German nihilists was sympathetic: “They did not really know, and thus they were unable to express in a tolerably clear language, what they desired to put in the place of the present world and its allegedly necessary future or sequel: the only thing of which they were absolutely certain was that the present world and all the potentialities of the present world as such, must be destroyed in order to prevent the otherwise necessary coming of the communist final order: literally anything, the nothing the chaos, the jungle, the Wild West, the Hobbesian state of nature, seemed to them infinitely better than the communist- anarchist-pacifist future. In an age of utter corruption, the only remedy possible is to destroy the edifice of corruption ‘das System’ and to return to the uncorrupted and incorruptible origin, to the condition of potential and not actual, culture or civilization: the characteristic virtue of that stage of merely potential culture or civilization, of the state of nature, is our age and nothing else. Let us then not hesitate to look for one moment at the phenomenon which I called nihilism, from the point of view of the nihilists themselves… How can a reasonable man expect an adequate expression of the ideal of a new epoch at its beginning, considering that the owl of Minerva starts its flight when the sun is setting?”

“I have alluded to the fact that the young nihilists were atheists. Broadly speaking, prior to the World War, atheism was a preserve of the radical left, just as throughout history atheism had been connected with philosophic materialism. There is no other philosopher whose influence on postwar German thought is comparable to that of Nietzsche, of the atheist Nietzsche. The relation of Nietzsche to the German Nazi revolution is comparable to the relation of Rousseau to the French revolution. That is to say: by interpreting Nietzsche in the light of the German revolution, one is very unjust to Nietzsche, but one is not absolutely unjust. Hitler? The less is said about him, the better. He will soon be forgotten. He is merely the rather contemptible tool of “History”: the midwife who assists at the birth of the new epoch, of a new spirit.

I believe it is dangerous, if the opponents of National Socialism withdraw to a mere conservatism which defines its ultimate goal by a specific tradition.”

Strauss sized up the then raging Anglo-German war (1941) as a clash of monumental historical significance in terms that convey a fundamental ambivalence. “In defending modem civilization against German nihilism, the English are defending the eternal principles of civilization. Those young men who refused to believe that the period following the communist world revolution, would be the finest hour of mankind in general and of Germany in particular, would have been impressed as much as we were by what Winston Churchill said after the defeat in Flanders about Britain’s finest hour.” 

This flourish deserves our attention. He had previously maintained that modern civilization advances inexorably toward to the egalitarian end state. Did Britain and the US now represent other possibilities for modern civilization, by either diverting the course from or restraining the momentum towards this end state? Did Western civilization have to be saved or destroyed? Going beyond the horizon of liberalism was clearly a movement back to antiquity but which one? The Jews were not descendants of the Greeks as the Germans could claim to be. What could they return to? Once again Strauss would turn to Nietzsche. Behind the corrupting biblical redactions of the priesthood Nietzsche had discerned the grandeur of the Hebrews before their subjugation by the Babylonians and all the other empires that the Jews would thereafter be compelled to live under. Perhaps he too had now taken to looking to the legendary, heroic world of ancient Israel for inspiration.    

“The Jewish ‘Old Testament,’ the book of divine justice, portrays people, things, and utterances in such a grand style that nothing in Greek or Indian writing can be compared to it. With fear and admiration we stand in the presence of these tremendous remnants of what man used to be, thinking sad thoughts about old Asia and its protruding peninsula Europe—Europe which has come to signify ‘man’s progress’ over and against Asia. To be sure, if you are nothing but a scrawny, tame house-pet, knowing only a house pet’s needs (like civilized people of today, including the Christians of ‘civilized’ Christianity), you will be neither amazed nor saddened among these ruins: the taste for the Old Testament is a touchstone for ‘greatness’ or ‘smallness’.”⁵⁵

Revisiting Political Theology

After his timely departure from Germany in 1932, Strauss lived in Paris supported by a Rockefeller Foundation grant, under the terms of which he would move to Cambridge where he worked as a research scholar. His discovery of a previously unknown manuscript laid the foundation for a pioneering study on Hobbes. While there and with more conviction at the University of Chicago, he began to reconsider his previously scathing judgment of the biblical prophets, or rather the traditional Jewish interpretation of them, as the instigators of the epochal spiritual collision of this worldly political realism and rationality with a next-worldly piety. Before coming to America, he began to distinguish two fundamentally opposed stances to this theologico-political problem within the Jewish tradition. In a talk from 1938, Strauss illustrated this division by counterposing two conceptions of the Messiah, one advanced by Maimonides and the other, centuries later, amidst the catastrophes of the forced conversion and expulsions of the Jews from Spain and Portugal, by the court treasurer and Cabalist Don Isaac Abravanel.             

“For Maimonides the Messiah was a successful military leader and military ability or deficiency seems to be the decisive natural reason for the rise or decline of states. The reason for the destruction of the Jewish state in the past was the neglect of the arts of war and conquest and accordingly, he expects that military ability will play a decisive part in the future restoration of the Jewish state…It is certain that his stressing the importance of military virtue in his philosophic prophetology was influenced by the prophetology of the Islamic philosophers, who attach a much higher value to war and to the virtue of courage than Plato and Aristotle had done…Miracles and the resurrection of the dead are barely mentioned in his account of the Messianic age. By contrast, the Messianic age is for Abravanel a period rich in miracles, the most impressive of them being the resurrection of the dead. It is preceded and followed by wars in which Israel is an on looker of the victory rather than the victor by its own hand.”⁵⁶ 

The theocracy Abravanel envisaged was a republican anarchy. 

“He conceives of urban life and of coercive government, as well as of private property, as productions of human rebellion against the natural order instituted by God: the only life in accordance with nature is a state of liberty and equality of all men, and the possession in common of the natural goods, or, as he seems to suggest at another place, the life ‘in the field’, of independent families.” 

Opposed to the pro-monarchical tradition represented by Maimonides, Abravanel argued that the messiah would be not a king but rather a prophet and high-priest. The past and future regime of the Israelites was to be divided between authority spiritual and authority temporal as conceived by the most extreme defenders of papal supremacy. In contrasting the two, Strauss suggests that it was the Christian Church and its sectarian successors not Judaism that had originated this politically fateful division of the spiritual and temporal. On this point, he was responding to the charge Schmitt made in his 1937 essay on Hobbes’s Leviathan that it was the other way around, i.e., that the Jews were its instigators. But Strauss’s retort had the troubling implication of denying the Jews of what he saw as their only world historical claim to fame. In this episode of their hidden dialogue,⁵⁷ he ended up qualifying his retort to Schmitt, stating in the concluding line of the talk that Abravanel, despite his intellectual debt to the Medieval defenders of papal supremacy, “belonged to the traditions of his people commanded to be a kingdom of priests.”

A nation of priests: Voltaire, at least, had left the scene. Leo Strauss had arrived at the conclusion that Jewish tradition could not be transcended and the whole effort to go beyond was in vain. But he now saw that un-transcendability as a good thing, for the Jews had a noble past and not just in the remote antiquity so admired by German bible scholars. The true pinnacle of this history was, in fact, the Middle Age. The Jerusalem he would soon oppose to Athens, employing a trope that went back to Mathew Arnold, was a holy city in speech of the Medieval Jewish philosophers who showed how it was possible for the enlightened to come to terms with the supernatural claims of scripture and even hostile religious authorities. Moreover, the rabbinical tradition could itself claim an improbable, if not strictly miraculous accomplishment: the millennial preservation of the Jewish people. Probity and ruthless critique would now make way for moderation and artful concealment.  

Uncovering the Young Strauss

We can sum up the results so far as follows.

1. Strauss’s subsequent conception of political philosophy originated in Weimar era controversies within and over Zionism hinging on contending understandings of the so-called Jewish Question. 
2. His adherence to a radically historicist understanding of the present that hinged on the Nietzschean theme of the death of God.
   
   “I think historically like you…because I consistently ascribe to the present an absolute historical right with regard to the future. It is not I but the unhappy Kierkegaard and the restorationists of today who want to repeat and rehabilitate what is lost. By contrast I think un-historically out of an extreme historical consciousness just as I live un-historically, very momentarily, and unburdened by ‘the disadvantages of history’.”⁵⁸
      
3. Far from rejecting the Enlightenment critique of biblical religion, Strauss in fact advocated a radicalization of this critique in the name of a consequential political Zionism. 
4. He saw Nietzsche and Heidegger not as standing opposed to Enlightenment but at the forefront of this radicalization. “The Heideggerian philosophy is a philosophy of Enlightenment, a foundation of Enlightenment.”⁵⁹ 
5. It was this radicalization of Enlightenment criticism of the biblical religion that opened up the space for this new confrontation with Greek philosophy.  
6. His political trajectory from an originally liberal to a more rightwing radical understanding of Zionism found support in an interpretation of ancient political philosophy as the only viable alternative to the egalitarian premises of the early modern political philosophers now coming under pressure in the late modern phase of the West.
7. The path that led him to Medieval Islamic and Jewish political philosophy and away from the damning verdicts on the diasporic Jewish tradition grounded in modern German biblical scholarship but going back to Spinoza.  

In what follows, we consider his subsequent disillusionment with a Rightist dream of a horizon beyond liberalism and the understanding of the significance of Zionism, anti-Semitism and the Jewish Question that arose from the foreclosure of this horizon. A consideration of what changed might shed light on the contemporary discourse on Israel, subjecting it to the standard of probity the young Strauss invoked in his case for the politico-existential necessity of statehood. 

The Jewish Question Redefined  

The whole theme of the decline and renewal of the West and of the role that the Jews might play in this tale of destiny went into eclipse as Strauss left behind the old world and habituated himself to the intellectual and political climate of the new. But it would continue to underlie, now more discretely, his reflections on the Cold War and the American political scene. In a lecture course on Hegel from the late 1950s, after pointing out how the notion of a Zeitgeist tended to obscure the significance of untimely individuals, he went on to acknowledge that it nonetheless captured a nearly all-encompassing sameness traversing the diversity and stark oppositions of contemporary opinion, the spirit of an age. 

“Whatever differences there may be, there are surely some very great differences, everyone today is affected by the fact that he lives in the ‘atomic age’ at least in his thought. No one was affected by that in 1910, to say nothing of earlier times. And Hegel would say that this is what really counts, what gives color to every position taken within the age.”⁶⁰

In a somber commentary on De Rerum Natura ancient atomism took on an eerie glow. The nuclear and spiritual arms race of the West with the Russians, the radical brother, remained unresolved but with the establishment of the State of Israel the Jewish question, it now seemed to him, could be retired into a sunset of edifying metapolitical reflections. He saw the enormities of the recent past as a matter of political theology and not of race and defended this view with words that would now provoke alarm, though one suspects it did not go over well then either.  

“Our worst enemies are called (since I do not know how many years) ‘anti-Semites,’ a word which I shall never use, and which I regard as almost obscene. I think that if we are sensible we abolish it from our usage. I said in a former speech here that it was coined by some German or French pedant: I smelled them…‘Anti-Semitism’ was coined in a situation in which people could no longer justify their hatred of Jews by the fact that Jews are not Christians.”⁶¹

But what was its basis? Strauss did not shrink from making troubling assertions. The old accusation that the Jews hated the human race reflected an undeniable fact: “In antiquity, a nation was a nation by virtue of looking up to its gods. They did not have ideologies at that time; they did not have even ideas at that time. At the top, there were the gods. And now, our ancestors asserted a priori—that is to say, without looking at any of these gods—that these gods were nothings and abominations, that the highest things of any nation were nothings and abominations.”⁶²  

Strauss now firmly rejected the harsh verdict of the early political Zionists that the Jewish religious tradition was something to be cast off, like a shameful background from the gutter. On the contrary, our bitterest foes recognize us as being a people of world historical significance: “Our past, our heritage, our origin is then not misfortune, as Heine said, and still less, baseness. But suffering indeed, heroic suffering, suffering stemming from the heroic act of self-dedication of a whole nation to something which it regarded as infinitely higher than itself—in fact, which it regarded as the infinitely highest. No Jew can do anything better for himself today than to live in remembering this past.”⁶³ He had come to recognize that suffering too, pace Nietzsche, could be heroic.

The hostility of our enemies speaks to an extraordinary spiritual distinction that we must continue to honor today. As Jews, we cannot deny our past, we must accept it as a responsibility to our ancestors to continue to remain Jews. But someone might say: “Must the Jew who cannot believe what his ancestors believed not admit to himself that his ancestors dedicated themselves to a delusion—if to the noblest of all delusions? However repulsive the thought of assimilation must be to any proud man, must he not accept assimilation as a moral necessity, and not as a convenience? Is not the noblest in man his capacity to assimilate himself to the truth?”⁶⁴ As we have seen, more than Weber or Heidegger or indeed Plato himself, Nietzsche still remained the authority for him on the spiritual condition of the present, and here he has him weigh in on the topic of “why we remain Jews.”  

“Very well, let us then reconsider assimilation. We will be helped in that reconsideration by this statement of a non-Jew, of a German. Of a German, in addition, who has a very bad reputation in many quarters, and that man is Friedrich Nietzsche. I would like to read to you an aphorism, which will not please every one of you, from Nietzsche’s Dawn of Day, aphorism 205: ‘Of the people of Israel: To the spectacles to which the next century invites us belongs the decision of the destiny of the European Jews. That they have cast their die, crossed their Rubicon, is now quite obvious: it only remains for them either to become the lords of Europe or to lose Europe, as once in olden times they lost Egypt, where they confronted a similar either/or…In the meantime, it is necessary for them to distinguish themselves in all the areas of European distinction and to stand among the first, until they will be far enough along to determine themselves that which distinguishes.’”⁶⁵

Strauss was clearly moved by this vision of a new European ruling class. “After one has heard such a passage, one trembles to look at the actual assimilation.” In a backhanded compliment to his contemporaries, he suggested that they stand out for their accomplishments- he mentions Einstein- but only amid a prevailing mediocrity. Look at these weak Jews of today! he seems to be saying. Nothing to be very proud of. But there was a more consequential flaw in Nietzsche’s stirring vision of a higher stage of Jewish assimilation. 

“Now, the most patent defect of Nietzsche’s analysis seems to be this: the regeneration or cleansing which he had in mind as part of the process proved to be insufficient as a work of individuals however numerous, dedicated, or gifted. It required and requires an act of national cleansing or purification; and this, in my mind, was the establishment of the state of Israel. Everyone who has seen Israel, nay, everyone who has witnessed the response to that act in New York, will understand what I mean. But this fact refutes Nietzsche’s dream. For what the establishment of the state of Israel means, while it may be an act or a progress, in a way, of Jewish assimilation—as it surely is—is also a reassertion of the difference between Jews and non-Jews.”⁶⁶

Even Jews indifferent or hostile to Israel had benefited from the end of what Weber had described as their pariah status. For those of an older generation, gratitude for this extraordinary uplift still remains reason enough to stick with Israel through thick and thin. But how did things look for the Jews of Cold War America? Speaking to the experiences of those in attendance, he portrayed them as occupying a position just above the Negroes, still quite far from the heights prophesied by Nietzsche. The latter’s dream of a eugenic Gentile-Jewish synthesis in a new European golden age was little more than a pleasant utopia: whatever the current climate, anti-Semitic prejudice would always keep the seed of Abraham from melting away in the pot. In reminding the Jews of their ancestral apartness, anti-Semitism was not a wholly bad thing. If it ever threatened to disappear perhaps one might have to reinvent it. 

How did Strauss size up the accomplishments and limits of Zionism in retrospect? His previous view that its future depended on an intellectually principled break with the Jewish religious tradition had been falsified by history. “Strictly political Zionism became effective…by making its peace with traditional Jewish thought. Through this alliance or fusion it brought about the establishment of the state of Israel and therewith that cleansing which it had primarily intended; it thus procured a blessing for all Jews everywhere regardless of whether they admit it or not. It did not, however, solve the Jewish problem. It could not solve the Jewish problem because of the narrowness of its original conception, however noble.”⁶⁷

If Zionism would no longer be understood as a solution to the Jewish Question, the very foreclosure of this prospect had nonetheless its own ennobling significance. For it testified to the impossibility of any solution to ‘the permanent problems’—of justice within and between nations, and of the so-called theologico-political problem, the conflict of religion and state, issues that remained very much alive in America as well as in Israel. The real significance of the Jewish Question was that the permanence of anti-Semitism had come to signify the insolubility of the fundamental problems of political and social life. You can’t have nice things like peace and justice because anti-Semitism.

“One can also say it as follows, also on the lowest denominator: the Jewish problem, as it is called, is the most simple and available exemplification of the human problem. That is one way of stating that the Jews are the chosen people. If that is properly developed, the whole of the other things would come out. The clean solutions of which people dream and dreamt have led either to nothing, or to a much greater bestiality than the uneasy solutions with which sensible people will always be satisfied…The Jewish people and their fate are the living witness for the absence of redemption. This, one could say, is the meaning of the chosen people; the Jews are chosen to prove the absence of redemption.”⁶⁸

Here one must pause and reflect. If all the clean solutions of which people have dreamt have led to nothing or bestiality then it would follow that grappling with the question of the best regime—the very thing that so called classical political philosophy is supposed to be about—would be futile, little more than a harmless academic game. Why bother, it would seem to follow, when sensible people are satisfied with the uneasy solutions of a tolerable status quo? 

This cold shower prompts a recollection of an old exchange from a century earlier. In his dispute with Bruno Bauer over whether religiously observant Jews could be politically emancipated, the young Karl Marx argued that the limitations of political emancipation—that it did not abolish the material roots of an alienation that gave rise to religious illusions—pointed to the necessity of a higher, social emancipation. After the defeats of the revolutions of 1848, Bauer returned to their dispute of 1843 and his focus now was on the menace posed by a new generation of Jews, who like the father of his former protégé, had renounced the religion of their ancestors. “He held that with Jewish civic emancipation, a destabilizing alien element had entered into the bloodstream of the European politico-intellectual world, forcing the course of modern history down the self-destructive path of ever more emancipations—a process that would culminate in the rule of a new post-Christian elite over a spiritual wasteland of deracinated peoples.”⁶⁹ The coming generations of this breed would go off like a bomb.

Strauss probably recognized but could not bring himself to admit that it was in this horizon of revolutionary transformation—whose terrifying negativity was grasped by Bauer as in a fever dream—and not through political Zionism, that modern Jews attained a world historical stature, a significance testified to by the National Socialist attempt to destroy them. If in the ancient world, Jews were hated because they held the gods of the nations to be abominations and nothings, one might say that in the modern world, hatred of no longer religious Jews reached its peak because the elites of this race were perceived to regard all the higher values of religious, race, family, nationality and property as abominations and nothings. Strauss’s attempt to reframe the Jewish Question as ultimately about the impossibility of any solutions to the so-called ‘permanent problems’ of collective existence is a mystification and indeed a travesty of this modern, tragic experience. The re-stabilization of modern civilization under American hegemony had led to the foreclosure of hopes for an alternative to liberalism and to his reframing the significance of the Jewish Question as pointing to the limits of the political. 

A lifelong anticommunist, Strauss became suspicious of all radical politics though theoretically he remained open to the possibility of a regime in accordance with an exalted and harsh natural right—the best regime, whose advent would be nothing short of miraculous.  He suspected the current direction of reform in America might be but another, merely slower path to transformations that effaced the outlines of this always endangered natural order of things. Translating the older European problematic of the Enlightenment’s war on prejudice to contemporary American realities, the Jewish Question was now placed under the rubric of ‘discrimination,’ the ideological key word of the Civil Rights era that was then beginning.     

“The liberal state cannot provide a solution to the Jewish problem, for such a solution would require a legal prohibition against every kind of ‘discrimination,’ i.e. the abolition of the private sphere, the denial of the difference between state and society, the destruction of the liberal state. Such a destruction would not by any means solve the Jewish problem, as is shown in our days by the anti-Jewish policy of the USSR.”⁷⁰ 

Looking at developments from the academic and racial enclave of Hyde Park, Strauss was hostile, though not fanatically so, to the progressive ambitions of the Great Society. As with many conservative Jews, he may have regarded the Republican Party as a not very appealing alternative until 1968, when he seems to have recommended a vote for Nixon. And despite his better dead than red anti-Communism of the 1950s and early 1960s, he could not shake the feeling that the progressive West had more in common with the Communist East than it liked to acknowledge.   

“The conservatism of our age is identical with what was originally liberalism, more or less modified by changes in the direction of present-day liberalism. One could go further and say that much of what goes by the name of conservatism has in the last analysis a common root with present day liberalism and even with Communism. That this would be the case would appear most clearly if one were to go back to the origin of modernity, to the break with premodern tradition that took place in the seventeenth century, or with quarrel between the ancients and moderns.”⁷¹

What does this say about his stance toward liberal democracy and the America as the new center of Western civilization? A shift in his perspective on the latter can be discerned from the new origins of modernity story he proposed in the early ‘50s. In this new account, the founder of modernity was no longer Hobbes or Spinoza but rather Machiavelli. This shift suggested that for Strauss modern civilization was no longer identical with bourgeois society, for its most extreme possibilities were being realized in new forms of tyranny against which the American ruling class would hopefully show the same fighting spirit of the British after Dunkirk, “Roman imperial principles”. The threat of nuclear war suggested the doubling back of progress into the cataclysms and cycles impassively expected by the philosophers of old. In the meantime, perhaps the struggle itself would arrest the devolution of mankind into a social herd animal.   

And where did all this leave the Jews? From the late 1940s, Strauss warily observed the beginnings of today’s ongoing Christian-Jewish dialogue promising a transcendence of an age-old hatred. Strauss never openly abandoned the founding Zionist conviction that others simply did not like or trust Jews.  

“Glad as I am about Christian-Jewish reconciliation, you cannot be blind to the fact that, for a hundred years, gradually building up and now coming to the fore in our century, there is a very powerful movement which is both anti-Christian and anti-Jewish…You know, when a new party arises, and it is very powerful, then the older parties, who were in a dogfight up to this point, might be compelled to make peace among themselves…Communism in principle threatens Judaism and Christianity equally. As a consequence, the Jewish-Christian antagonism—just as the intra-Christian antagonisms—tend to disappear. I would say, in proportion as Jewish-Christian antagonism disappears, other antagonisms come to sight; and these antagonisms cannot be presumed to be indifferent to the difference between Jews and non-Jews, and are likely to exploit this difference for their purposes.”⁷²

This prediction that the defeat of Communism would bring a renewal of Christian-Jewish antagonism was falsified by the post-Cold War hyping up of Jewish identity amid an increasingly unconditional Western support for Israel. What explains the utter failure of this prophecy of permanent division between Christians and Jews, of a permanence of anti-Semitism? Though the inter-war radical Right had seen Moscow as the headquarters of Judeo-Bolshevism, this identification of the Jews with revolutionary causes began to unravel with the establishment of Israel. The US eventually stepped in as the great defender of the Jewish people, later officially commemorating its holocaust as it came to ever more zealously identify itself with the state of Israel, beyond any ordinary geopolitical calculation. Over the last half century, and picking up steam after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Americanization of Zionism eventually resulted in a shift in the meaning of the Jewish Question—from the true fulfilment of emancipation to a new civil-religious discourse of atonement for past evils. 

One aspect of this ideological shift is worth mentioning in this context. Like others of his generation, Strauss valued dignity so highly because it testified to the Jew’s transcendence of an undeserved pariah status. But if it’s conceded that the establishment of the State of Israel swept away indignities Jews once had to endure, its trajectory over the last half century has swept away all these alleged psychological benefits. Intelligent Jews with any sense of decorum now have to put up with the exorbitant concern of others for Jewish feelings on anything touching on Israel’s so called right to exist. What would professor Strauss make of this hysterical jargon of existential threats, the heart-jerking pleading and wailing, the cynical instrumentalization of past suffering, the insufferable smugness that characterizes the discourse of today’s pro-Jewish lobby? The most committed supporters of a cause tell you what its true nature is. Look at them now.

To his dismay, America’s progressives aimed to dissolve the prejudices of society defying the public/private division of an older sort of liberalism. Strauss did not live to see the tremendous successes of the administrative state in reeducating the population, eventually reducing sexism, racism and especially antisemitism to mere vestiges of their former selves. Since the 1970s anti-Semitism, more so than any other once prevalent prejudice, has been completely uprooted in what were formerly Christian countries. I’d like to think that Professor Strauss had too much probity, was simply too honest to deny these facts and, for all his forebodings, would have made some choice remarks on the rise of shameless victim playing in societies experiencing this general decline in prejudice. It’s true, the motto he conveyed to his own closest students was “say what they say” which gives us little reason to think he’d now go out of his way now to express the disgust he always harbored towards those whom he regarded as weak Jews, but he at least recognized a spade when he saw one. 

These various post-war musings of Leo Strauss need to be set against the backdrop of the sudden rise of Israel’s importance both for American Jews and the country at large in the aftermath of the spectacular military victories of ’67.

“Except as an occasional object of charity, Israel practically dropped from sight in American Jewish life soon after the founding of the state. In fact, Israel was not important to American Jews. In his 1957 survey, Nathan Glazer reported that Israel ‘had remarkably slight effects on the inner life of American Jewry’. Membership in the Zionist Organization of America dropped from the hundreds of thousands in 1948 to the tens of thousands in the 1960s. Only 1 in 20 American Jews cared to visit Israel before June 1967. In his 1956 reelection, which occurred immediately after he forced Israel’s humiliating withdrawal from the Sinai, the already considerable Jewish support for Eisenhower increased. In the early 1960s, Israel even faced a drubbing for the Eichmann kidnapping from sections of elite Jewish opinion like Joseph Proskauer, past president of the AJC, Harvard historian Oscar Handlin and the Jewish-owned Washington Post, ‘the kidnapping of Eichmann,’ Erich Fromm opined, ‘is an act of lawlessness of exactly the type of which the Nazis themselves . . . have been guilty.’”⁷³ 

That seems long ago, another age, almost another country. 

Strauss may have been somewhat bewildered by the status escalation that would bring American Jews to the very top of the social heap. Here they would no longer need to suffer the slightest indignities except those still suggested by the imagination. Celebrated and extolled by all, they have become the apple in the eye of mainstream America and now the West more generally. As if in fulfillment of a biblical prophecy—one more vaulting than even Nietzsche’s—the Gentiles now pledge their love of the Jewish people by unconditionally supporting the State of the Jewish People in the Land of Israel. Given the circumstances, who would not want to remain a Jew? 

Zionism once spoke to justifiable fears that Jews needed a national safe haven. It seems that people often don’t like hearing the good news. Any sober and dispassionate reflection on anti-Semitism today would conclude that it is a completely spent force in the West and indeed in the wider world, despite its persistence in the dark corners of the internet where, however ugly, it poses no threat to any Jew anywhere in the world. A nuclear war vaporizing the Jabotinskyan Iron Wall and most of historic Palestine is now about as likely as a post-apartheid state or states based on the pursuit of truth and reconciliation. To put it politely, the idea that Israel remains a safe haven for the Jews of the world is hardly credible. As a raison d’être for the state of Israel and its special claims on our sympathies and pocket books this will hardly do. States do not generally need a clear reason to exist in order to continue to exist but it should be apparent that this generality does not wholly apply to a Zionist Israel that claims a toll, the collection of which requires ever more extraordinary efforts, underscoring the existential import of this claim to a special status. The material proceeds of this relationship in money and weapons have been immense, but the privilege in question here is the right not to be criticized, to exclude by law or orchestrated denunciation statements or actions deemed to be anti-Semitic by the experts on this subject. 

While the later Strauss was consistently opposed to America’s once raucous, libertarian, First Amendment culture of unrestricted freedom of expression out of concern for the protection of religion, he recognized that a compelling case for it had been made by Spinoza: “The freedom of speech is demanded precisely by the men of noble character, the proud, self-respecting men, and that shows that there is a kinship between freedom of speech and nobility of character.”⁷⁴ We often forget that the heyday of the progressive administrative state in the 1960s and 1970s was also the heyday of this First Amendment political culture. The liberals of that period understood that if you were going to attempt to use policy to affect changes in public morality, to do away with ‘prejudice,’ that the strongest contending sentiments and viewpoints that this transformation would inevitably unleash needed see the light of day, fight it out, so that these changes initiated from above might win a broad democratic legitimacy from below. But there was an equally important subjective dimension to this so-called free speech absolutism, for this popular constitutionalism centered on the First Amendment, idealistically fostered by progressives, did much to counter the real and perceived dangers of social engineering. Not too long ago, liberals abandoned their political commitment to this noble ideal and we are now reaping the consequences of this change of heart. The protection of Israel was not the motive behind this abandonment of principle but it now reinforces it with unforeseeable consequences on the right to dissent in the West. In the meantime, it has been made clear, if there was ever any doubt, who holds the trump cards in the great game of protection from hateful speech.

The situation in the other, subordinate half of the West, where there are welfare states but no First Amendment tradition looks even sadder. In Europe Jewish communities anxiously fret over the anti-Semitism of the large minorities of Muslims who typically fail to respect the norms of polite, philosemitic society. Even critics of Israel hesitate to state the obvious: namely that whatever hostility there is, is almost entirely the result of the unstinting support of these Jewish communities for the policies of the state of Israel and their insistence that Germany, France and the UK adhere to this commitment on penalty of de-legitimation at the hands of their American and Israeli friends. It is logically absurd to say that Israel can be seen as a safe haven for Jews in the face of hostilities towards them that stem from their support of Israel. Here in Germany, the Jews proudly hold Israeli passports and threaten to leave if they don’t get their way. They’re like American celebrities who threaten to leave the country if the greatest evil ever prevails in the next election. No one should take them seriously.

Their Morals and Ours

At the risk of impropriety, and of sounding somewhat pompous, I would like to address left-wing Jews in what follows: first, those Jewish progressives and their allies who remain in the orbit of Zionist discourse and then turn to those who see themselves as anti-Zionists. I am with the latter but will offer what I hope will be taken as a productive criticism. 

First, the facts. We all see that there is a troubling threat inflation concerning anti-Semitism but many of us have difficulty acknowledging just how pernicious it is. We observe that it is deployed to silence dissent almost as if it were meant to provoke the kind of sentiments that would justify, in turn, its hysterical suspicions and brazen threats. “We who speak for the Jews everywhere, we took out your Jeremy Corbyn, and we’ll do it to the next guy too—how you like us now?” Fortunately, anti-Semitism is so spent a force that not even all this offensive, obsessive hasbara patrolling of the borders of legitimate political discourse has been able to bring it back to life. Safe to say, no one would even care about the Jews today were it not for the existence of this nuclear armed regime, its occupation and its rampages that periodically threaten the world. 

What is to be done about those on the Left who don’t feel about Israel like we do, those who go along with, or are incapable of resisting manufactured anti-Semitism scandals? Perhaps warranting separate consideration, there is the entire German Left whose narcissistic cult of national guilt stands out as the purest, saddest case of this wider formation with all its enfeebling, sad passions. Although the parallel is hardly exact, Strauss’s call for a break with the religious Zionists is a suggestive precedent: for a political anti-Zionism to get its bearings, there needs to be a break with the upholders of our reigning civic-religion within our midst. It is now apparent that no movement of opposition is possible in the West while they remain any part of it. Come election time, we will be subject to the usual barrage demanding a vote for those responsible for the genocide in Gaza. Let us tell these progressive influencers what we think of that. If they succeed, the opportunity that this monstrous crime has created will be lost.        

As anti-Zionists our arguments often concede too much ground to our opponents, and not just as it relates to the general discourse on the resurgence of fascism, but more specifically as it relates to the contemporary significance of the extermination of European Jewry in the last world war. By the 1970s this event was established as the paradigmatic genocide for a western-dominated international legal community that claimed as its central mission the suppression of lesser genocides. The anti-Zionist Left operates within this ideological field, credibly denouncing the enormities of the collective punishment of Gaza as genocidal but coming up against the following problem.  

“In the scales of terror, the Nakba does not compare with the Shoah. The Nazi extermination of the Jews in Europe was an enormity of a different order, and the disproportion between them has traditionally been used to justify, or attenuate, the expulsion of Palestinians that lies at the foundation of Israel. To this day, it is the mantle of the Judeocide that covers the actions of the Zionist state, in the eyes not only of the Israeli population or Jews of the diaspora, but Western opinion at large.”⁷⁵

The disproportion is not simply a quantitative one. The Nazi extermination of the Jews was motivated by an ideal that lacked any basis in Realpolitik whereas the expulsions of the Palestinians and their fate under Israeli occupation belong to a more ordinary calculus. In other words, the enormities of Israel’s war in Gaza are part of a wider pattern of actions that arguably qualify as genocide but fail to rise to the sui generis status of the so-called Final Solution in terms of motive and execution. Strauss agreed with many that Germany had lost its right to exist as nation with the perpetration of this unique evil.⁷⁶ On the same implicitly Hegelian standard of collective national guilt and punishments, many now argue that Israel has forfeited its right to exist to the extent that they concede it had one in the first place. Let us take a closer look at the mysteries of contemporary moral reasoning on these competing existential claims. 

The legal charge of genocide against Israel presages a welcome deterioration of its international stature. But there are two problems that the Palestinians confront in justifying their own raison d’être. From a Palestinian perspective, the entirety of Palestine is theirs, and not just the portion that they were left with after 1967. The UN’s recognition of Israel that sanctioned this dispossession and lies behind any two-state solution cannot be judged morally legitimate. The large populations of Palestinian refugees living in neighboring countries may never truly be satisfied with a Palestine that does not include the homes where their families once lived. Of course, many peoples have had to reconcile themselves with comparable misfortunes, but the regional context of overwhelming Arab and Muslim predominance gives them less reason to forgive and forget. The demand for all of Palestine, given the premise of their existence as nation, could perhaps be satisfied with the One-State democratic solution, but this would obviously mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state. Putting aside its practicality, the justice of this solution would be obvious to the leaders of the West who pay homage to democracy except for the fact that here it flatly contradicts their tenet that the Holocaust unquestionably justifies the existence of this unique ethnoreligious suprematism. From the western point of view, redressing the absolute evil of the Holocaust trumps claims for redress based on the perpetration of any lesser relative evil and especially one that inevitably follows from the redress of the former. 

Our opposition to Israel—singling it out—cannot rest on the claim that it is the greatest perpetrator of atrocities in the world today, although that is currently also true. The genocide standard of international law is certainly a credit to modern liberal civilization, however inconsistently it is applied, and the most should be made of it in this case. But while this metric may modify the behavior of powerful armed states it will never govern their strategic calculations nor will it determine the focal points of political opposition to their wars and alliances. There is nothing per se wrong with this politically selective morality, for the standards of politics are not the same as those of humanitarian morality. We identify with the Palestinians but not so such with the Rwandans, for no reason that this metric can justify, and we identify with the Palestinians because of their heroic, tragic opposition to the Jews, as the Zionists understand that term, because this opposition put them into the center of a long history, our history, our divisions of friend and enemy. 

“Do you know why we Palestinians are famous? Because you are our enemies. The interest in us stems from interest in the Jewish issue. The interest is in you not in me. We have the misfortune of having Israel as our enemy because it enjoys unlimited support. And we have the good fortune of having Israel as our enemy because the Jews are the centre of attention. You’ve brought us defeat and renown.”⁷⁷

All political claims based on the interpretation of suffering, as Nietzsche foresaw,⁷⁸ enter the ideological arena of relativism, of warring claims to redress. Whether its slavery or the Holocaust there is no value-free way of stacking up the enormities of the past with those of the present. The present suffering of the Palestinians cannot be made to trump the past suffering of the Jews during the Holocaust and over a longer history of Christian-Jewish relations. The Western Left is now having to confront long accepted rationales for the firebombing of German cities during WWII that defenders of Israel now regularly invoke to justify the conduct of the IDF in Gaza. The number of British civilians killed by German bombs—forty thousand–was dwarfed by the scale of the devastation of the RAF’s air war on Germany, but not too many have doubted that had the German Reich prevailed it would have done far worse, reducing London to rubble. The Israelis argue that this is what would happen to them if they backed down from their seemingly disproportionate response. The problem of moral proportions in killing and suffering is complicated not only by the weight accorded to the past versus the present but also by counterfactuals, what ifs.       

The post-emancipationist discourse of justice as an interpretation and redress of the suffering of contending claimants to damages is a political dead end, at least for a Left that aspires to change the world and not just to interpret it. A Left that has no chance of changing society foreswears the classical rationales for revolutionary violence. If the expulsion of the Palestinians had led to the establishment of a state and people representing something new and great we might have accepted such a terrible fait accompli. In that case, be done with it. But if the result, and this is where it probably had to end up, is a nation as shitty as today’s Israel, let’s be done with that. 

We find ourselves in a strange, historical predicament, one that brings us back to the titular question of Strauss’s talk at Hillel: ‘Why We Remain Jews.’ It’s true we have no attachment to either the Jewish religious tradition, even in its most liberal form, and only a sentimental connection to the history of the international Left where Jews once distinguished themselves. This past and not the Holocaust should be our beacon, it is our ideological antiquity. It is frankly enraging to see these smug Zionist loudmouths deny that we remain Jews compelling us to assert the contrary against the machinations of this powerful defamation league. For reasons we do not fully comprehend the name ‘the Jews’ remains fateful in these late or postmodern times, even in the absence of any compelling historicist ideology of civilization and return to origins of the kind that supported Strauss’s Zionism. It is well known that as Jews we are given more license to denounce an infamous regime that claims to represent us. We do not want this name to be equated with the deadening proposition that “the clean solutions of which people dream and dreamt have led either to nothing or to a much greater bestiality than the uneasy solutions with which sensible people will always be satisfied.”   

This brings us to the predicament of contemporary anti-Zionism. The Left discourse of Israel as an apartheid and colonial settler state effectively appeals to generally recognized norms that morally discredit racism and Western colonialism, but it fails to capture the ideological specificity of Israel and the US/Western relation to it based in this longer history. South African apartheid had by comparison only the most faint-hearted Western backers who pulled the plug on it after it had served its Cold War role. Such general labels do not touch the subjective ideological core of the contemporary Jewish Question. After the fall of Marxism as a political force, the main identity available to those who remain Jews in order to contend with the Zionists over this name has seemingly been a version of the diasporism against which the young Strauss directed his fire. Progressive diasporism holds that Jews have an ethical calling to denounce injustice and opposes itself to Zionism according to which the world owes the Jewish people for the supreme injustice perpetrated against it. These have long been the main politically consequential responses to the question of ‘why remain Jews’ today. 

The old European Zionism had its reasons for believing that anti-Semitism was permanent and that Jews would only be safe in their own country. But American Jews did not suffer the fate of their European counterparts and American Zionism was never about abandoning this so-called diaspora. Indeed, American Zionism presupposes the permanence of a very powerful diaspora in the most powerful countries, securing for Israel a perch above all nations. Perhaps the unconditional allegiance of America’s rulers to Israel will come to an end as the inter-state order passes from unipolarity to multipolarity. But Israel is seen as the frontline of the West, and they do not like to contemplate what would happen if it faltered and this may give them cause to double down and not accept the new geo-political reality. In the meantime, the great and small Leviathans of the West—America, Germany and the others—have all been hooked, an accomplishment beyond the wildest expectations of the founders of the ZO. Progressive diasporism depends upon this American geo-political and ideological configuration in which it is conceded the status of a morally trustworthy opposition, although an unhinged late Zionism is stepping up its efforts to deny the legitimacy of criticism in the name of an alternative Jewish identity. 

Even in its most anti-Zionist form, diasporism keeps the critique of Zionism within the familiar boundaries of humanitarian concern for refugees, migrants, bare life and the stateless. In their role as champions of social justice, the diasporists claim we will always have to contend with the hostility of those who prefer the closed to the open society. Like the Zionists, they think that anti-Semitism is here to stay and take it as axiomatic that the Right in Europe and America is deep down very hostile to the Jews. These are well-intentioned people, but they willfully ignore the obvious. Today’s Right wishes to win the Jews over, to be the best friends of Israel. They know what time it is.       

The same cannot be said of the Left. Diasporism belongs to a Left that, after having lost all its capacity to change society, has been compelled to fall back on an older ‘capitalism inevitably becomes fascism’ thesis as the last remaining justification for its continued existence. Even an irreverent Philip Roth evoked this specter in his somber The Plot Against America that sent chills down the spine of progressives in the Bush years and again in the latest political season. While this Left fights neo-liberalism and foreign wars, admittedly not very effectively, that no longer wholly distinguishes it from the populist Right. What does distinguish it is its mission to fight any resurgence of a Right that it insists on portraying as fascist, instead of what it is: an ideologically miscellaneous, reactive populism. Although it recognizes and complains about the pro-Israel instrumentalization of anti-Semitism, given this premise, anti-Zionist diasporism cannot wholly deny the significance of the phenomenon itself, or even the scale of it as asserted by those most attuned to its presence. Hence the muddle.

Here is a characteristic statement of anti-Zionist diasporism. 

“One sign of this generational divide is the increased visibility of young, left-wing, anti-Zionist American Jews—a cohort to which I and many of my friends belong. For months our most prominent representatives have been two activist groups calling for a ceasefire in Gaza: IfNotNow (INN) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). Broadly speaking, these groups reject Israel as the central focus of American Jewish life, and do so explicitly as Jews. They draw on language, symbolism, and values rooted in the rich and at times suppressed history of left-wing Jewish radicalism, which peaked before the State of Israel was founded and Zionism became central to diasporic Jewish identity…In this sense, the Jewish left’s estrangement from mainstream Jewish institutions has been a source of renewal as well as trauma. By taking a lonely moral stand—in many cases risking real loss as a result—we are learning precisely what it means to be Jewish.”⁷⁹

Activism in this spirit, for all its good works, revolves around an endless conversation of prioritizing and mediating competing victim claims. Strauss denounced diasporism as annoying, narcissistic and offensive to probity, and so it remains. Claiming to uphold the true meaning of the Holocaust will squander the opening that Palestine gifted to the Western Left at what was arguably its lowest point. The moral stands of young Jews who are currently breaking with Zionism are admirable, even inspiring, but the impasse of our discourse of good and evil reveals the urgency of a horizon beyond their progressive left-liberalism. While Strauss’s Nietzsche inspired denunciations of the Left of his time hardly grazed the surface of a Marxism that was always quite far from being a slave revolt in morality,⁸⁰ when it comes to the Left of today, it now comes somewhat closer to the mark. If there is no powerful communist or socialist alternative we can point to, nor any Great Tradition to return to, such an anti-Zionism will allow the best of us to take a leading role in whatever opposition emerges to our intellectually bankrupt and morally discredited status quo. “The time has come for a sober and dispassionate realization of our true position.”

1. Leo Strauss, “Why we Remain Jews?” (1962), in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, ed. Kenneth Hart Green (Albany: SUNY Press 1997). ↩︎
2. Marvin Lowenthal (ed.) The Diaries of Theodor Herzl (Dial Press: New York) 1956, p.6  ↩︎
3. Perry Anderson, “The House of Zion,” New Left Review 96 (November-December 2015). ↩︎
4. Winston Churchill, “Zionism versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People,” Illustrated Sunday Herald (London), 8 February 1920, 5.  ↩︎
5. David Klion, “The American Jewish Left in Exile,” New York Review of Books, 28 January 2024. ↩︎
6. Jerry Muller, “Leo Strauss: The Political Philosopher as a Young Zionist,” Jewish Social Studies 17, no. 1 (2010). This article blows the lid off Straussian legends surrounding the young Strauss’s Zionism. But the perspective offered here is at odds with Muller’s main claim around which his account of the young Strauss’s Zionism is organized. He argues that  the latter did not respond to the intellectual challenge of the Enlightenment critique of religion and amounted to little more than an ordinary realist conception of “the role of power and particularistic identities and interests in human affairs.” This claim, I hope to show, effaces all of its intellectually distinguishing features.   ↩︎
7. Strauss’s claim that ancient philosophers practiced a now forgotten art of esoteric writing to conceal their disbelief in not just the gods of the city but also its customary morality might seem hardly credible given that the intellectually livelier Greek and Roman cities were, in most circumstances, indifferent to heterodoxy, whether cultic or philosophical, unless overtly trouble making. The persecution of the written word, the thesis presupposes, did not impinge in those pre-Christian times with the force or consistency that would necessitate such literary stratagems, but Strauss invoked the execution of Socrates to argue that it did nonetheless. He found some support for his view of a pious antiquity in the pages of The Ancient City by the conservative historian, Fustel de Coulanges who sought to counter the Jacobin appropriation of ancient virtue.  ↩︎
8. Immanuel Wolf, “Ueber den Begriff einer Wissenschaft des Judenthums,” Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judenthums (1822). ↩︎
9. Muller, “Leo Strauss.” ↩︎
10.  Leo Strauss, preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (New York: Schocken Books, 1965), 5. ↩︎
11. Ibid, 2. ↩︎
12. Ibid, 3. ↩︎
13. Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason (1952), trans. Peter Palmer (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1981). ↩︎
14. Leo Strauss, “Why We Remain Jews.” One hears in his recollection of this exchange, the terms of the dispute staged in the Platonic dialogue Laches, the study of which a sixteen-year-old Strauss had dreamed of devoting his life to as a small-town postmaster. The topic is courage, its definition and relation to other virtues. The dialogue opposes the Athenian generals Nicias and Laches who understand courage as manliness, i.e., in conventionally military terms, to Socrates who invokes a more intellectual kind of courage and questions an education prioritizing the art of war, although in the end conceding that perhaps courage had a certain, irreducibly non-intellectual element to it. The ostensible subject is the education of youth but what’s at stake is the relation of military to intellectual ideals in a rationally organized political regime or movement. His youthful devotion to this particular dialogue suggests that the themes of his Zionism and of its significance for his understanding of the quarrel of the ancients and moderns had taken shape early on. Though his views changed, there was no ‘epistemological break’ between a young German Zionist and historicist Strauss and the later émigré proponent of the Great Tradition though the continuity is concealed by a conservative rhetoric of the value of venerable old books. ↩︎
15. Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, “The Iron Wall (We and the Arabs),” Rasswyet (Berlin), 4 November 1923. First published in Rasswyet, a Russian-language Zionist immigrant newspaper, The Iron Wall was published in 1925 in Rasswjet (Deutsches Heft) (Druck: A. Huning, 1925), a collection of Jabotinsky’s articles from Rasswjet translated into German. It was subsequently translated into English in The Jewish Herald (South Africa), 26 November 1937. The title itself posits a blasphemy as the long undisputed rabbinical consensus explicitly ruled out the building of such a wall, i.e., any attempt at Jewish reconquest and settlement of the land. ↩︎
16. Leo Strauss, “Biblische Geschichte und Wissenschaft” (1925), in Gesammelte Schriften, Band 2, ed. Heinrich Meier(Stuttgart: Metzler, 1997). ↩︎
17. Leo Strauss, “Bemerkung zu der Weinbergschen Kritik” (1925), in Gesammelte Schriften, Band 1, ed. Heinrich Meier(Stuttgart: Metzler, 1996). ↩︎
18. Leo Strauss, “Zur Ideologie des politischen Zionismus” (1929), in Gesammelte Schriften, Band 1. ↩︎
19.  Leo Strauss, “Die Zukunft einer Illusion” (1928), in Gesammelte Schriften, Band 1. ↩︎
20. It is very probable that he had read Max Weber’s Ancient Judaism but that he never commented on it is strange because he continued to engage with Weber long after he ceased to recognize him as an authority. Moreover, all his Weimar writings on this topic subscribe to the same Wellhausen reading of the Old Testament to which Weber subscribed. “The world-historical importance of Jewish religious development rests above all in the creation of the Old Testament for one of the most significant intellectual achievements of the Pauline mission was that it preserved and transferred this sacred book of the Jews to Christianity as one of its own sacred books. Yet in so doing it eliminated all those aspects of the ethic enjoined by the Old Testament which ritually characterize the special position of Jewry as a pariah people. These aspects were not binding upon Christianity because they had been suspended by the Christian redeemer.” Max Weber, Ancient Judaism (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1952). ↩︎
21. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, eds. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 156. ↩︎
22. Leo Strauss, “Religiöse Lage der Gegenwart” (1930), in Gesammelte Schriften, Band 2, 389. ↩︎
23. Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion. ↩︎
24. Muller, 17. ↩︎
25. Strauss, preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 5. ↩︎
26.  Leo Strauss, “Das Testament Spinoza” (1932), Gesammelte Schriften, Band 1, 420. ↩︎
27. Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 51.   ↩︎
28. Leo Strauss, “Seminar in Political Philosophy: Spinoza” (Autumn 1959), https://leostrausscenter.uchicago.edu/spinoza-autumn-1959. ↩︎
29. Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, in Complete Works, ed. Michael L. Morgan, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, Cambridge: Hackett, 2002), 425. ↩︎
30. The most famous contemporary commentator on Spinoza and his reception, Jonathan Israel, has little to say about the actual content of the Theological-Political Treatise and its call for the Jews to dissolve themselves as separate people.    ↩︎
31. Strauss, preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 20. ↩︎
32. Ibid, 16. ↩︎
33. Ibid, 30. ↩︎
34. Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 178. ↩︎
35. Ibid. ↩︎
36. Strauss, preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 11. ↩︎
37. Strauss, “Zur Ideologie des politischen Zionismus,” 448. ↩︎
38. Leo Strauss, “Lectures on Hegel’s Political Philosophy” (Autumn 1958), https://wslamp70.s3.amazonaws.com/leostrauss/s3fs-public/Hegel%20%281958%29.pdf. ↩︎
39. Leo Strauss, “Die geistige Lage der Gegenwart” (1932), in Gesammelte Schriften, Band 2, 452. ↩︎
40. Ibid., 447. ↩︎
41. Strauss had some difficulty coping with the fact that the figure he saw as the fount of the philosophical tradition seemed to regard a certain kind of communism as the best regime. He must have realized the dubiousness of his later claim that Plato intended the Republic as an esoteric satire on communism as an unattainable and inhuman utopia, but his ingenuous American students and followers appeared willing to accept it without question.  ↩︎
42. Friedrich Nietzsche, Book 1, Aphorism 37, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 55. ↩︎
43. Friedrich Nietzsche, Part V, Aphorism 195, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2001), 84.  ↩︎
44. Leo Strauss, Letter to Karl Löwith, 2 February 1933, Gesammelte Schriften Band 3, ed. Heinrich and Wiebke Meine (Stuttgart: Metzler 2001), 620. ↩︎
45. Leo Strauss, Letter to Gerhard Krüger, 19 August 1932, Gesammelte Schriften Band 3, 399. ↩︎
46. Leo Strauss, Letter to Karl Löwith, 19 May 1933, Gesammelte Schriften Band 3, 625. ↩︎
47. Jabotinsky, Zionism and Communism (1933), cited in Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators. ↩︎
48. Carl Schmitt, “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations” (1929), in The Concept of the Political, Expanded Edition, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996), 148. ↩︎
49. Ibid. ↩︎
50. Ibid, 167. ↩︎
51. Leo Strauss, “Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political,” in The Concept of the Political, Expanded Edition, 174. ↩︎
52. Ibid, 187. ↩︎
53. Leo Strauss, Letter to Klein 10/34, Gesammelte Schriften Band 3, 534. We get a sense of what Strauss would come to understand as natural right when in a letter to Jacob Klein from 1934 he accused Schmitt having appropriated without acknowledgement his notion of a ruler-ruled relation freed from the neutralizing consequences of positivist legality so as to justify the new order that had been established the year before. ↩︎
54. Leo Strauss, “German Nihilism” (1941), Interpretation 26, no. 3 (Spring 1999): 353-378. ↩︎
55. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 48. ↩︎
56. Leo Strauss, “On Abravanel’s Philosophical Tendency and Political Teaching” (1937), Gesammelte Schriften, Band 2, 195-231. ↩︎
57. The final episode came with Strauss’s decision to republish a translation of his remarks on Schmitt’s Concept of the Political  that he placed at the end of the American edition of his book on Spinoza. His reason for appending this text has long been a mystery—why a commentary on Schmitt in a book on Spinoza?—but the rationale will hopefully now be clearer.   ↩︎
58. Leo Strauss, Letter to Karl Löwith, 1 August 1933, Gesammelte Schriften Band 3, 616. ↩︎
59. Leo Strauss, Letter to Karl Löwith, 17 November 1932, Gesammelte Schriften Band 3, 407. ↩︎
60. Strauss, “Lectures on Hegel’s Political Philosophy.” ↩︎
61. Strauss, “Why We Remain Jews.” ↩︎
62. Ibid. ↩︎
63. Ibid. ↩︎
64. Ibid. ↩︎
65. Ibid. ↩︎
66. Ibid. ↩︎
67. Strauss, Preface Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 6. ↩︎
68. Strauss, “Why We Remain Jews.” ↩︎
69. Gopal Balakrishnan, “Counterstrike West,” New Left Review 104 (March-April 2017). ↩︎
70. Strauss, preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 6. ↩︎
71. Leo Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968). ↩︎
72. Strauss, “Why We Remain Jews.” ↩︎
73. Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, (New York: Verso) 2015 ↩︎
74. Strauss, “Seminar in Political Philosophy: Spinoza.” ↩︎
75. Anderson, “The House of Zion.” ↩︎
76. Strauss, “Lectures on Hegel’s Political Philosophy.” ↩︎
77. Interview with Mahmoud Darwish, in Jean-Luc Godard’s Notre Musique.  ↩︎
78. Friedrich Nietzsche, Essay 2, The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage 1967). ↩︎
79. Klion, “The American Jewish Left in Exile.”  ↩︎
80. Like the Platonic Laches was for the young Strauss, so Leon Trotsky’s Their Morals and Ours was for this author. An unforgettable passage from the latter conveys something of the immense distance that separates us from our own foundational tradition. “In his psychology and method of action the Jesuit of the ‘heroic’ period distinguished himself from an average priest as the warrior of a church from its shopkeeper. We have no reason to idealize either one or the other. But it is altogether unworthy to look upon a fanatic warrior with the eyes of an obtuse and slothful shopkeeper.”  ↩︎