Leo Strauss’s discovery of the theologico-political problem

The Jewish Question

Between the years 1923 and 1932 Strauss penned approximately two dozen articles and reviews that dealt largely with Zionism and Jewish themes. ⁶ Like others of his generation, Strauss was intensely concerned with the so-called Judenfrage, a term of 19th-century vintage concerning the right of admission of German Jews to citizenship in the German state. ⁷ This issue acquired a new urgency in the years immediately after the First World War where for the first time the German state took the form of a liberal democracy, the Weimar Republic. Today Weimar is remembered nostalgically as a period of enormous cultural creativity and artistic and sexual experimentation of the kind portrayed in Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin and romanticized in the film, Cabaret. Yet this is quite different from the way the regime was experienced by those, fuelled by the experience of military defeat, who rallied under the banner of Nietzsche. ⁸

Nietzsche was the dominant philosophical influence of Strauss’s youth. Years later, in a letter to Karl Löwith, he would write: ‘Nietzsche so dominated and charmed me between my 22nd and 30th years that I literally believed everything I understood of him.’ ⁹ This would date the height of Nietzsche’s influence on Strauss between the years 1921 and 1929, the very time when he was making his first foray into the theologico-political thicket. What so bewitched the young Strauss was, above all, the nihilist Nietzsche. Nihilism, as Strauss would later explain, was not simply the affirmation of nothingness. It was the affirmation of a certain kind of protest, in particular a moral protest against the conditions of modern civilization. From Nietzsche, he had learned that modern civilization was the product of modern philosophy. The conviction underlying this philosophy was a preference for open societies, open with respect to trade, commerce, and, of course, scientific inquiry. The good society as conceived by modern philosophy was a cosmopolitan society that could be conceived by certain formulae such as ‘the relief of man’s estate’, ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number’, and ‘the rights of man’. Yet from Nietzsche’s perspective, such a society lacked the possibility of greatness. Greatness resides in the affirmation of particularity that in modern circumstances means the affirmation of the sovereign state. The serious life, by which is meant the morally serious life, is only possible in a society that actively resists the blandishments of modern civilization. It represents a preference for the spirit of Sparta over Athens, or the world of Kultur over Zivilisation. ¹⁰

Strauss was never a liberal Vernunftrepublikaner after the manner of Friedrich Meinecke or Thomas Mann. ¹¹ Rather, for the young Nietzscheans of Strauss’s generation, Weimar was a symbol of a triumphant Anglo-French civilization. Weimar was associated with the western liberal tradition of peace, commerce and the rights of man. This liberal tradition had always been weaker in Germany than in the other western nations. As keen an observer of German history as Karl Marx once wrote: ‘We have shared in the restorations of modern nations without ever having shared in their revolutions.’ ¹² In other words, Germany had missed out on the Enlightenment tradition of liberalism and had developed only a Counter-Enlightenment tradition of anti-liberalism. Marx hoped that the very weakness of the liberal tradition would allow Germany to leapfrog the bourgeois stage of development and assume leadership of the socialist movement, but the result was instead a deepening of these anti-modernist tendencies that proved so fateful for German thought in the following decades. ¹³

Three additional passages serve to illustrate the fragility of the Enlightenment in Germany. The first is from Heinrich Heine, the greatest cosmopolitan German of his generation. ‘In France,’ Heine wrote, ‘patriotism is love of homeland, of civilization and progress. German patriotism, by contrast, means hatred of the French, of civilization and liberalism.’ ¹⁴ The second passage was written a generation later in Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil:

They are no philosophical race, these Englishmen: Bacon signifies an attack on the philosophical spirit; Hobbes, Hume, and Locke a debasement and lowering of the value of the concept of ‘philosophy’ for more than a century. It was against Hume that Kant arose and rose; it was Locke of whom Schelling said, understandably, ‘je méprise Locke.’ ¹⁵

The weakness of liberalism in Germany was related closely to the precariousness of the Jewish population. The Jewish Question was inseparable from liberalism. Strauss would later write that Weimar had one moment of greatness, namely its response to the assassination of Walter Rathenau, the Jewish Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1922. ¹⁷ The vulnerability of the German Jews gave a heightened urgency to Strauss’s own Zionist commitments and his search for an answer to the Jewish Question outside the confines of the European nation state. Strauss’s Zionism, as he noted, was at that time ‘straightforward political Zionism’, by which he meant the Zionism of Leon Pinsker and Theodor Herzl as opposed to the cultural Zionism of Martin Buber and Ahad Ha’am. It is in this context that Strauss could recall meetings with Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of the militant revisionist wing of the Zionist movement:

I was myself … a political Zionist in my youth and was a member of a Zionist student organization. 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, keep abreast of developments, and so on.’ He replied, ‘And rifle practice?’ And I had to say, ‘No.’ ¹⁸

Towards political atheism

Zionism and liberalism are often taken as polar opposites. Zionism grew out of a response to the inadequacy of the liberal state to provide protection for the Jews. ‘For many Weimar Jews,’ David Biale has written, ‘Zionism represented the most fundamental alternative to the German liberalism in which the Jews had placed their hopes. Zionism was not simply one alternative among several, as it was for East European Jews, but the antithesis of their world view.’ ²¹ As a cultural generalization this may be true, but for Strauss it seems the exact opposite of the case. Rather than offering an alternative to liberalism, Zionism, on Strauss’s account, shares the same theological ‘neutrality’, the same political atheism, that makes it a piece with political liberalism. This arresting thesis was developed most fully in his essay ‘Der Zionismus bei Nordau’ published originally in Martin Buber’s journal Der Jude in 1923. ²²

The name of Max Nordau is not as well remembered today as that of other founders of the Zionist movement. ²³ He was a Hungarian Jew, Herzl’s most famous convert to Zionism, and the author of several novels and works of cultural criticism, chief among them a work called The Conventional Lies of Civilized Humanity. Like Herzl, Nordau had been an assimilationist until the Dreyfus Affair convinced him of the necessity of Zionism. The Dreyfus Affair pointed out to them the limits of liberalism and the need for a Jewish state if the Jews were to have any semblance of a normal political existence. In a famous speech given to the first Zionist Congress in Basle in 1897, Nordau electrified his audience by announcing that the project of emancipation had been a failure and that the only recourse for the Jews was to build a state of their own. ²⁴ He compared the Jews of the Diaspora to the ‘new Marranos’ who have been uprooted by the emancipation from their ancient traditions, but who have been refused full entry into the modern world due to the rise of anti-Semitism. As a disciple of the famous Italian criminologist Cesare Lambroso, Nordau diagnosed anti-Semitism as a form of spiritual or intellectual sickness that could only be cured with the transformation of Judaism into a new national identity – a new form of muscular Judaism – whose role models would be taken from the ranks of the Maccabean revolt and other Jewish war heroes.

Nordau is the only figure of the Zionist movement to whom Strauss devoted an entire essay. The occasion was the publication of Nordau’s Zionistische Schriften in 1923, the year of his death. From the outset of the essay, Strauss’s animus against Nordau is evident, although it seems less than fully warranted. ²⁵ Nordau, on Strauss’s account, vacillated between a commitment to political Zionism with its desire to achieve the material ends of land and statehood and a form of spiritual Zionism (geistiger Zionismus) that viewed Zionism as a movement of cultural renewal. There is a tension in Nordau’s Zionism between his realistic analysis of the plight of European Jewry and the means necessary to alleviate this situation. It is by no means obvious why Strauss should single out Nordau, of all people, for taking an insufficiently realistic attitude unless he means by that Nordau’s emphasis on the moral and psychological aspects of Jewish distress (Judennot). In the end Strauss identifies Nordau with the trait most characteristic of diasporic Judaism – an aversion to power. ²⁶

Strauss takes Nordau to task for his faint-heartedness at Herzl’s Machiavellianism. He cites Herzl’s posthumously published diaries revealing his irritation with Nordau’s private criticism of Herzl’s policy of deceptively playing off the Great Powers while self-consciously exaggerating Jewish enthusiasm for Zionism. Strauss’s point is that if one wills the end, one must will the means. ‘The motive for this falling away from Herzl’, Strauss complains, ‘is itself already a spiritual one: “honesty.”’ ²⁷ Herzl was a realist who believed that in politics ‘to speak of truth and untruth is ambiguous’. Politics, Strauss argues, is about creating realities so that what is untrue today may become true tomorrow. It is precisely this ‘underhandedness’ (hinterhältig)– his willingness to get his hands dirty – that constitutes the essence of Herzl’s political realism against which Nordau proposed a politics based on trust in the Jewish people. He accuses Nordau of demagogically appealing to ‘the Jewish heart which is always susceptible to innocent suffering and disappointed idealism’. Nordau’s ‘sympathy for socialism as well as the antipathy for secret diplomacy’ was the antithesis of Herzl’s political Zionism. ‘He contributed much to the frustration of Herzl’s original impulses,’ Strauss avers, ‘by explaining the greatness of Herzl to himself and to the Jewish people in sentimental categories.’ ²⁸

Strauss brings to his analysis of Zionism a new concept of his own coinage: Einwirklichung, a term with no very precise English translation. It is related to the term Wirklichkeit or reality. It might be rendered ‘a sense of reality’ or even ‘entering into reality’, but in any case a return of Judaism to the real world. While Jews had previously lived a spectral existence as a Luftvolk – a people without a normal political life – the categories of traditional Jewish thought – categories like chosenness and messianism – at least helped to sustain ‘a strong will to existence’. These categories provided the Jews with ‘a maximal possibility of existence by means of a minimum of normality’. ²⁹ By denying these traditional categories, liberalism has contributed to the euthanasia of Judaism. ‘Assimilation’, Strauss writes, ‘takes away from the Jews the self-assurance of ghetto life and gives them instead the illusory surrogate of trust in the humanity of civilization.’ ³⁰ Only when ‘the good natured hopes of liberal Judaism’ have been stripped away would the ‘sober kernel’ of Zionism be able to emerge.

Strauss argues that Nordau’s Zionism is itself a variant of the very emancipation it has fought against. By emancipation was meant that religion would no longer be used as a qualification for full civil and political rights. Henceforth religion was to be depoliticized or moved entirely to the private sphere of civil society. But, as it turned out, emancipation could not prevent, indeed was the precondition for, the rise of a new and virulent type of anti-Semitism based not on religion but on claims of culture and nationality. It was precisely this kind of secular anti-Semitism – indeed the very word anti-Semitism was the product of the new ‘science’ of racial ethnology – that left the Jews both bereft of their traditional status and unable to enter fully into modern life. ³¹ Nordau, Strauss writes, is ‘typical of current Zionism’ for his combination of ‘a naïve Enlightenment faith in the ideals of 1789 and a realistic skepticism concerning their actual significance for the Jewish question’. ³² Zionism derives from the same impulse towards national self-determination as do other forms of European nationalism. In this respect, Zionism is simply the alter ego of the age of emancipation. It is premised on the rejection of traditional Jewish categories of thought. ‘In Zionist matters,’ he claims, ‘theology has no say; Zionism is purely political.’ ³³

The critique of Nordau ends with a kind of ‘plague on both your houses’. Both Herzl and Nordau look outside the Jewish tradition to modern scientific achievements to supplement Zionism:

The close relation to biology characterizes the Zionism of Nordau just as much as the enthusiasm for technology characterizes the Zionism of Herzl. To put it bluntly, Herzl has the attitude of the northern German engineer – ‘With our technological achievements we’ll get the job done’ – whereas Nordau has the attitude of Homais the apothecary [in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary] who puts his famous scientific knowledge in the service of the public by engaging in the improvement of cider making, while constantly emphasizing his virtue. ³⁴

The same tough-mindedness – the same spirit of Sparta– that led Strauss to impugn Nordau is also evident in his critique of the neo-orthodox movement that he ridicules as a new ‘church militant’ (ecclesia militans). ³⁶ By orthodoxy Strauss understands ‘the submission of the Jewish people to the Torah’ that had received recent expression in the messianism of Isaac Breuer. ³⁷ Strauss presents the differences between political Zionism and messianism in a series of military images (‘forgive me for all the saber-rattling images, but the situation forces them upon us’). Most strikingly, he describes orthodoxy as the ‘single Jewish enemy’ of Zionism to which the Zionists are seen as ‘infidels and traitors’. To be sure, Zionism and neo-orthodoxy share the same dissatisfaction with the Enlightenment, but Strauss denies that a return to Jewish tradition is the solution to the problem. Strauss remains unwilling to turn his back on the Enlightenment. Rather, he claims that the very premises of orthodoxy have been thoroughly refuted by the ‘European critique’ of religion by which he means the Religionskritik of Spinoza and Nietzsche. ‘If Orthodoxy is resolved to do battle,’ Strauss writes, ‘then Zionism will not refuse to give battle, even though it cannot appeal to tradition but only to reason.’ ³⁸

This struggle against the ‘Jewish church’ and its neo-orthodox defenders was further developed in an address given at a camp retreat in Forchtenberg where Strauss replied to the critique of Hans Weinberg. ³⁹ Here Strauss called on his Bundesbrüder to establish a new alliance between Zionism and liberalism (‘political Zionism is liberal’). Contrary to a popular image of Strauss as a right-wing Jabotinskyite, ‘Today,’ he proclaimed, ‘the enemy is on the Right!’ – by which he meant the revival of Jewish orthodoxy. ⁴⁰ Although he had criticized Nordau for attaching himself naïvely to Enlightenment liberal principles, the Zionism that Strauss endorses is emphatically liberal Zionism, that is, ‘it rejects the absolute submission to the Law and instead makes individual acceptance of traditional contents dependent on one’s own deliberations’. ⁴¹

Instead of drawing upon exclusively Jewish sources and tradition, Strauss takes the current situation of German Jewry as his point of departure. His is a purely situational ethic that will take the needs of the present as its only authority. ‘What is justified by this situation is the will to the Jewish state, to Jewish external politics,’ he writes. ⁴² This means, essentially, the Herzlian demand for a liberal democratic state that recognizes the distinction between the public and private spheres of liberty and especially a freedom that leaves its citizens free from an intrusive orthodoxy. Rarely if ever again can one find in Strauss’s writings such a frank endorsement of atheism and political liberalism.

The illusion of experience

Strauss’s most comprehensive statement of his early atheism is found in an essay on Freud’s Die Zukunft einer Illusion published in Der jüdische Student in 1928. ⁴³ The core of the review is a passage borrowed from Goethe that the struggle between unbelief and belief – Unglauben und Glauben – is ‘the eternal and sole theme of the entire history of the world and of man’. ⁴⁴ This is, to say the least, a remarkable statement. It removes Strauss’s understanding of the theologico-political problem from its immediate context in recent German Jewish history and elevates it to the status of a world-historical problem, the ‘sole theme’ of world history. It brings to mind Jacobi and the famous Pantheismusstreit concerning the priority of faith or reason that was the subject of his doctoral dissertation. It is clear that Strauss’s thinking was moving beyond the sphere of ordinary political and literary polemics into a very different direction.

The debates over Zionism, Strauss alleges, have all taken place on the grounds of modern atheism. ‘In the age of atheism,’ Strauss avers, ‘the Jewish people can no longer base its existence on God but only on itself alone, on its labor, on its land, and on its state.’ ⁴⁵ This is especially true of Herzl’s political Zionism with its emphasis on ambitious technological plans and social engineering to achieve a utopian vision of harmony and social justice. Herzl concluded his utopian novel Altneuland with the phrase Wenn Ihr wolt, so ists kein Märchen (‘If you will it, it is no dream’), suggesting that the fate of the Jewish people depended on the priority of human agency rather than God’s providence.

The same atheistic presupposition holds true for the cultural Zionists as well. The cultural Zionists were more attuned than Herzl to the moral nature of Judaism, but they trace morality – the morality of the prophets – to the spirit of the Jewish people. But the biblical prophets claimed to speak to God who told them what to say and not to some amorphous Jewish spirit. Consequently, cultural Zionism conceives of Judaism as a national culture rather than a body of revealed law. It is based on European romanticism’s claim that each people, each Volk, has its own unique genius expressed in its original language, poetry and music. ⁴⁶ This reduction of the whole body of revealed law to the national culture or national consciousness of the Jewish people could not but represent a profound break with the Jewish tradition. ⁴⁷

Strauss welcomed Freud’s book as providing a remorseless attack on the category of experience as the basis of religious belief. ⁴⁸ The category of experience was an important modernist trope, going back to Rousseau’s religion of the heart in Emile and sanctioned by Kant’s moral religion of reason, but that was given powerful expression in Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige on which Strauss had published a note in 1923. ⁴⁹ For Otto, God is the mysterium tremendum, the ‘wholly other’ who can only be experienced in an existential state of fear and trembling. ‘The truly “mysterious” object is beyond apprehension and comprehension,’ Otto wrote. ⁵⁰ Within Jewish theology, Franz Rosenzweig had argued for a new experiential philosophy that he called das neues Denken. William James’s lectures The Varieties of Religious Experience would also be an example of works in this genre. In all of these works the central theme was the subjective experience of religion and how God is perceived by the subject.

Otto’s book was an important statement of the new theology that attempted to rescue the experiential sources of religion from the rationalist systems of theology that had come to be seen as increasingly remote from life. One of the very few readers to take note of Strauss’s review of Otto, Joseph Cropsey, observed that one can find here very early in Strauss’s career a distinction between an older theology based on the divine attributes and a modern theology based on the experience of the believer that comes close to his famous distinction between ancient and modern thought. ⁵¹ ‘Then,’ Strauss wrote, ‘the primary fact was God; now, it is world, man, religious experience.’ ⁵² It is not so much that the traditional doctrines of God and the attributes have been falsified; it is that they have become trite, clichéd. ‘Nowadays,’ he claims, ‘one usually invokes the “living fullness of experience” which is contrasted with the emptiness of the “attributes”.’ ⁵³ It is the ‘great significance’ of Otto’s book that it seeks to limit the rational aspect of religion by recovering those lived features of experience that form the basis of reason.

Strauss’s critique of the theology of experience can be traced back to his participation in the Blau-Weiss group. Blau-Weiss was a German-Zionist youth group created as an alternative to the Wandervogel, a kind of precursor of the Hitler youth organization with its emphasis on the Teutonic roots of German nationalism. By the time of Strauss’s involvement with Blau-Weiss, the group had split into two wings that could be called (somewhat anachronistically) an authoritarian and a communitarian branch. In his first published article, the ‘Response to Frankfurt’s “Word of Principle”’, Strauss took exception to the right-wing tendency epitomized by its charismatic leader Walter Moses, with his attempt to refound the group on the principle of Führertum. But he equally opposed the tendency of the Frankfurt group’s left-wing faction – Ernst Simon, Leo Löwenthal, Erich Fromm and Fritz Goithein – who countered the ‘pagan-fascist’ rhetoric of Moses with a ‘mystical-humanitarianism’ derived from Martin Buber and the cultural Zionists. ⁵⁴

The Frankfurt faction had adopted Buber’s theology of Erlebnis or intense inner experience as the basis for their own form of communitarian ethics. Near the beginning of the article Strauss offered up his own mea culpa for having been deceived by the Frankfurt faction’s appeal to personal experience and emotional sentimentality. Against the Frankfurt faction, Strauss found his ‘word of principle’ in the concept of Nüchternheit, a term that Michael Zank translates as ‘sobriety’, but that could be equally rendered as ‘matter-of-factness’ or ‘tough-mindedness’ to give it a Jamesian connotation. ⁵⁵ ‘It was thought that by heaping upon us for years, to the point of nausea, “personal encounters” and “confessions” one could make us forget that there is such a thing as critique,’ Strauss complained. ‘We ourselves were temporarily confused, but now we unambiguously profess the spirit of sobriety (Geist der Nüchternheit) as opposed to pathetic declamation.’ ⁵⁶ By the spirit of sobriety, Strauss meant something like the idea of Einwirklichung or a return to reality that he had introduced in his critique of Nordau.

Returning to the review of Freud, Strauss’s stated preference here for ‘sobriety’ over ‘declamation’, for ‘critique’ over ‘confessions’, is connected to his rejection of the experientialist standpoint. Rather than providing a dam against atheism, experience is simply theology’s last gasp. Strauss sets up a dialogue between the believer and the unbeliever. The believer claims to have experienced God; the unbeliever casts doubt on that experience. In such a standoff, Strauss wonders, shouldn’t the victory be awarded to those who have had the experience rather than those who have not? The believer in religious experience – like Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov – will say that experience may reveal something deeper, something more meaningful, than the categories of rational thought, to which Strauss replies sceptically: ‘importance and depth are bad criteria when dealing with the truth’. ⁵⁷ The appeal to experience is simply the last refuge of religion after it has already abandoned the biblical claims about miracles or God’s power over nature. ‘If that is the case,’ Strauss writes, ‘then it must be stated that the God of Scripture, the God who created heaven and earth, who not only directs the hearts of men like rivers, but who also guides natural events with a Creator’s freedom, that this God is no longer believed in.’ ⁵⁸ As Strauss would say later, better to be an open and honest atheist than to say that God exists as an idea. ⁵⁹

The value of Freud’s book is its claim that religion is an illusion rooted in human misery. Strauss finds in Freud’s description of the human situation something akin to Hobbes’s account of the state of nature as one of maximal fear and insecurity. Indeed, Freud’s account of the natural condition may have led Strauss to pursue his studies of Hobbes that would occupy a great deal of his time during the 1930s. Religion, for both Freud and Hobbes, is born out of the desire – the all-too-human desire – to escape the natural condition. The belief in a just and benevolent God is meant to provide comfort and meaning in a world threatened on all sides by uncontrollable forces. The classic Enlightenment critique of religion believed that freeing us from religion – the religious delusion – was the precondition for the achievement of a life of autonomy and self-direction. But the new atheism eschews all emancipatory dreams that are treated as simply another illusion. ‘Freud promises nothing except insight into the real situation of man,’ Strauss writes. ⁶⁰

‘The good European’

The bulk of Strauss’s time between 1925 and 1928 was devoted to a book project on Spinoza titled Die Religionskritik Spinozas als Grundlage seiner Bibelwissenschaft. ⁶¹ The background of its publication is worth noting. In 1924 Strauss published a lengthy review article titled ‘Cohens Analyse der Bibel-Wissenschaft Spinozas’, also published in Der Jude. ⁶² The article caught the attention of Julius Guttmann, the director of the Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin who appointed Strauss as a researcher. As its name implied, the Academy was dedicated to the pursuit of a scientific study of Judaism in accordance with the methods of the German Geisteswissenschaften, that is, a purely historical object of study. Strauss’s official assignment was the investigation of Spinoza’s science of biblical criticism and its predecessors. For reasons connected with disagreements with Guttmann, the book did not appear until 1930, by which time it had acquired a dedication to the memory of Franz Rosenzweig who had died the year before. ⁶³

Strauss’s disagreement with Cohen had focused on the alleged motives behind Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Cohen, as mentioned earlier, was the leading light of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism and (as Strauss would say many years later) ‘the center of attraction of philosophically minded Jews who were devoted to Judaism’. ⁶⁴ Cohen’s essay ‘Spinoza über Staat und Religion, Judentum und Christentum’ was published in 1910 at the very moment when the reputation of Spinoza was being rehabilitated throughout the Jewish world as a leader of the new age of emancipation. For Cohen, the case against Spinoza was simple: his critique of religion was based on a ‘humanly incomprehensible betrayal’ of Judaism and the Jewish people. ⁶⁵

Strauss’s essay criticized Cohen without exactly vindicating Spinoza. He takes Cohen to task for attributing motives of hatred and revenge to Spinoza that are either conjectural or unnecessary for understanding the Tractatus. Cohen makes much of Spinoza’s alleged hostility to the Jewish community, but such claims, Strauss alleges, are purely ad hominem attacks and fail to consider the ‘objective condition’ of 17th-century Holland. ⁶⁶ Further, Cohen had argued that the target of Spinoza’s ire was Judaism, but Strauss replies that there is nothing Spinoza says about Judaism that does not equally apply to Christianity. His target was revealed religion as such. But most significantly, Strauss alleges that Cohen missed the point of the Tractatus. Spinoza’s goal was not to attack Judaism but ‘to win recognition for the neutrality of the philosopher’. ‘Spinoza’, he wrote, ‘was compelled to engage in the critique of the Bible by legitimate motives, whether or not he was full of hatred toward Judaism.’ ⁶⁷

Strauss’s critique of Cohen on the grounds of historical accuracy must have appealed to Guttmann’s understanding of a Wissenschaft des Judentums. Yet in the course of preparing the book, Strauss turned his critical gaze on the very project of a science of Judaism. His concern was less with the science or Wissenschaft of Judaism than with the preconditions or condition of possibility for such a science. Strauss set out to show that there is no such thing as an unconditional or presuppositionless (voraussetzungslose) science of religion. As he put it tersely in a discussion of Simon Dubnow’s recently published History of the Jews: ‘The atheism of present-day Bible science is obvious.’ ⁶⁸ Rather than resting on a value-neutral science of the Bible, Strauss showed that this science presupposed the very atheism it sought to prove. This was evident in the title of Strauss’s book. Rather than making Spinoza’s Bibelwissenschaft the foundation of his critique of religion, he chose to make his critique of religion the presupposition of his biblical science. Strauss was close to arguing that the entire project for a Wissenschaft des Judentums was a house of cards. ⁶⁹

Strauss’s Die Religionskritik Spinozas was anything but a neutral piece of historical scholarship. Rather than ranking Spinoza as a founder of the modern scholarly discipline of Bible science (Bibel-Wissenschaft), he now placed Spinoza’s critique of religion within the tradition of ‘Epicureanism’ whose modern representatives he identified as Uriel Da Costa, Isaac de la Peyrère and Thomas Hobbes, as well as later thinkers like Hume, Holbach, Bauer, Feuerbach and Marx. ⁷⁰ The goal of the Epicurean critique of religion is to attain a condition of ataraxia, that is, tranquillity of soul where we have been emancipated from fear of death and the gods. The pursuit of tranquillity – not the pursuit of scientific truth – is the primary motive for the Religionskritik. The critique of religion remains fundamentally a moral, not a scientific, project, a point that he would develop again later on in his book on Hobbes. ⁷¹ This may seem an innocuous claim, but Strauss’s charge of Epicureanism was a battle cry. In the world of traditional Judaism, the very word Apikoros was deemed a highly charged term of abuse. To be sure, Strauss does not describe Epicureanism as a heresy, but even to use the term is to raise a red flag. To rank Spinoza among the Apikorsim was already to put him beyond the pale. ⁷²

Strauss’s second expulsion of Spinoza – that is not too strong a term – from the Jewish canon was made explicit in an essay titled ‘Das Testament Spinozas’ published in 1932, two years after the appearance of his book. ⁷³ Strauss begins the essay with a brief reception history of Spinoza from condemnation as a godless heretic, to partial vindication at the hands of Moses Mendelssohn, to canonization by Heinrich Heine, to modern scholarly neutrality. The question he asked is what is the testament of Spinoza, especially at a time when he was being welcomed back to the Jewish fold as an inspiration of the age of emancipation? How, then, are we to acknowledge Spinoza?

It is not as a Jew, Strauss argues, but as a member of that ‘small band of superior minds’ that, following Nietzsche, he calls ‘the good Europeans’ to which Spinoza properly belongs:

Spinoza did not remain a Jew, while Descartes, Hobbes, and Leibniz remained Christians. Thus it is not in accordance with Spinoza’s wishes that he be inducted into the pantheon of the Jewish nation. Under these circumstances it seems to us an elementary imperative of Jewish self-respect that we Jews should at last again relinquish our claim on Spinoza. By so doing, we by no means surrender him to our enemies. Rather, we leave him to that distant and strange community of ‘neutrals’ whom one can call, with considerable justice, the community of the ‘good Europeans’. ⁷⁴

Strauss went so far as to cast doubt on Spinoza’s influence on the creation of Zionism of which his Theologico-Political Treatise was being treated as a forerunner. ⁷⁵ In the third chapter of the book Spinoza considered the possibility of the recreation of the Jewish state and thus the chance of gaining God’s election ‘a second time’ (de novo). Strauss argues that, on this basis of this passage, it would be ‘risky’ to assign Spinoza favoured-son status in the Zionist movement. Spinoza did not so much endorse the creation of a Jewish state as consider it at most a condition of possibility (Möglichkeitsbedingung). ‘As if condescending from the heights of his philosophical neutrality,’ he writes, ‘[Spinoza] leaves it to the Jews to liberate themselves from their religion and thus to obtain for themselves the possibility of reconstituting their state.’ ⁷⁶ In other words, Spinoza could be of no use to Jews as Jews.

The chief testament of Spinoza is the idea of neutrality. Spinoza is to be remembered neither as a Jewish heretic nor as a forerunner of political Zionism but as a proud example of that rarest human phenomenon: the philosopher. ‘Spinoza will be venerated,’ Strauss concludes his essay, ‘so long as there are men who know how to appreciate the inscription on his signet ring (“caute”) or, to put it plainly: as long as there are men who know what it means to utter [the word]: independence.’ ⁷⁷ The independence that Strauss is referring to here is not the freedom to live as a Jew, but the freedom to live apart from one’s own theologico-political community. It is the freedom of the philosopher.

The discovery of the theologico-political problem

Strauss approached Spinoza to discover whether the Enlightenment had effectively refuted revealed religion. By returning to Spinoza, he was returning to the Enlightenment critique of religion in its classic form. If Spinoza was right then atheism and, perforce, political Zionism were legitimate responses – indeed the only honest responses – to the Jewish Question considered as a purely political phenomenon. But what if Spinoza was wrong? What if the claims for revelation had not been refuted, but only appeared to have been refuted? What if the entire project of Bibel-Wissenschaft rested on atheistic premises that reduced religion to an ingredient of culture, or spirit, or Weltanschaaung? What if political atheism was itself an act of faith or belief? What would this mean for the future of Jews and Judaism?

These questions were raised obliquely at the end of Strauss’s Weimar period in his ‘Anmerkungen zu Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen’, originally published in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpoitik in 1932. ⁷⁸ Schmitt had famously argued that das Politische – he was, I believe, the first to turn this word into a noun – rests on certain pre-rational ‘givens’, that is, on faith, decision and acts of will. This view that the irrational precedes all forms of rationalism was a standard trope of the German Counter-Enlightenment from Jacobi through Nietzsche and even to Weber’s theories of ‘value freedom’. Our choices, at least our ultimate choices, cannot be justified by reason alone, but are themselves the foundations on which any possible justification can take place. For Schmitt, these decisions in turn form the basis of the fundamental distinction between friend and enemy that constitutes the essence of the political. The political consists of distinct human groupings – peoples, nations, states – that are locked into a condition of unremitting ‘antagonism’ to one another. Only those with the courage to recognize this fact can restore a sense of ‘seriousness’ (Ernst) to political life.

There was much in Schmitt’s understanding of the political with which Strauss concurred, especially his analysis of liberalism’s tendency to paper over issues of ultimate concern in order to achieve social peace or consensus. But Schmitt’s understanding of liberalism contained a crucial fallacy, according to Strauss. Schmitt had turned to Hobbes to show that the natural condition of mankind is one of enmity and war. Strauss agreed with Schmitt that a world in which differences had been flattened would cease to be a political world. It would be a world of consumption, culture and ‘entertainment’. ⁷⁹ But Strauss argued that Hobbes’s deepest desire was to overcome the state of war, to replace it with a largely pacified society in which the basic distinction between friend and enemy had all but disappeared. Ironically, Hobbes was the source of the very liberalism that Schmitt so abhorred. Strauss concluded his review by noting that Schmitt’s critique of liberalism failed because it presupposed ‘the horizon of liberalism’. ⁸⁰

On the surface it appears as if Strauss is deepening the critique of liberalism that Schmitt had begun. Yet Strauss’s main concern is not with liberalism, but with the basis of the friend–enemy distinction that provided the foundation for Schmitt’s conception of power politics. It is not the friend–enemy distinction per se that divides humanity into hostile camps, Strauss argued, but our competing conceptions of justice and the human good. The basis for our divisions are not simply acts of will or moments of existential decision that defy reason, but rather reasoned judgements over questions like ‘how to live?’ or ‘what way of life is right?’ For the first time in any of his writings, Strauss turns to classical political philosophy – Plato’s Euthyphro, 7b–d and Phaedrus 263a – to indicate the true source of disagreement. In the former passage Plato writes as follows:

But about what would a disagreement be, which we could not settle and which would causes to be enemies and be angry with each other? Perhaps you cannot give an answer offhand; but let me suggest it. Is it not about right and wrong, and noble and disgraceful, and good and bad? Are not these the questions about which you and I and other people become enemies, when we do become enemies, because we differ about them and cannot reach any satisfactory agreement? ⁸¹

Strauss's reference to Plato gives the lie to the thesis (much advertised of late) that he was some kind of Counter-Enlightenment reactionary. Strauss’s understanding of the political is guided not by romantic political theology, but by Platonic political philosophy. ‘By the seriousness of the question of what is right,’ Strauss averred, ‘the political – the division of the human race into foes and friends – is justified.’ ⁸² In other words, only what can first lay claim to justice – to what is right – can count as a matter of moral seriousness. With a simple turn of the screw Strauss demonstrated that Schmitt’s view of the political was lacking in the very seriousness for which he had criticized liberalism. For Schmitt, conflict was an expression of Nietzschean Redlichkeit – honesty, sincerity, faith and rectitude – but emotional commitment, as Strauss had said in his Freud review, was a poor criterion for handling the truth. It was this realization that, just a few years later in a footnote to the Introduction to Philosophie und Gesetz, would lead him to note the difference between ‘the new probity’ and ‘the old love of truth’ (Wahrheitsliebe). ⁸³

Conclusion

Strauss’s engagement with Schmitt would ultimately provide the occasion for the ‘change of orientation’ that he later claimed sanctioned a return to pre-modern philosophy. ⁸⁴ This change of orientation coincided precisely with his break with his youthful infatuation with Nietzsche about which he had confessed to Löwith. ⁸⁵ Among other things, his review of Schmitt forced a whole new examination of the struggle between unbelief and belief that he called – and would call again – ‘the genuine, single, and deepest theme of world history’. ⁸⁶ Rather than assuming that Spinoza’s and Nietzsche’s Religionskritik had settled the dispute between faith and reason in favour of atheism, this struggle between atheism and orthodoxy came to acquire a new sense of urgency. Political atheism and political theology came to appear as simply two sides of the same coin, namely, dogmatic beliefs that presupposed what they needed to demonstrate.

This change of orientation also necessitated a very different perspective on the Jewish Question. Strauss’s earliest writings were those of a young Zionist who accepted Herzl’s political atheism. His early critique of Nordau had focused on the latter’s sentimentality and unwillingness to engage in the kind of power politics that characterized Herzl’s practical Zionism. The later Strauss – the Strauss who had come to regard political atheism as itself a piece of faith – adopted a considerably different understanding of power politics and accordingly a more sympathetic reading of cultural and even religious Zionism. What was political Zionism but an empty shell if a Jewish state were not supported by Jewish culture? Political Zionism, he maintained, was an ‘honourable’ response to the levelling of tradition brought about by the age of emancipation, but it was by no means an adequate response. Although Strauss would proclaim that the establishment of the state of Israel was ‘a blessing for all Jews everywhere regardless of whether they admit it or not’, he could still say that a Jewish state had not ended the Galut – the exile – but that the state of Israel remained very much a part of the exile. The Jewish Question, such as it was, was not susceptible to political solutions but remained one of those ‘infinite, absolute problems’ that do not admit of human solutions. ⁸⁷

Strauss said that his changed orientation was merely given its ‘first expression’ in his review of Schmitt’s Der Begriff des Politischen, but this review had been prepared by a discovery that would amount to a revelation. This occurred while working on the Islamic and Jewish philosophers in the Berlin National Library in 1929. ⁸⁸ While reading a Latin translation of Avicenna’s On the Divisions of the Rational Sciences, Strauss came across a sentence that would serve as the equivalent of Rousseau’s famous ‘illumination’ on the road to Vincennes. According to Avicenna’s statement, the entire treatment of prophecy and divine law is already contained in Plato’s Laws. Indeed, so powerful was the influence of this statement that Strauss would use it as the epigraph to his last book written more than 40 years later. ⁸⁹ This seemingly unobtrusive statement was to put Strauss’s work on a wholly new path. This meant for him that the themes of prophecy, revelation and providence were not to be understood as belonging to the province of the ‘philosophy of religion’, but to political philosophy – law in the most comprehensive sense of the term – in its original meaning. Strauss would go on to apply this insight not only to the major figures of medieval philosophy – Alfarabi, Averroes and Maimonides – but to the origins of philosophy in the classical world. The central problem of philosophy was not the tension or reconciliation of faith and reason which is a peculiarly modern trope, but the primacy of the law – the authoritative grounding of the political community – as the ultimate foundation of philosophy. The grounding of the law becomes nothing less than the rationale for philosophy. Henceforward, as Strauss would understand it, every community, insofar as it is a political community, is a theologico-political community based on the peculiar nexus of philosophy and law. ⁹⁰

It would be an exaggeration to say that there was an ‘epistemological break’ – to use a somewhat discredited term – separating the young from the mature Strauss in the way that used to be attributed to the early and late Marx. ⁹¹ There are not two Strausses or even three (as has sometimes been claimed) but only one whose work is characterized by a slow but steady process of deepening and self-clarification. ⁹² Strauss’s transition from a young Zionist to a Platonic philosopher did not occur overnight. Rather his engagement with the theologico-political problem was not complete until he made his discovery or rather recovery of the tradition of exoteric writing several years later. ⁹³ This allowed him, for the first time, to see how the great medieval and early modern philosophers adapted philosophy to harmonize it with the prevailing laws or nomoi of their respective political communities. But this act of harmonization did not prevent them from quietly, yet emphatically, probing the foundation of the laws that were the very precondition of philosophy.

The effect of these discoveries was a return to the source of the problem in the struggle between Unglauben und Glauben by means of a re-enactment of the quarrel between the partisans of theology and the partisans of philosophy. This quarrel would later be expressed in the formula ‘Jerusalem and Athens’, about which Strauss would write continuously. ⁹⁴ By Jerusalem, Strauss meant the pre-philosophic city, the holy city, based on faith or belief; by Athens, he meant the natural city based on reason or philosophy. It was the ongoing dialectic between these two cities – these two competitors, as it were, for the right way of life – that constituted the core of the theologico-political problem. But by the end of the Weimar period, this was only barely coming into view. Strauss had come to see that the modernist project associated with Spinoza had failed in its ‘Napoleonic’ efforts to storm the citadel of orthodoxy and that the claims for Jerusalem had not been refuted. Strauss was at last within hailing distance of the theme – the theologico-political dilemma – that would prove to be his life’s work.