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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2014
The German Jewish historian of political philosophy Leo Strauss is best known for mature works in which he proposed the existence of an esoteric tradition in political philosophy, attacked the liberal tradition of political thought, and defended a classical approach to natural right against its modern counterparts. This essay demonstrates that in his youth, beginning during a scholarly apprenticeship at the Berlin Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, Strauss championed “medievals” (rather than ancients) against “moderns,” and did so through a sparring match with his postdoctoral supervisor Julius Guttmann, whom he cast in the role of representative “modern.” While for Guttmann the stakes were scholarly, for Strauss they were political. Strauss's Weimar Jewish “medievalism” was a deliberate rejection of the tradition of modern Jewish thought Strauss associated with Guttmann's teacher Hermann Cohen, whom Strauss accused of neglecting the political distinctiveness of Jewish thought. While the conflict between Strauss and Guttmann has been neglected in much of the literature on Strauss, it served as the crucible in which many of his mature views, including his famous exoteric (sometimes called “esoteric”) writing thesis, began to take shape.
1 Strauss, Leo, Philosophy and Law, trans. Adler, Eve (Albany, 1995)Google Scholar.
2 Strauss himself first referred to “exoteric writing,” but “esoteric writing” has become the conventional term. See Strauss, “Persecution and the Art of Writing,” originally published in Social Research (1941) 8, 488–504, and then republished in Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago, 1952).
3 Scholars have convincingly argued that Strauss's esoteric writing thesis was grounded in readings of Maimonides and his Islamic influence, al-Farabi, that Strauss conducted during the late 1930s; Daniel Tanguay argues at length in Leo Strauss: An Intellectual Biography (New Haven, 2007) that the “exoteric writing” thesis could have only emerged after Strauss's thought took a “Farabian turn.” However, Tanguay omits the Weimar context in which Strauss first encountered al-Farabi's thought. It is most likely that Strauss first learned of al-Farabi's writings on Plato and Aristotle from his eventual brother-in-law, the scholar of medieval Islam Paul Kraus. They studied together in Berlin during the late 1920s, examining Farabi's paraphrase of Plato's Laws as well as Farabi's al-Milla and al-Fadila, side by side. On 1 May 1946, two years after Kraus had committed suicide in Cairo, Strauss wrote to Kraus's friend Charles Kuentz in search of the documents Kraus had prepared following their collaboration: “I have worked together with Kraus on Farabi, and we studied together the al-milla and al-fadila, and the paraphrase of Plato's Laws in particular. When we were both in Berlin, I ordered photographs of the mss. of these works, which Kraus later took to Cairo in order to prepare an edition and translation. These must be among his papers . . . I should appreciate it very much if, in accordance with the plan of your institute, you would let me have these materials at your earliest convenience.” Kuentz evidently did not find the documents, but Strauss continued his own work on al-Farabi as a key to reading Maimonides and Plato. The fragment of Strauss's letter is reprinted in Kraemer, Joel L., “The Death of an Orientalist: Paul Kraus from Prague to Cairo,” in Kramer, Martin, ed., The Jewish Discovery of Islam: Studies in Honor of Bernard Lewis (Tel Aviv, 1999)Google Scholar.
4 For one classic formulation of this view see Abrams, M. H., Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York, 1971)Google Scholar.
5 Strauss, Leo, Spinoza's Critique of Religion (Chicago, 1965)Google Scholar 2. For the sake of convenience all references are to the English edition published by the University of Chicago Press; the original German appeared as Die Religionskritik Spinozas als Grundlage seiner Bibelwissenschaft Untersuchungen zu Spinozas Theologisch-Politischen Traktat (Berlin, 1930).
6 On “modernist archaism” see Gordon, Peter Eli, Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (Berkeley, 2003)Google Scholar. Gordon's account emphasizes the aesthetic dimensions of modernist archaism (see ibid., 238–43) but attends to the philosophical and religious elements of “antimodernism” as well. Modernist antimodernism could be seen, he suggests, in those German Jewish thinkers who “longed for a ‘primordial’ Jewish past.” Ibid., 24.
7 Strauss, Spinoza's Critique of Religion, 2–3.
8 Ibid., 3. In his 1940 lecture “The Living Issues of German Postwar Philosophy” Strauss claimed that “criticism of modern civilization is related to a longing for some past, for some antiquity. An English acquaintance of mine told me that what struck him most, and what was most incomprehensible to him, when he was talking to Germans, was their longing for their tribal past. Now, longing for the Teutonic past is only the most crude and unintelligent, the most ridiculous form of a deep dissatisfaction with modern civilization. In its most enlightened form, it is a longing for classical antiquity, especially for Greek antiquity.” See Strauss, “The Living Issues of German Postwar Philosophy,” published in Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem (Cambridge, 2006), 115–40, 115–16. “Teutonic” might only refer to a tribal group identity perhaps poorly understood both by contemporary Germans and by Strauss himself, but it could also refer to the Teutonic knightly order originally formed to aid pilgrims to the Holy Land which became, however, an important military force in the Crusades. In the 1940 lecture Strauss clearly juxtaposes his own interest in the Greeks against the lesser antiquarianism of medievalism—but as in 1962, the gesture merely disavows his very real earlier medievalism.
9 McCormick, John P., “Irrational Choice and Mortal Combat as Political Destiny: The Essential Carl Schmitt,” Annual Review of Political Science, 10/1 (2007), 315–39, 317CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Eliezer Schweid, in an important review of Strauss's disagreements with Guttmann, notes their methodological dispute but emphasizes their underlying theological debate over the compatibility of religion with rational philosophical inquiry. See Schweid, “Religion and Philosophy: The Scholarly–Theological Debate between Julius Guttmann and Leo Strauss,” in Maimonidean Studies, 1 (1990), 163–95, esp. 164–5. See also Rethelyi, Mari, “Guttmann's Critique of Strauss's Modernist Approach to Medieval Philosophy: Some Arguments toward a Counter-Critique,” Textual Reasoning, 3/1 (June 2004), available at http://jtr.lib.virginia.edu/volume3/rethelyi.htmlGoogle Scholar.
11 See Schweid, “Religion and Philosophy,” 165.
12 The essay is translated into English as Ethics of Maimonides, trans. and ed. Almut Sh. Bruckstein (Madison, 2004).
13 Ibid. 23.
14 Ibid. 30.
15 Ibid. 315. On the distinction Maimonides himself drew between proximity to God and knowledge of God, see Gordon, Peter Eli, “The Erotics of Negative Theology: Maimonides on Apprehension,” Jewish Studies Quarterly, 2/1 (1995), 1–38Google Scholar.
16 Strauss, Leo, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought, ed. Kenneth Hart Green (Albany, 1997) 18Google Scholar.
17 Ibid., xxv. Here Strauss drew on the famous phrase of Samson Raphel Hirsch (1808–88), the neo-Orthodox German Jewish leader who slogan was “Torah im Derekh Eretz,” or Torah in harmony with the ways of existing political communities.
18 Guttmann, Julius, Die Philosophie des Judentums (Munich, 1933)Google Scholar; unless stated otherwise all citations in this essay are to the much later American edition of Guttmann's book, which was itself based on a Hebrew edition in which Guttmann substantially revised portions of the earlier work. See Guttmann, The Philosophy of Judaism, trans. David W. Silverman (Northvale, 1964), 328–9.
19 Notably Jakob Guttmann had been part of a 1904 gathering of scholars in Breslau that had called for a new reading of Maimonides—and that had recruited Cohen to produce what became his 1908 Ethics of Maimonides.
20 See Fritz Bamberger's introductory essay to the 1964 edition of The Philosophy of Judaism, xiii.
21 Guttmann, The Philosophy of Judaism, 355.
22 Ibid., 357. Guttmann's critique of Cohen recapitulated, albeit in a different key, Martin Buber's earlier complaint that Cohen's rendition of Judaism as a system of concepts ignored the reality of the Jewish nation. See Martin Buber, “Begriffe und Wirklichkeit,” Der Jude, 5 (July 1916), 281. Notably, in his “Living Issues of German Postwar Philosophy” Strauss made a comment that recalled Guttmann's critique of Cohen, although Strauss placed the blame for the depersonalization of the Divine squarely on Kant's shoulders: “It was hard not to see that the question of the existence or non-existence of a personal God, Creator of Heaven and Earth, was a serious question, more serious even than the question of the right method of the social sciences. If the question should be answered, if it should even be understood as a meaningful question, one had to go back to an age when it was in the center of discussion—i.e, to Pre-kantian philosophy.” Strauss in Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 130–31.
23 In contrast, and illuminating his disquiet with Cohen, Guttmann praised Franz Rosenzweig for focusing on the existential predicament (and encounter with the Divine) of the individual. Guttmann, The Philosophy of Judaism, 370.
24 Ibid., 359.
25 See R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, Introduction to Guttmann's Philosophies of Judaism.
26 Ibid., 15.
27 Ibid., ix.
28 Ibid., 358.
29 Guttmann, The Philosophy of Judaism, 4.
30 Ibid., 47.
31 See Guttmann in Alfred Jospe, ed., Studies in Jewish Thought: An Anthology of German Jewish Scholarship (Detroit, 1981).
32 Strauss, Philosophy and Law, 73.
33 Ibid., 54.
34 Ibid., 43.
35 Guttmann, The Philosophy of Judaism, 12.
36 Ibid., 342.
37 Rosenzweig, Franz, “Einleitung,” in Cohen, Hermann, Jüdische Schriften (Berlin, 1924)Google Scholar.
38 Kinkel, Walter, Hermann Cohen (Stuttgart, 1924)Google Scholar.
39 Strauss, “Quarrel,” in Strauss, Philosophy and Law, 47.
40 Ibid., 58, original emphasis.
41 Ibid., 59.
42 Ibid., 60.
43 On Strauss and heresy see Lazier, Benjamin, God Interrupted: Heresy and the European imagination Between the World Wars (Princeton, 2008)Google Scholar.
44 Strauss, “Quarrel,” 73, original emphasis.
45 Guttmann, Philosophy of Judaism, 172.
46 Ibid., 178.
47 Ibid., 180.
48 Strauss was addressing Cohen's “Spinoza über Staat und Religion, Judentum und Christentum,” Jahrbuch für jüdische Geschichte und Literatur, 18 (1915), 56–150.
49 Strauss in Leo Strauss: The Early Writings (1921–1932), ed. and trans. Michael Zank (Albany, 2002), 149, Strauss's emphasis.
50 Ibid., 156.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid., 151.
53 Ibid., 158, original emphasis.
54 Published in ibid.
55 Ibid., 109.
56 Ibid.
57 See Michael Zank, Introduction, in ibid., 3–49.
58 Ibid., 177, original emphasis.
59 Ibid., 180. Strauss would use the term “the sociology of philosophy” in the 1952 Introduction to his collection Persecution and the Art of Writing. He seemed to be describing the essays published in that work, composed during the 1940s, which he understood as studies in “genuine knowledge” as opposed to works in the more capacious “sociology of knowledge” imagined by Max Weber, Karl Mannheim, and others, which could concern either “genuine knowledge” or that which “pretends to be knowledge.” See Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, 7.
60 See Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 12.
61 Strauss, “Ecclesia Militans,” Jüdische Rundschau (Berlin), 30/36 (8 May 1925), reprinted in Leo Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, ed. Heinrich Meier (Stuttgart, 1996), 351–6. Also translated and republished in Leo Strauss: The Early Writings, 124–30.
62 Strauss, “Ecclesia Militans,” 354; and see Myers, David N., Resisting History: Historicism and Its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (Princeton, 2003), 128Google Scholar.
63 Breuer and Strauss also shared an appreciation, more restrained in Strauss's case, of the writings of Franz Rosenzweig. A letter from Breuer to Rosenzweig (11 March 1924) and Rosenzweig's response (28 March 1924) testify to the impression that Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption made on Breuer, and to the effect which Breuer's tract, Messiaspuren (traces of the Messiah) had on Rosenzweig. The letters are stored in the Leo Baeck Institute Archive, Item # MF 579.
64 Breuer, Isaac, The Jewish National Home (Frankfurt am Main, 1925), 353Google Scholar.
65 Mittleman, Alan, Between Kant and Kabbalah(Albany, 1990)Google Scholar, viii.
66 Ibid., 12.
67 Kant, Immanuel, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Greene, Theodore M. and Hudson, Hoyt H. (New York, 1934), 85Google Scholar.
68 As Samuel Moyn points out, the attractions of a Breuer-esque Law understood as command only tell part of the story of Strauss's opposition to Cohen. Strauss's reference to the Streit between Luther and Eck may have also resonated with his own ongoing disenchantment with a circle of Protestant theologians, including Rudolf Otto, Karl Barth, Friedrich Gogarten, and the larger circle of writers associated with the journal Zwischen den Zeiten (Between the Times), authors originally committed to an “experiential” theory of religion, who watched, however, their model collapse during the Weimar years. Against the neo-Kantian revival of the 1890s, with Hermann Cohen at its head, the experientialists attempted to show that Cohen's Kantian view of the Divine might be broadened to allow for an experiential rather than merely noumenal picture of the Divine. However, and as Moyn points out, the attractions of experience would not survive the crisis of meaning brought on by the Weimar years. See Moyn, Samuel, “From Experience to Law: Leo Strauss and the Weimar Crisis of the Philosophy of Religion,” History of European Ideas, 33/2 (June 2007), 174–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Julius Guttmann himself noted, in his Philosophy of Judaism, that many young German Jews “including some of Rosenzweig's friends,” were influenced by the teachings of some of the younger Christian groups, although by that comment Guttmann was referring to converts to Christianity. See Guttmann, The Philosophy of Judaism, 368.
69 On Peterson and Dempf, see Michael Hollerich, “Catholic Anti-liberalism in Weimar: Political Theology and Its Critics,” draft version, available at www.law.wisc.edu/m/mrmnd/hollerich_10–20–08.doc, accessed June 2011.
70 On Schmitt's interest in the medieval see McCormick, John P., Carl Schmitt's Critique of Liberalism (Cambridge, 1999)Google Scholar.
71 In 2009 the journal Constellations published a 19 May 1933 letter Strauss sent to his friend Karl Löwith, a letter that has since become infamous. In that letter Strauss seemed to affirm the virtues of fascism with the remark, “There is no reason to crawl to the cross, neither to the cross of liberalism, as long as somewhere in the world there is a glimmer of the spark of the Roman thought.” See Strauss in Constellations, 16 (2009), 82–3. Notably, almost two months later Strauss wrote to Schmitt asking him if he could provide an introduction to Charles Maurras, the anti-Dreyfusard and principal thinker behind the Action Française. Strauss's letter to Schmitt is reproduced in Meier, Heinrich, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, trans. Lomax, J. Harvey (Chicago, 1995), 127–8Google Scholar.
72 Strauss, “Anmerkungen zu Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik (Tübingen), 67/6 (Aug–Sept. 1932), 732–49. For ease all citations provided here are to the translation of Strauss's Notes published in Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue.
73 Joseph Cropsey, Foreword to Meier, The Hidden Dialogue, x–xi.
74 Ibid., 94.
75 Strauss, Leo, Philosophie und Gesetz: Beitrage zum Verstandnis Maimunis und seiner Vorlaufer (Berlin, 1935), 31Google Scholar and 31 n. And see Meier's discussion in Meier, The Hidden Dialogue, 30 n. 32.
76 Strauss in Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 101.
77 Guttmann's response to Strauss is published as Philosophie der Religion oder Philosophie des Gesetzes?, Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, vol. 5/6 (Jerusalem 1974).
78 Ibid., 4.
79 Ibid., 6.
80 Ibid., 5, trans. Mari Rethelyi.
81 On Rosenzweig's and, secondarily, Heidegger's relationships with Cohen see Gordon, Peter Eli, “Science, Finitude, and Infinity: Neo-Kantianism and the Birth of Existentialism,” Jewish Social Studies, 6/1 (Fall 1999), 30–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and see Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (Berkeley, 2003), 39–81.
82 See Bambach, Charles R., Heidegger, Dilthey and the Crisis of Historicism (Ithaca, 1995), 197–8Google Scholar. See Eugene Sheppard's discussion of Destruktion in Sheppard, Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile: The Making of a Political Philosopher (Waltham, 2006), 38.
83 Leo Strauss, “An Unspoken Prologue to a Public Lecture at St. John's,” 2; reprinted in Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, ed. Hart Green (Albany, 1997), 449–52, 450.
84 As Peter Eli Gordon notes, the original 1933 edition of Guttmann's Philosophy of Judaism only referred to Rosenzweig obliquely and critically, mentioning that contemporary Jewish thought “follows the metaphysical and irrational tendencies that generally dominate the thinking of our day.” Guttmann, The Philosophy of Judaism, 362, German edn., trans. Gordon. See Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy, 7.
85 Strauss, Philosophy and Law, 52.
86 See Ferry, Luc, Rights: The New Quarrel between Ancients and Moderns, trans. Philip, Franklin (Chicago, 1990)Google Scholar; Smith, Stephen B., Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism (Chicago, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and, recently, Altman, William H.F., The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National Socialism (Lexington, VA, 2010)Google Scholar. For this author's review of Altman see Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, available at www.ndpr.nd.edu/review.cf, posted 6/2/2011; and see also Wurgaft, Benjamin Aldes, “How to Read Maimonides after Heidegger: The Cases of Levinas and Strauss,” in Robinson, James T., ed., The Cultures of Maimonideanism (Leiden, 2009)Google Scholar, 353–83.
87 Strauss passed this judgment on Heidegger in his correspondence with Alexandre Kojève: “we both apparently turned away from Being to Tyranny because we have seen that those who lacked the courage to face the issue of Tyranny, who therefore . . . were forced to evade the issue of Being as well, precisely because they did nothing but talk of Being.” Strauss, Leo, On Tyranny, ed. Gourevitch, Victor and Roth, Michael S. (Chicago, 1991), 212Google Scholar.
88 Strauss, Philosophy and Law, 74.
89 See Peter Eli Gordon's discussion of Cassirer's statement in “Science, Finitude, and Infinity.”
90 Strauss was far less generous to Cohen and Guttmann than was Rosenzweig, who had seen himself as in some respects continuing Cohen's project even as he negated Cohen. See ibid.
