The Jewish Thought of Leo Strauss?: Review Essay

Review Essay: TheJewish Thought ofLeo Strauss? THE JEWISH THOUGHT OF LEO STRAUSS? REVIEW ESSAY by Shadia B. Drury Department of Political Science University of Calgary 81 Jew and Philosopher: The Return to Maimonides in the Jewish Thought ofLeo Strauss, by Kenneth Hart Green. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. 278 pp. $18.95. InJew and Philosopher, Kenneth Hart Green sets out to discover the Jewish thought of Leo Strauss. He provides a painstaking account of the development of Strauss's thought that focuses on his commentaries on Jewish writers-Moses Maimonides, Benedict Spinoza, Hermann Cohen, and Franz Rosenzweig. Those who are not already familiar with these authors will not learn about them from Green's book, whose turgid prose bears all the marks of a graduate dissertation. Those who have the tenacity to get through it will be very disappointed. If they knew nothing about Jewish thought, they will discover nothing; and if they knew a little about Leo Strauss, they will find only what they already knew. There is no doubt that the book will be dismissed as the plodding product of an unseasoned intellect. But all its shortcomings notwithstanding, the book is not as insipid or as innocuous as it seems. On the contrary, I believe that the book chronicles a tragedy of epic proportions. The disappointment felt by the reader at the end of the book is the disappointment of the hero at the end of a harrowing adventure. Kenneth Green is the heroic protagonist who searches tirelessly for the Jewishness of his beloved hero, Leo Strauss. But as we shall see, the heroic search is in vain. Green rightly sees Strauss as someone who was always preoccupied with the contest between Jewish Orthodoxy on one hand and Western philosophy on the other-Jerusalem and Athens (p. 29). Green paints Strauss as a young man who was eagerly searching for a complete and rational system of truth that he eventually found in the thought of Maimonides (pp. 40, 48, 51). But how exactly did Strauss understand 82 SHOFAR Winter 1995 Vol. 13, No.2 Maimonides? Green identifies three stages in the development of Strauss's understanding of Maimonides. These three stages correspond roughly to three of Strauss's works: Spinoza's Critique of Religion, Philosophy and Law, and Persecution and the Art of Writing. In the first stage, Strauss is impressed by Spinoza because he faces the theologico-political problem more honestly and more forthrightly than more moderate liberals like Hermann Cohen. Green does not explain what is involved here, but it is safe to say that Spinoza's liberalism or modernism requires a secular society that is neither Jewish nor Christian, a society in which Jews and Christians can live side by side. Spinoza was a firm believer in the principles of the Enlightenment; he thought that rule by enlightened statesmen would be preferable to rule by ambitious and cunning priests. Spinoza was accused of being a traitor and a, self-hating Jew, but Strauss rightly defends him against these charges, saying that his defense of a secular liberal modernity against Orthodoxy had its source in his love of the Jewish people-he wanted them to live happily in a secular community without fear of persecution. Nevertheless, as Green points out, Strauss was not totally convinced by Spinoza's criticism of Maimonides because he thought that reason cannot totally refute revelation (p. 94). According to Green, in the second stage of the development of Strauss's Maimonidean thought, Strauss begins to turn away from Spinoza in the direction of Maimonides. However, his understanding of the latter is largely conventional (pp. 59,88). In this conventional view, Maimonides is the Aquinas ofJudaism-someone who tries to bridge the gulf between biblical theology and Aristotelian philosophy. However, Strauss was not entirely convinced that a reconciliation of reason and revelation was pOSSible (p. 88). In other words, Strauss thought that the claim that there are good rational grounds for faith was not compelling. And the reason for that, it seems to me, is that Strauss continued to see faith as a leap outside of reason, and this explains his fascination with the existential theology of Franz Rosenzweig...