¹ Green, Kenneth Hart, Jew and Philosopher: The Return to Maimonides in the Jewish Thought of Leo Strauss (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993), 237f.Google Scholar; Gildin, Hilail, “Déjà Jew All Over Again: Dannhauser on Leo Strauss and Atheism,” Interpretation 25 (1997–1998):126Google Scholar; Sorensen, Discourses on Strauss, 45f.

² Reading Leo Strauss, 116.

³ Reading Leo Strauss, 137.

⁴ Reading Leo Strauss, 183, quoting Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 24.

⁵ Reading Leo Strauss, 199–201.

⁶ Cf. Reading Leo Strauss, 131, 196–97.

⁷ Reading Leo Strauss, 117, quoting Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1958), 13.

⁸ Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1952), 143Google Scholar.

⁹ There are at least two other occasions where Smith seems to me to depart too quickly from the surface details of what Strauss is saying. One is his calling attention to Strauss's speaking of Judaism as a “delusion,” albeit a “heroic delusion,” as if it were self-evident that Strauss's intention in using this expression was atheistic—whereas Strauss himself goes on to forestall just such an inference by explaining, as Smith allows by quoting Strauss's explanation in part though without further comment, that by “delusion” is meant a “dream” or “aspiration” or “divination of an enigmatic vision” and that “an enigmatic vision in the emphatic sense is the perception of the ultimate mystery, of the truth of the ultimate mystery”; Strauss adds that the mystery in question is not denied but confirmed by the modern belief in the essentially and eternally progressive nature of science (Reading Leo Strauss,82f.; see Strauss, “Why We Remain Jews,” Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought, ed. Green, Kenneth Hart [Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997], 327–29)Google Scholar. The other occasion is Smith's inferring, from Strauss's assertion that the tension between Jerusalem and Athens is not resolvable, that Strauss's supposed choice of atheism over Judaism is “fideist,” i.e., decisionist or irrational (Reading Leo Strauss, 16f., 70f., 80ff.); see, however, my remarks on Sorensen and on Meier, below.

¹⁰ Reading Leo Strauss, 39. Here Smith admittedly relies on what he takes to be the drift of Strauss's Maimonides interpretation rather than on the details of what either Strauss or Maimonides says firsthand.

¹¹ Reading Leo Strauss, 13f.

¹² E.g., Deut. 4:6. Cf. note 28, below.

¹³ Guide of the Perplexed 3.27.

¹⁴ The opinions in question are God's existence, oneness, and incorporeality. Cf., e.g., Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern, 149ff.

¹⁵ See Strauss, Philosophy and Law: Contributions to the Understanding of Maimonides and His Predecessors, trans. Adler, Eve (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 103, 105, 121Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Possibly Smith is misled by his reliance on Samuel Shirley's translation of Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. A passage Smith quotes from Shirley to underwrite his Spinoza argument reads: “[I]t would be hardly likely that men addicted to Egyptian superstition … should have had any sound understanding of God” (Reading Leo Strauss, 34, quoting Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, trans. Shirley [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995], 32). The same passage continues, in Shirley's rendering: “Therefore the right way of life, or true living, and the worship and love of God was for them bondage rather than true freedom … .” In Spinoza's Latin, the last five words are: magis servitus, quam vera libertas (Spinoza, Opera, ed. Carl Gebhardt [4 vols.; Heidelberg: Carl Winters Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1925], vol. 3, 41, line 6f.). A more literal translation of them would read: “more bondage than true freedom.”

¹⁷ See Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Ch. 17 (Opera, 3, 201–21, esp. 207–17).

¹⁸ Spinoza is thinking of the freedom of the biblical prophets to express themselves as they saw fit; see Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Ch. 2, where he speaks of how prophecies “varied with respect to the diversity of opinions of the Prophets” (Opera, 3, 32, line 32f.).

¹⁹ See also Lachterman, David R., “Laying Down the Law: The Theologico-Political Matrix of Spinoza's Physics,” in Leo Strauss's Thought: Toward a Critical Engagement, ed. Udoff, Alan (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner, 1991), 123–53Google Scholar.

²⁰ Thoughts on Machiavelli, 174–299. See Sorensen's paragraph-by-paragraph outline of this chapter in Discourses on Strauss, 167–68.

²¹ Besides the example I am about to discuss in my next paragraph, Sorensen seems to me to make an all-too-quick inference when he quotes Strauss as saying that Machiavelli, unlike readers nowadays, was “unaware of the legitimacy” of the distinction “between the core and the periphery of the Biblical teaching,” and comments: “Here is a rare instance where Strauss is seeking to understand Machiavelli better than he understood himself.” (Discourses on Strauss, 69, on Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 196–97; cf. note 8, above). Sorensen overlooks the likelihood that Strauss may not be seeking to understand Machiavelli better than he understands himself (i.e., without having first understood him as he understands himself), so much as he is seeking to disabuse readers nowadays who might presume that they could understand Machiavelli better than he understands himself simply by retrofitting onto Machiavelli the aforementioned distinction—which nowadays has a “legitimacy” that it did not have for Machiavelli. (Cf. a related discussion in Strauss's “Preface to Spinoza's Critique of Reason,” as found in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, 148–53.) Compare, on the other hand, Sorensen's uncomplicated endorsement of Strauss's remark: “We would go too far were we to assert that Machiavelli has never heard the Call nor sensed the Presence, for we would contradict his remarks referring to the conscience. But he certainly refuses to heed experiences of this kind.” (Discourses on Strauss, 78, on Thoughts on Machiavelli, 203).

²² Discourses on Strauss, 445, quoting Strauss. “The Mutual Influence of Theology and Philosophy,” as found in An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays by Leo Strauss, ed. Hilail Gildin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 290: “No one can be both a philosopher and a theologian, or, for that matter, a third which is beyond the conflict between philosophy and theology, or a synthesis of both. But every one of us can be and ought to be open to either the one or the other, the philosopher open to the challenge of theology, or the theologian open to the challenge of philosophy.”

²³ See Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, 311–56.

²⁴ Discourses on Strauss, 48, with Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, 312.

²⁵ Discourses on Strauss, 48ff., with Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, 317, 319.

²⁶ Sorensen cites the version in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, 137–77.

²⁷ Discourses on Strauss, 52, quoting Michael Morgan, “The Curse of Historicity: The Role of History in Leo Strauss's Jewish Thought,” Journal of Religion 61 (1981): 351. See, in contrast, my discussion of Meier, below.

²⁸ Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, 172. Likewise for the two quotations from Strauss which follow.

²⁹ About these paragraph numbers, see note 20, above.

³⁰ Discourses on Strauss, 143, quoting Thoughts on Machiavelli, 284.

³¹ Discourses on Strauss, 143.

³² Cf., for the following, Strauss, “On the Genealogy of Faith in Revelation,” in Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 141–80; “Progress or Return? The Contemporary Crisis in Western Civilization,” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, 87–136, esp. 117–32.

³³ In addition, Meier appends the previously unpublished text of a 1940 lecture called “The Living Issues of German Postwar Philosophy,” an informal account of philosophical currents as Strauss encountered them as a young man during the Weimar Republic years (Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 115–39).

³⁴ As Meier points out (Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 12), Avicenna's statement that the treatment of prophecy and the divine law is contained in Plato's Laws is quoted and elaborated in Strauss's Philosophy and Law, 122–25, and is the epigraph of Strauss's last book, The Argument and the Action of Plato's Laws (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975).

³⁵ Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 24, with 16ff.

³⁶ Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 32, 164.

³⁷ Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 33, 40f., 166f.

³⁸ Strauss, Philosophy and Law, 32–38.

³⁹ Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 21.

⁴⁰ Meier cites these paragraphs of Strauss's Spinoza Preface as found in Liberalism Ancient and Modern, 234–37.

⁴¹ See Heidegger, Being and Time, sec. 57, along with Meier's further references, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 49 n. 9, and Meier's general discussion, 48–51.

⁴² Footnote no. 23 of Strauss's Spinoza Preface invites the reader to consider, alongside sec. 57 of Heidegger's Being and Time, the identification of God with death in the Swiss writer Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's novella The Tempting of Pescara (trans. Clara Bell [New York: W.S. Gottsberger, 1890; reprint, New York: Howard Fertig, 1975]); see Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 45–47.

⁴³ Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern, 234f.: “Surely the Bible teaches that in spite of all appearances to the contrary the world is guided by God or, to use the traditional term, that there is particular providence, that man is protected by God if he does not put his trust in flesh and blood but in God alone, that he is not completely exposed or forsaken, that he is not alone, that he has been created by a being which is, to use Buber's expression, a Thou.”

⁴⁴ Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern, 236.

⁴⁵ Meier continues: “The comfort taken in one's own resoluteness, fortitude, conscientiousness takes the place of binding knowledge… . Heidegger's orientation towards ‘death or nothingness’ as the unoutstrippable, all-decisive possibility of being that each Dasein ‘enters into’ is no less suited than the religious reliance on the ‘wholly other’ ‘to cover over man's radical unprotectedness, loneliness, and exposedness,’ to whose defense, after all, that orientation seems to have devoted itself.” Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 48—I have emended Brainard's renderings of inappellablen Instanz (at the end of the sentence quoted in the text) and die religiöse Inanspruchnahme durch das “Ganz Andere” (in the sentence just quoted); see Meier, Heinrich, Das theologisch-politische Problem: Zum Thema von Leo Strauss (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2003), 78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁶ Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 59.

⁴⁷ Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem,. 56f.; see also 57 n. 2, where Meier cites, among other sources, Strauss's 1931 review of Julius Ebbinghaus, Über die Fortschritt der Metaphysik (in Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Meier, , [6 vols. in progress; Stuttgart: Metzler, 1996ff.], vol. 2, 438–39Google Scholar; trans. Zank, Michael, in Leo Strauss: The Early Writings, ed. Zank, [Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002], 215)Google Scholar, and Persecution and the Art of Writing, 155–56.

⁴⁸ Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 57ff.

⁴⁹ Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 66ff., 71ff.

⁵⁰ Meier sums up this result nicely (Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 71): “Whoever is wholly devoted to understanding a philosopher exactly as he understood himself, and whoever allows himself to be led in the study of that philosopher by the maxim that the greatest effort and care is to be employed in order to discover whether his oeuvre contains truth, may reach the point at which it no longer makes any difference to him whether he thinks the thoughts of the philosopher or his own, because he moves on a plain on which the arguments take the lead and the alternatives visibly emerge that, beyond the ‘historical embeddedness’ of both the author and the interpreter, determine the issue towards which the thought of both is directed.”

⁵¹ Meier, , Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, trans. Lomax, J. Harvey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

⁵² Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 79.

⁵³ Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 82.

⁵⁴ Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 81; cf. 84.

⁵⁵ Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 82.

⁵⁶ Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 85.

⁵⁷ Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 91–94. See, for the following, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 94ff.

⁵⁸ Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 102.

⁵⁹ Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas, 32.

⁶⁰ Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas, 90.

⁶¹ Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas, 118, 129–36.

⁶² Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas, 132.