Scientific knowledge of Judaism is purchased at the price of belief in the authority of revelation.
Leo Strauss, Philosophy and Law Footnote 1
INTRODUCTION
The historian of political philosophy Leo Strauss has been both celebrated and criticized for his Platonism, for his attacks on modern liberalism, and perhaps most famously for his “exoteric writing thesis,”Footnote 2 according to which many authors have concealed their most controversial philosophical and political teachings “in plain sight,” encoded so that only sympathetic readers would read and understand them. But long before Strauss grew into his mature Platonist persona, he was a young man coming of age in Weimar Germany who championed not Athens but rather medieval Jewish thought against the intellectual tendencies he associated with modernity. These included philosophical rationalism, the interpretation of religion as a matter of subjective experience, and the enshrinement of a liberal subject whose freedom is the paramount achievement of politics and civil law. In the person of Julius Guttmann, the neo-Kantian philosopher who supervised his postdoctoral research at the Berlin Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, Strauss found an embodiment of precisely the trends in modern philosophy, and especially in modern philosophy as applied to the understanding of Judaism, that he considered pernicious, and he lashed out. Strauss's critique of Guttmann's magnum opus, Die Philosophie des Judentums (The Philosophies of Judaism) was not only an attack on Guttmann's vision of Judaism as a religious tradition compatible with neo-Kantianism, which Guttmann had inherited from his own teacher Hermann Cohen. It was also an attack on what Strauss perceived as the liberal German Jewish project of interpreting away the political dimensions of Judaism so that Jewish identity might comfortably fit within a modern, liberal, Germany. Strauss's antiliberalism was fueled by readings in medieval thought, including works by primarily Jewish, but also Christian and Muslim, authors as well. However, and as this essay endeavors to explain, Strauss's critique of Guttmann matters not only because it opens a window onto Weimar Jewish medievalism, but also because the Strauss–Guttmann Streit prefigured many of Strauss's mature views, including the “exoteric writing” thesis itself.Footnote 3 And if Strauss would be best known as a Platonist in his maturity, he never ceased to write on that medieval Jewish paragon, Moses Maimonides, the significance of whose work he and Guttmann had once hotly debated.
Weimar medievalism took many forms, from the political medievalism of Ernst Kantorowicz, who would go on to write The King's Two Bodies—or the political medievalism of Percy Ernst Schramm, future official historian of the Wehrmacht—to the political theology of the jurist Carl Schmitt, whose works became a critical influence on Strauss. To be sure, many would look back to the medieval world for spiritual and philosophical inspiration rather than for the models of political authority that attracted Kantorowicz, Schramm, and Schmitt; the Jewish existentialist Franz Rosenzweig translated the works of the twelfth-century physician and poet Judah Halevi while the cultural historians Aby Warburg and Erwin Panofsky, among others, wrote eloquently about medieval art and architecture. But when he looked back at his Weimar years from the vantage point of 1962, Strauss only saw the symbolic use to which so many conservative writers had put the medieval. While writing a preface to a new, English-language edition of his 1930 Spinoza's Critique of Religion, originally written under Guttmann's direction between 1926 and 1928, Strauss interpreted Weimar medievalism as the culmination of a very old impulse in German intellectual life, a longing to recapture a form of political and religious experience that modernity had rendered inaccessible through what Weber, following Schiller, called the “disenchantment of the world.” While many scholars have traced German medievalism back to early nineteenth-century Romanticism,Footnote 4 Strauss wrote, “In Germany, and only there, did the end of the Middle Ages coincide with the beginning of the longing for the Middle Ages.”Footnote 5 A spirit haunted Strauss's modern Germany—the spirit of archaism.Footnote 6
Suggesting that liberals presented their ideology as the “opposite of medieval society,” Strauss interpreted the conflict between Weimar liberalism and antiliberalism as the inevitable result of long-standing tendencies in German thought.Footnote 7 And, despite his attraction to the medieval and his own conservative politics, Strauss was not naive regarding the potential consequences, for Jews, of Weimar-era appropriations of medieval European thought, religion, or politics. As he put it, “The action most characteristic of the middle ages is the crusades.”Footnote 8 What Strauss could not have owned in 1962 was that he himself had sympathized, if only intellectually, with the “Crusaders” and had produced readings of medieval Jewish thought that were strikingly close to Schmitt's political theology. As John P. McCormick puts it, “Divine command, or something like it, rather than a fundamentally groundless rational–legal norm, is [for Schmitt] the only worthy and stable justification for political rule.”Footnote 9 In a similar vein, Strauss criticized Guttmann for neglecting Judaism as a source of divine command not because the atheist Strauss longed for some form of theocracy to be erected either in twentieth-century Europe or in what was then called Palestine, but because in his view the omission of Judaism's legal and political dimensions facilitated a liberal vision of German–Jewish coexistence which was far too optimistic and failed to account for the ascendancy of radical politics during the Weimar years.
Despite the recent surge of interest in Strauss's early career, the Strauss–Guttmann Streit has received little attention.Footnote 10 One substantial reason for this occlusion is that while Strauss wrote about medieval Jewish thought throughout his career, the methodological issues he raised with Guttmann seem to disappear behind the looming columns of Strauss's more famous and essentially Platonic preoccupations: the relationships between philosophy and society and between the philosopher and the polis, and the need to employ “esoteric” modes of writing and reading in order to keep potentially subversive teachings out of the wrong hands and, most fundamentally, to preserve the boundaries between philosophy and the nonphilosophers who make up the vast majority of the polity. However, it was during his long intellectual engagement with Guttmann that Strauss reached the issue that would preoccupy him more than any other, namely the question of the relationship between philosophy and politics, or the question of philosophy's permanent political horizon. On its most basic level Strauss and Guttmann's debate concerned a methodological question that scholars of the philosophy of religion must address: do religion and philosophical reason disclose the same core truths? But on a more important level their Streit was over the political stakes in reading medieval Jewish texts.
However, an even more likely reason for the occlusion of the Streit was that it produced little writing, in fact so few documents that we might view it as having barely taken place. First there appeared Strauss's appreciative but critical 1935 review of Guttmann's 1933 magnum opus, Die Philosophie des Judentums (“The Philosophies of Judaism,” but often rendered as “The Philosophy of Judaism” after its English translation), and then Guttmann's short response, “Philosophie der Religion oder Philosophie des Gesetzes?” (“Philosophy of Religion or Philosophy of Law?”), unpublished during his lifetime and likely unseen by Strauss. Guttmann's lectures on the philosophy of religion, given at Hebrew University in 1947, were reportedly influenced by Strauss's review as well.Footnote 11 But Strauss and Guttmann had worked together closely at the Berlin Akademie, where they participated in seminars and where Guttmann supervised Strauss's postdoctoral research on Spinoza's Bible science. Strauss's adoption of the phrase “critique of religion” in the title of his 1930 book revealed a subtle but important shift from the terminology of “Bible science” that Guttmann had set for him, as if Strauss had been trying to persuade his supervisor that the scientific study of the Bible, performed on Spinoza's terms, aimed at disabling rather than simply examining its object of inquiry. As Strauss would put it, in a statement that ably summarized his critique not only of Guttmann but also of neo-Kantianism's emphasis on science, “scientific knowledge of Judaism is purchased at the price of belief in the authority of revelation.” Strauss's 1935 critique of Guttmann thus reflected philosophical and political differences that had emerged years earlier, and the documents of the Strauss–Guttmann dispute are best read as surface signs of a long-running argument likely conducted as much in person as in print: it was a Weimar dispute, even if its texts were produced after the Republic's fall.
Eliezer Schweid has rendered the Strauss–Guttmann debate as a clash over whether the claims of philosophy were compatible with the claims of religion. For him the Streit was a modern working-through of a problem as old as the meeting between Judaism and Aristotelianism: do the truths of revelation and the truths of philosophy operate on the same plane? Are they the same kind of truths? However, in Strauss's view, beneath this very meaningful question lay the more significant issue of how an understanding of Judaism as law, an understanding Guttmann could not give himself, could lead to a primarily political understanding of revelation, and an appreciation of the fact that both religion and philosophy are human practices conducted within the space of pragmata, the practical, everyday concerns all persons must encounter. Strauss held that he and Guttmann disagreed not only about the possibility of synthesizing religion and philosophy together but about the political character of each, understood as human practices. For Strauss, animated by the antiliberalism he had found in so many of his youthful influences, including Heidegger, Schmitt, and several strains of Zionism, Guttmann lacked an appreciation for the political stakes in reading medieval Jewish sources. For Strauss, Guttmann was too loyal an inheritor of the attitude towards the medieval found in the Jewish works of Hermann Cohen, one of the founders of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism and perhaps the single most influential German Jewish philosopher to come to prominence in Germany in the late nineteenth century.
HERMANN COHEN'S “MEDIEVALISM” AND GUTTMANN'S CULTURE
Before he could arrive at a legal–political interpretation of Judaism, the young Strauss first had to rebel against a line of specifically Jewish medievalism that had influenced both him and Guttmann, namely that of Hermann Cohen, who in 1908 had penned the essay “Characteristics of Maimonides’ Ethics” and who gave Maimonides a starring role in his (posthumously published) 1919 Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism. In his 1908 essay Cohen had offered a revolutionary rendering of the “Great Eagle” as a Platonist for whom both the philosophical and the religious “good” had a purely ideal status, rather than an Aristotelian, as Maimonides had most often been interpreted.Footnote 12 For Cohen, the work of the medieval physician–philosopher served as a “proof” that Jewish philosophy existed as an authentic genre, for his religious ethics and his philosophical metaphysics were “coterminous,” or, as Cohen wrote, “There is no greater testimony to Maimonides as the most vital and most genuine representative of philosophy within Judaism than the fact that his ethics constitutes the core and effective center of his metaphysics.”Footnote 13 While in his later Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism Cohen did call Maimonides “the focal point” of “unceasing agitations” between religion and philosophy,Footnote 14 those agitations did not keep Cohen's Maimonides from describing proximity to the Divine as “knowledge of God”: a closeness purely of the mind.Footnote 15 Strauss would later remark that “Cohen had no doubt that in teaching the identity of Reason and Revelation he was in full agreement with ‘all,’ or ‘almost all,’ Jewish philosophers of the Middle Ages.”Footnote 16 In Strauss's view Cohen had tended to treat the medieval as a “screen” onto which he could project his own understanding of the relationship between philosophy and religion. Strauss would also ultimately conclude that there was an extra-philosophical dimension to Cohen's project, namely ensuring that Judaism would be compatible with liberalism. In pursuit of this essentially political goal, Cohen had to demonstrate that there was only harmony between, as Strauss put it, “Judaism and culture” or “Torah and derekh eretz,”Footnote 17 or in other words, Cohen had to show that the revealed Law was compatible with the laws of the non-Jewish states in which Jews abided. When Strauss attacked Guttmann's application of the techniques of “cultural science” to Judaism, it was because he understood Guttmann to be simply carrying on where Cohen had stopped.
While Guttmann was in fact far more critical of Cohen than Strauss credited—he once said that “there remains an unbridgeable gap between the content of religion and the philosophic creation of concepts” despite Cohen's protestations to the contrary—he had himself grown up in Cohen's school of thought.Footnote 18 The son of Jakob Guttmann, a leading rabbi and himself a historian of medieval Jewish thought, Julius received both a doctorate in philosophy (Breslau, 1903) and a rabbinical degree (Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar, 1906).Footnote 19 Guttmann's academic advisers at Breslau often took students from the nearby Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar, and his dissertation on Kant's concept of God reflected the intellectual orientations of his two areas of training.Footnote 20
But the account of Cohen that Guttmann offered in The Philosophy of Judaism was literally ambivalent. Guttmann praised the master for having lived a full Jewish life—and for giving the idea of God an “organic interrelation with the principles of ethics”Footnote 21 which Kant's God never possessed—while also observing that Cohen's God lacked qualities usually present in traditional Jewish accounts. Cohen's God of ethics was certainly not Spinoza's God, a pantheist deity equally distributed across nature, but Cohen had reconstructed “God into an idea, involving the denial of his metaphysical claims and personal character.”Footnote 22 No personal God, such a deity could never be encountered by individuals but only ever as the deity of humanity writ large.Footnote 23 Furthermore, because of his view that all religions could ultimately be contained within a transcendental ethical idealism that bridged the cultural differences between religions, the “complete Jew” Cohen was guilty of “enclos[ing] and enfold[ing] Judaism within the systematic verdict concerning all religions, seeking to idealize it so that it might be ripe for the transition to philosophical ethics.”Footnote 24 Guttmann implied that Cohen's universalism did a disservice not only to Judaism's specificity as a tradition but also to its religious content, and he found himself speaking of “the spirit of living religion” in Cohen while denying that Cohen's concepts had anything to do with Jewish life.
As R. J. Zwi Werblowsky pointed out, a specific view of Judaism's essence showed through Guttmann's chronicle of Jewish philosophy, understood as the practice of taking up Judaism as a subject for philosophizing, usually yielding elucidations and justifications of the Jewish religion before the bar of reason.Footnote 25 The cultures of Judaism proliferated from a starting point in what Guttmann felt he could meaningfully call Jewish consciousness. And while Guttmann, following Cohen, observed that Jewish philosophy drew its form and method from beyond Judaism (“Jewish thought is not oriented towards metaphysical questions,” as he put itFootnote 26) and simply took up Judaism as an object about which to philosophize, he found a source within Jewish religious consciousness for the desire to philosophize. In the Book of Job the religious consciousness “calls to thought for aid,” taking up the question of divine justice and its apparent failings as a philosophical problem.Footnote 27 Nor is it for nothing that Job takes the form of a dialogue. But if Job is a philosophical book, it is also one in which a final revelation effectively demarcates and limits the territory in which philosophy can operate. Thus Guttmann found the “seed” of Jewish philosophy, but also detected religion's tendency to restrict the scope of philosophical inquiry, within the textual tradition of Judaism itself. God and his Revelation demand obedience, but still the “unconditioned truth” of the Bible calls out for philosophy—and philosophy finds that religion poses a problem to which it must respond.
Cohen had presented a developmental narrative to explain the origins of his philosophy of ethical idealism. As Guttmann observed of Cohen, “historically, religion is the source of ethical idealism, and philosophy, which seeks to develop and confirm its principles in continuity with the historical forces of culture, cannot ignore religion as one of the sources of ethics.”Footnote 28 However, ethics had always been present in certain types of religion—monotheistic types—and had served as the catalyst by which those religions “disengaged from the entanglements of myth.” Despite his criticisms of Cohen, Guttmann took his model for the development of early Judaism from the master. He might have taken his distance from Cohen's abstract idea of God, asserting that for Judaism the personal and willful character of God was critical, but he shared Cohen's view that the systematization of ethics had divided Judaism (or allowed it to split off) from a prior culture that included magical and mythical elements: the image of the biblical Flood was a terminal moraine left over from that division. Unlike Cohen, Guttmann did not find that this purging of “irrational” elements from a preceding culture reflected the work of an inner ethical rationalism within Judaism, but rather the force of personal commandment—law. But Jewish law was still something Guttmann could speak of in terms of culture. Thus he could ascribe to the medieval period “a total, all-embracing culture based on religion” in which philosophy rarely transcended the scope of religious thought.Footnote 29 And while Guttmann's own uses of the term “culture” were rare and unsystematic, they tended to describe the meeting of Judaism with another world view. “Cultures” were most clearly independent totalities when two or more of them met and thus displayed their unique character by contrast, although Guttmann allowed that such meetings could produce new forms of “culture.” However, he used the term “culture” most often to describe a milieu in which Jewish thinkers reached beyond the Bible and Talmud, seeking “a universal ideal of intellectual culture.”Footnote 30 In other words, Guttmann's use of “culture” tellingly recapitulated the logic of Cohen's theory of philosophy's historical development out of religion, despite Guttmann's misgivings about Cohen's tendency towards abstractionist accounts of history.
THE “LAW” OF STRAUSS'S MEDIEVALISM
Strauss responded to Guttmann's ambitious survey with harsh words. The very title of Strauss's review essay, “The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in the Philosophy of Judaism,” suggested the existence of an internal conflict within Jewish philosophy that Guttmann had not seen. For Strauss, Guttmann was too focused on the superiority of modern thought to see that its medieval antecedents might challenge it—or to see that he, himself, had presented evidence supporting the merits of the medieval over the modern. In Strauss's view the conflict was further obscured by Guttmann's fascination with the “methodological value of religion,” an opaque phrase best understood by consulting Guttmann's earlier study “Religion and Science in Medieval and Modern Thought” in which he articulated the method of the philosophy of religion in the study of both modern and medieval thought, as the examination of “religious consciousness.”Footnote 31 As Strauss observed, this approach could be traced directly back to Schleiermacher and what Strauss called his “return or retreat to subjectivity,”Footnote 32 and Strauss furthermore observed that “Guttmann . . . is the last one who needs to be taught that a ‘method’ is never an indifferent, impartial technique, but always pre-determines the possible content.” By employing modern methods to examine medieval sources, Guttmann had missed the very “quarrel” that any comparison of modern and medieval Jewish thought would provoke in an alert reader.Footnote 33 But much of Strauss's review was given over to arguing that Guttmann's very subject matter, the medieval philosophy of religion, quickly undid the critical bonds that Schleiermacher's methods threw around it.
Much ado about methodology in the study of religion and philosophy, perhaps. Yet for Strauss the stakes were high, namely the restoration of the relation between revealed religion and philosophy imagined by medieval Jewish philosophers. Strauss held that for those medievals it had been “first philosophy” to account for revealed legislation, and that “first philosophy” had been a task prior to any other task they might wish to undertake, due to the basic conflict between reason and revelation. Despite his dutiful reconstruction of the problems of Jewish thought from the rabbinic period to the modern, Guttmann had replaced the fundamental alternative of religion or reason with Cohen's “harmonizing decision that the teachings of revelation are identical with the teachings of reason.”Footnote 34 Hermann Cohen might, for Guttmann, achieve a greater understanding of the “ethical personalism of the consciousness of God,”Footnote 35 but such an understanding was itself grounded in modern categorical approaches to religion. Guttmann, in Strauss's view, was praising the modern understanding of religion over the medieval for its sheer modernity, and thus had no substantive basis for his case. But Strauss pointed out that Guttmann, in certain moments, worked against this tendency, granting that the medieval possessed something that the modern lacked: “the medieval thinkers are more strongly rooted as total personalities in the Jewish tradition and way of life, and belief in the divine authority of the revelation is more self-evident in them.”Footnote 36 Reflecting on this point, Strauss passed judgment, saying that “the adequate scientific knowledge of Judaism is bought at the cost of the belief in the authority of revelation,” or in other words that scientific study deprived religion of its social function. And he went on to cite Hegel's famous image of Minerva's owl beginning its flight at dusk, by which he meant that Guttmann's philosophy of Judaism could not adequately describe the realities of Jewish life, regulated by revelation's authority, that gave rise to that very philosophy.
For Strauss the broader significance of Guttmann's method derived from the fact that it was founded upon a scientific treatment of religion, which in Strauss's view had served Judaism as a theoretical armature by which to survive and even flourish despite the rising tide of secularism that science had produced in modern Europe. Strauss's sweeping comment about modernity's “rising tide” could have could easily have referred to Spinoza, to the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment) or to the Wissenschaft des Judentums school, but given that his immediate target was Guttmann, Strauss's phrase “the scientific treatment of religion” clearly implicated Cohen and neo-Kantianism itself along with his postdoctoral supervisor.
Cohen's treatment of religion had been interpreted in many ways by the time Strauss critiqued Guttmann. In 1924 Franz Rosenzweig argued that Cohen had broken from his earlier scientism in Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism and given religion a living presence his earlier categorical thinking had made impossible.Footnote 37 Yet there was a broad consensus on the part of neo-Kantians that Cohen's presentation of religion was essentially consistent with his earlier work in the philosophy of science, in which Cohen had adapted Kant's vision of a set of a priori laws that determine what humans can know and a transcendental method by which humans can determine what counts as knowledge. Whereas in his philosophy of the natural sciences Cohen emphasized the importance of beginning with the facts divulged by scientific observation, in his 1904 Ethics of Pure Will he explored the idea of an ethics, discovered by transcendental methods, which took as its starting point the conclusions of social science—and, in a gesture Strauss must have found ironic, Cohen chose law as his model social science. In the same year that Rosenzweig authored his heterodox reading of Cohen the neo-Kantian, Walter Kinkel looked back over the development of Cohen's thought from his philosophy of science to his ethics, and argued that the master had never offered anything novel in the concept of religion beyond what he had already offered in his ethics.Footnote 38
Strauss essentially agreed with Kinkel's judgment when he observed that it was in Cohen that “the barrier dividing modern thought [i.e. scientific thought] from Judaism [is] most distinctly visible.”Footnote 39 Strauss further noted that even a loyal follower like Guttmann had had to concede Cohen's inability to conceive of God as a historical reality, and Strauss sharpened the point by recounting the famous story of how Cohen had once been approached by an Orthodox Jew who asked him if his thought had room for God understood as the creator of the world (bore’ ‘olam) and, having no answer, Cohen had had to weep. But Strauss's real difficulty with a modern philosophy of religion, established on a scientific footing, was that its underlying premises had no basis in a traditional world view that had once helped human subjects to understand themselves and the objects of their knowledge as contained within an overarching cosmos. Instead, philosophers of religion took human consciousness as their starting point and therefore could encounter neither God nor cosmos except as a feature of said consciousness. But behind the inherently modern emphasis on consciousness which characterized Guttmann's narrative Strauss claimed to find evidence for a lesson which Guttmann had ignored: there were truths in the medieval understanding of philosophy and religion that modern mentalities could never appreciate. It was not for nothing that 245 out of Guttmann's 360 pages were devoted to medieval thinkers.
Strauss argued that in the medieval meeting between Islamic, Jewish, and Greek thought, the practice of philosophy was profoundly altered by philosophers’ awareness of the social dominance enjoyed by belief in revelation. Strauss cited as evidence a passage of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed which offered an essentially historical explanation of why philosophy had become difficult “in our time,” in contrast with the natural and thus ever-present factors which make philosophy difficult. “In our time,” Maimonides suggested, “opinion” has come to keep us from knowing the truth. As Strauss explained, “the fact that a tradition based on revelation was introduced into the world of philosophy added to the natural difficulties of philosophizing, which are given with the ‘cave’-existence of man, the historical difficulty.”Footnote 40 To the “opinions” one had to take into account when philosophizing, one suddenly had to add the need for some gesture of public recognition of revelation's truth and authority, the authority of a law that reason had not given to itself. Guttmann himself acknowledged that philosophers who wished to remain Jews suddenly had to philosophize only to the extent that the law allowed, and in some cases only to the extent that the law commanded. Thus Strauss arrived at a new understanding of the “philosophy of religion” of the medievals: it was essentially a practice of “exoteric” writing—Strauss here used the term for the first time in his career—intended for a nonphilosophical audience, defending philosophy's accordance with the terms of the Law.Footnote 41 It was this vision of medieval Jewish thought that Strauss juxtaposed against Guttmann's assessment of medieval Jewish thought as philosophy of religion.Footnote 42 Furthermore, Strauss extended the “exotericism” thesis he had subtly referenced earlier—though he did not meditate on the claim for long—by supposing that a fundamental unbelief lay beneath the medievals’ public insistence on the compatibility between reason and revelation. The understanding of revelation they broadcast to the world was “pedagogical” in the sense that it was intended for masses in need of the political guidance that the Law could provide but unequipped to understand the Law themselves. While Guttmann's medievals were preoccupied with philosophical truths, Strauss's medievals were preoccupied by the problem of how to create a space for the pursuit of philosophy in a world dominated by a Law whose adherents might find philosophy not merely threatening but downright heretical.Footnote 43 They were guided in their efforts by an insight into the basic meaning of religious law; as Strauss put it, the medievals held a great virtue over the moderns insofar as they were “guided not, like [the moderns], by the derived idea of natural right, but by the primary, ancient idea of law as a unified, total regimen of human life; in other words, because they are pupils of Plato and not pupils of Christians.”Footnote 44 That is, modern Jewish philosophers had been influenced by the Christian context in which they operated, to the point where they could not countenance the essentially theocratic dimension of revealed law.
Strauss's critique of Guttmann was harsh, but it is far from clear that it was deserved. Guttmann had been more critical of Cohen than Strauss acknowledged, and furthermore his survey touched on themes central for the young Strauss, including the deep conflict between medieval thought and modern Jewish philosophy and the tensions between reason and revelation. Indeed, in his account of Maimonides Guttmann attended to precisely the same issues that fascinated Strauss, including the tension between esoteric and exoteric expression (the very terms Guttmann used) and the division between philosophical elites and un-philosophical masses. For Guttmann's (and Strauss's) Maimonides, prophetic utterances have to be pronounced in terms calibrated for “the intellectual capacity of the masses,”Footnote 45 whereas “the profounder sense of Scripture which was identical with philosophic truth was accessible only to an intellectual elite; like the Islamic philosopher, Maimonides held that it should not be revealed to the masses.”Footnote 46 This seems to leave the issue as one of law versus culture, with Strauss taking issue with Guttmann's inattention to law and blaming that inattention on Guttmann's emphasis on culture and consciousness. But not only was Guttmann less reliant on “culture” than Strauss suggested (Guttmann never described the project of his book in terms of the cultural sciences), he also was hardly blind to law, examining Maimonides’ positions on the political and spiritual purposes of the Torah's law.Footnote 47 Given that Guttmann was far from inattentive, let alone hostile to Strauss's concerns, something beyond Guttmann's text must have inspired Strauss's harsh critique.
Solutions to the puzzle of Strauss's intemperance may be found by considering the pathway Strauss traveled towards promoting law over culture, beginning with the work on Spinoza's “Bible science” he conducted under Guttmann's supervision during the second half of the 1920s, work that culminated in Spinoza's Critique of Religion. Strauss's 1924 essay “Cohen's Analysis of Spinoza's Bible Science” had impressed Guttmann and earned Strauss a place at the Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentums but, ironically, it could easily have alerted him to Strauss's deviation from the Cohen lineage.Footnote 48 While Strauss accepted Cohen's criticism of Spinoza on some points—Strauss was not fond of the dissolution of God into the overall unity of Nature—he was critical of Cohen's own dissolution of God into a mere concept. As Strauss put it, “the norm of Cohen's Maimonidean–Kantian rational faith is not what is said about God in scripture, inasmuch as it is scripture, but rather it is the concept of God.”Footnote 49 And Strauss made it clear that his criticism of Cohen's view of Judaism was also a criticism of the “liberal understanding of religion.” What we liberal moderns have lost, Strauss claimed, is “the primitive–numinous as opposed to the rational concept of God, the cultic and immediate understandings of ritual and prayer as opposed to the ethical interpretation of ritual, and the possessive and national understanding of the biblical God as the God of Israel and of no other nation.”Footnote 50 And that was precisely what Spinoza's Bible science offered to recover: “those themes which are readily covered up, in part already by tradition but especially by liberalism,” as Strauss said.Footnote 51 Strauss thus found a way to express sympathy with Spinoza's political view of Judaism as an alternative to Cohen's fixation on the “concept of God.” Furthermore, he anticipated his later arguments by describing Spinoza as understanding public speech about religion as having a “sociopedagogical character” which could also be called “the most upright and disinterested . . . form of the pia fraus (pious fraud).”Footnote 52 Spinoza's Bible science, the Strauss of 1924 observed, affords a vision of the history of religion as political history, whereas Cohen's liberal project relies on a depoliticized version of religion that can travel under the name “culture.” But perhaps most significantly for his later work under Guttmann—and thus for their Streit —in “Cohen's Analysis of Spinoza's Bible Science” Strauss also addressed the “antithesis” between Maimonides and Spinoza as a battle “between the traditional–ecclesiastical interpretation of the Bible and the critical–scientific interpretation of the Bible.”Footnote 53 Spinoza's Bible science had been part of the struggle to free science from religion, but Cohen—so indebted to the Enlightenment and the victory of science—stood on the other shore of historical change from Spinoza, on which the unity of religion and science could once more be imagined (but erroneously, thought Strauss) by a Jewish philosopher wielding Kant's transcendental method.
Strauss had disentangled the modern approach to religion from its traditional counterpart in another essay of the same year, “On the Argument with European Science.”Footnote 54 Within modernity, Strauss told his reader, the science of religion was only one part of the rise of science in general, and even the Orthodox had ceased, Strauss said, to criticize the findings of natural science. But Strauss noted the strange novelty of applying science to religion. As he said, “There was a time, not so long ago, when the two powers, tradition and science, did not coexist peacefully on parallel planes, with no points of contact, but engaged in a life-or-death struggle for hegemony on the single plane of the ‘truth.’”Footnote 55 In other words, the existence of a scientific approach to religion could trick moderns into thinking that the two human practices had always existed in different domains, which was simply not the case. No informed reader could have missed the reference to Cohen's neo-Kantianism in Strauss's statement that “while an idealistically reinterpreted religion may be the most amusing thing in the world, it can in any case no longer be religion.”Footnote 56 And yet Strauss acknowledged that Cohen was not an independent culprit in the idealization of religion but only one of many participants in a modern pact—after the rise of the scientific study of religion, with its roots in Spinoza's Bible science, one could only preserve religion by means of idealization, by transforming it not only into a series of concepts, as in the case of Cohen's embrace of a God-concept, but also through self-limitation, a practice perhaps best exemplified by Kant's denial of knowledge to make room for faith. Notably, in 1925 Strauss had not yet written on political theology, a doctrine according to which religion survives in the secular vessel of the sovereign, but he was certainly familiar with the vision of the sovereign Spinoza himself had described in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.
But if Strauss had established his disquiet with neo-Kantianism and its emphasis on science early on, it was in a 1926 progress report to the Akademie entitled “On the Bible Science of Spinoza and His Precursors” that Strauss began the shift, which would be instrumental for his ultimate critique of Guttmann, from analyzing “Bible science” to analyzing the critique of religion that Strauss saw within that science.Footnote 57 It was here that Strauss also presented a new reading of Maimonides, the same one that would be reflected in his 1935 review of Guttmann's Die Philosophie des Judentums, according to which Maimonides had a vision of the divine law that was fundamentally elitist in character, serving the “heterogeneous goals in life of the wise few and the unwise many through a single legal order.” For Maimonides, “The Torah aims at the highest perfection of the few, that is, theory. At the same time, it aims at the social organization of the many and at their civilizing, which serves this secondary purpose.”Footnote 58 Strauss was entering a territory that only became truly marked in his thought during the 1930s and 1940s, the territory of the “sociology of philosophy” in which the truly pressing thing was the social context in which philosophical practice is always conducted, or, as Strauss put it in 1926, “More radical than the question of whether theory and Scripture can be harmonized . . . is the question of their coordination—that is, assuming the supremacy of theory, the question of what an interest in revelation really means.”Footnote 59 It was here that Strauss awoke to the idea that Maimonides—foremost among medieval thinkers for Cohen and Guttmann alike—had been interested in revelation as a source of law. Heinrich Meier has observed that sometime in 1929 or 1930 Strauss would discover a sentence in Avicenna's On the Divisions of the Rational Sciences that alerted him to the fact that, long before philosophy's medieval encounter with religion, Plato had treated the issue of prophecy and divine law.Footnote 60 Thus he learned of the importance of Plato for the medievals, and learned that Maimonides was a path back to Plato, only after he had completed his manuscript of Spinoza's Critique of Religion in 1928. But it is critical to add that even before that discovery, on which Meier places great weight, Strauss had spoken of a hidden doctrine in medieval thought and a necessary coordination of religion with reason, and he knew, from Cohen, that Maimonides could easily be read as a Platonist.
Thus long before he picked up Guttmann's Die Philosophie des Judentums, Strauss had gathered the elements for the legal approach to medieval Jewish thought that he would employ in his 1935 review. But this leaves the question of the antiliberal character of Strauss's “The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in the Philosophy of Judaism.” Strauss's attempt to recover a version of “law” more authoritative than the law of liberalism was also motivated by inspirations he encountered outside his formal studies. While examining the medieval problem of the coordination of revelation and reason Strauss wrote a series of essays for a variety of German Zionist publications he had read for years as a member of the German Jewish youth group Blau-Weiss. It was in the course of these journalistic exercises that Strauss contemplated the significance of neo-Orthodox Judaism, which became an important source for his continued reflections on the role of law in Jewish life—but because of the intellectual rather than religious interest Orthodoxy held for Strauss, an avowed atheist. Strauss first mentioned neo-Orthodoxy in the 1925 “Ecclesia Militans,” a reflection on the challenge Frankfurt's separatist Orthodox community posed for German Zionism.Footnote 61 While Strauss saw that his own political Zionism was incompatible with the neo-Orthodox “submission of the Jewish people to the Torah,” he was fascinated by the Orthodox emphasis on law as revealed legislation, especially as developed by Isaac Breuer, the central intellectual figure of Frankfurt neo-Orthodoxy, who opposed Zionism on the grounds that it threatened to supplant Divine Law with the secular law of the state. Strauss criticized Breuer for his attacks on Zionism and, against him, spoke of “the genius” of Herzl's “politicization of the Jewish people.”Footnote 62 But Strauss nevertheless respected Breuer's critique of the Zionist goal of national “normalization” and his belief that it entailed sacrificing the essential character of the Jewish people.
Undoubtedly it was Breuer's insistence on the primacy of biblical law in Jewish life that attracted Strauss and rendered him sympathetic to at least one dimension of Breuer's critique of Zionism.Footnote 63 In Breuer's view the mere existence of Orthodoxy within modernity demanded that Jews ask whether “God and the Torah are primary over the Jewish nation or if the historical relation is primary,” as Breuer asked in his 1925 The Jewish National Home.Footnote 64 Alan Mittleman describes Breuer as a man who had “realized the disillusioning restlessness of modern reason and has abandoned all aspiration to achieve a harmonious accord between it and Judaism.”Footnote 65 Investigating the “Torah's claim to totality” rather than the postulates of Idealist thought, Breuer had studied philosophy at Marburg but never visited Hermann Cohen's lecture hall: he had always distrusted Cohen, who, by the time of Breuer's training, had become the embodiment of the “harmonious accord” between reason and Judaism.Footnote 66 And even as Strauss was discovering the limitations that neo-Kantian methods imposed on the study of Jewish thought, Breuer and other Orthodox thinkers were turning on its head Kant's old dismissal of Judaism as a “collection of mere statutory laws upon which was established a political organization.”Footnote 67 Where Kant had derided Judaism as legalistic, they celebrated Judaism's living, revealed legislation against the modern account of law as conventional. Instead of reading Judaism through Kant, Breuer held Kant up to the standards of Judaism. Thus Breuer, the intellectual opposite of Guttmann and, of course, of Cohen, suggested for Strauss a very different reading of the relation between religion and reason.Footnote 68
But the real importance of Strauss's “Ecclesia Militans” lies in Strauss's discovery, in Breuer, of a species of late medievalism. “Ecclesia militans” had been the battle cry of the theologian Johannes Eck (1483–1543), a contemporary and antagonist of Martin Luther. As David Myers points out, Strauss cast Breuer as an “Eck-like figure”—even as Weimar-era Catholic theologians were developing their own forms of neo-Orthodoxy in response to the apparent failures of liberal Protestant theology after the Great War. If authors such as Erik Peterson and Alois Dempf criticized liberal Protestantism, Strauss expressed sympathy for Breuer's view that Enlightenment thought had failed to provide religious and political guidance for Jews.Footnote 69 And the Latin title of the essay placed Strauss's loyalties on the medieval side of the medieval–modern divide for which the Reformation served as a symbolic dividing line. Indeed, given the successes of Reform Jewry in Frankfurt and the extreme tensions between Reform and Orthodox there, it was natural for Strauss to cast Breuer's movement as a kind of modern Jewish “Counter-Reformation.”
But Strauss was guided in his attack on Guttmann's “culture” by another, non-Jewish account of authority informed by medievalism, in this case the political theology of Carl Schmitt, with whom Strauss maintained a correspondence before Schmitt's loyalty to the National Socialist Party had become common knowledge.Footnote 70 While scholars of Strauss and Schmitt have often seen them as intellectual opponents—the political theologian disagreeing with the political philosopher about the essence of the political—they shared much, and Strauss endorsed Schmitt's antiliberal decisionism and his fondness for premodern sources, sources that seemed to validate a politics based on obedience to a law not subject to collective ratification or reformulation.Footnote 71
In 1932 Strauss published an appreciative if critical survey of Schmitt's 1927 Concept of the Political in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik.Footnote 72 In these remarks Strauss took his distance from Schmitt's conception of the “political,” giving license to the common view that he chose political philosophy over a political theology in which, as Joseph Cropsey puts it, faith is “the absolute object of the commitment that defines the political and inspires men to kill and die.”Footnote 73 But while Heinrich Meier and other commentators are right that Strauss and Schmitt championed reason and revelation respectively, their differences were sharpest on the level of pure theory—on the question whether philosophy or religion truly helps one to comprehend the “human order of things”—and in his 1932 remarks Strauss was less interested in opposing political theology from a philosophical perspective and more in comprehending Schmitt's critique of liberalism, which he shared. And according to Strauss, Schmitt's version of “the political” was not only the opposite of liberalism but an attempt to undermine the philosophy of culture, which was liberalism's philosophical “arm.”
According to Strauss, such a philosophy took “the totality of human thought and action” and divided them into different spheres—into different “provinces of culture.”Footnote 74 But “the political” was not a separate province; politics and religion were the two forces that provided men with existential promises and threats and thus transcended the “provincial” framework that the culture model proposed. While discussing Guttmann's work in 1935, only a few years after his “Notes on The Concept of the Political,” Strauss extended the argument he had developed while reading Schmitt. He called religion and politics the “original facts” that transcend culture, and he proposed that a “theologico-political treatise” could accomplish the critique of the philosophy of culture, referring his reader back to his earlier “Notes” on Schmitt's text.Footnote 75 When Schocken published the English translation of Strauss's Philosophy and Law in 1965, Strauss included his “Notes” as an appendix—obliquely affirming Schmitt's influence on his response to Guttmann.
Intriguingly, what Strauss seemed to value most in Schmitt was not the model of political authority provided by religious law but rather the way Schmitt's political theology carried the reader back from culture towards nature. As Strauss put it, “If it is true that the final self-awareness of liberalism is the philosophy of culture, we may say in summary that liberalism, sheltered by and engrossed in a world of culture, forgets the foundation of culture, the state of nature; that is, human nature in its dangerousness and endangeredness.”Footnote 76 Schmitt's version of “the political” was analogous to the very “nature” that always lay beneath “culture,” though culture denied it. While nature here meant primarily the Hobbesian status naturalis, Strauss's implication was that the “human order of things” below culture was the meaningful subject of political-philosophical inquiry as well as of political theology. But if Strauss clung to the philosophical analysis of nature as an internal goal for philosophy, by 1932 he had certainly learned that the very gulf between philosophy and religion, and between the former's private nature and the latter's public function, could benefit philosophers: they need not become political theologians themselves to benefit from political theology's critique of liberalism and its analysis of a basic state of human existential threat, which in turn demanded the strong rule of law. The implications of Strauss's reading of Schmitt for his 1935 criticism of Guttmann were, simply put, that when Strauss accused Guttmann of operating within the provinces of the philosophy of culture he meant that Guttmann could not see the true existential stakes of religion, stakes that had been clearer for ancients, and medievals, than for moderns.
PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION OR PHILOSOPHY OF LAW?
Guttmann never replied to Strauss's charge in print. However, after his death in 1950, an unpublished reply was found among his papers and published under the title “Philosophie der Religion oder Philosophie des Gesetz?” (Philosophy of Religion or Philosophy of Law?).Footnote 77 In this text Guttmann made both formal and methodological objections to Strauss's review, but the two were clearly intertwined. Against Strauss's claim that essentially modern presuppositions had misguided the conclusions of his Die Philosophie des Judentums, he responded that Strauss's own methodological commitments led him to misread medieval sources, projecting contemporary concerns onto the “screen” of the past. Guttmann reacted strongly against Strauss's legal interpretation of medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophy and noted that Strauss's interpretation ran contrary to the common perception that revelation's goal was the communication of a numinous truth.
Surveying the teachings of Ibn Rushd and Maimonides in his response, Guttmann claimed that Strauss had lost sight of the extra-political meanings revelation had held for these thinkers. Strauss, operating in a modern world in which atheism threatened belief, could see no options other than Orthodoxy and atheism, and had thus forgotten that for thinkers like Ibn Rushd and Maimonides, revelation and reason did not constitute a “dilemma” but rather mutually supporting if different phenomena, just as “metaphysics is applied to revelation and revelation turns into revealed metaphysics.”Footnote 78 Interest in the law was not merely cynical and self-protective, as Strauss seemed to think, but an effort to explicate a set of regulatory principles that not only allowed philosophical speculation but enjoined humans to engage in philosophical explication of the law to further their progress towards spiritual perfection. In other words, reason confirmed rather than challenged the authority of revealed law. Strauss seemed to reduce the revelation of law until it was nothing more than the establishment of an ideal political order while ignoring a point Maimonides had labored hard to make, namely that the founding of an ideal political order was only a step towards the spiritual perfection of individuals within that order.
Very importantly, Guttmann acknowledged that in order to bring out the possible meanings of medieval philosophy, in his Philosophies of Judaism he had employed essentially modern categories such as “religion” itself (that is, religion understood as an independent sphere of human experience) and “religious consciousness.”Footnote 79 And he insisted on the appropriateness of doing so, acknowledging that while “the modern categories as such are completely foreign to medieval thought,” there were good reasons to use them anyway:
The problem-historical approach has the right to use modern categories in order to characterize those tendencies in the more ancient thinkers that are aiming towards these categories as well as to indicate the limit within which the modern motives are anticipated in the history of a problem.Footnote 80
Guttmann was, in other words, interested in making medieval texts speak to modern consciousness and saw that task as essential to his “problem-historical” approach, as opposed to the “objective–philosophical” approach he ascribed to Strauss, which always led Strauss to view problems completely out of context. Guttmann labeled his own reasons for using modern categories “existential,” apparently meaning that they helped to describe the experience of contemporary individuals—thereby acknowledging that contemporary concerns motivated his own reading of medieval thinkers just as they did Strauss's reading. This, in turn, suggests that Guttmann knew that he and Strauss were at philosophical loggerheads regarding the decision between the metaphysical commitments of neo-Kantianism and existentialism.
As Mari Rethelyi points out, in Guttmann's view Strauss's insistence on the legal character of medieval Jewish philosophy—which at this point in his career was the lynchpin of his antimodernism—rested on Strauss's inability to accept the metaphysical meanings of medieval Jewish thought: Strauss was an atheist, and his philosophy of law was ultimately anthropocentric insofar as Strauss acknowledged no divine lawgiver. Regardless of the essential accuracy of Guttmann's assessment, he still seems to have missed the basic paradigm shift Strauss was trying to effect by radicalizing the reading of medieval Jewish thought. Guttmann wished to remain within the ambit of a version of “philosophy of religion” in which metaphysics, and thus the project of Cohen's Marburg school, remained meaningful, reflecting not the domestication but rather the continued life of Judaism within German philosophy.
CONCLUSION: AN EXISTENTIAL LAW
As this essay has endeavored to show, Strauss's critique of Guttmann can best be understood as an effort to radicalize the reading of medieval Jewish thought, an effort most comprehensible when examined in the context of a series of medievalist influences, broadly antiliberal in character, which Strauss absorbed during his formative professional years.
However, one important influence on Strauss's rendition of medieval Jewish thought as philosophy of law remains, namely the thought of Martin Heidegger, with whom Strauss had studied and whom he grouped with Franz Rosenzweig as a proponent of the “new thinking,” or existentialism. Their influence on Strauss justified, in a roundabout way, both Guttmann's insistence that it was appropriate to approach medieval thought from the standpoint of the modern philosophy of religion because such an approach was consistent with the “existential” needs of the present, and Guttmann's suggestion that Strauss's legalistic reading of medieval thought was motivated by his sense of what the present required. Furthermore, both Strauss and Guttmann would have been well aware that Rosenzweig and Heidegger were united in targeting Cohen's philosophy as perhaps the system that their new methods had to transcend.Footnote 81
The first tool Strauss took from Heidegger was a method of reading, which Heidegger had modeled in the lecture classes Strauss attended while pursuing a doctorate under the supervision of Ernst Cassirer. Heidegger referred to his way of reading philosophical texts as Destruktion, by which he meant not “obliteration” but rather a clearing away of the accumulated prior readings of a text. Heidegger's new method promised not only to help readers find their way around the blockages of established philosophical tradition, but also to throw open the question of Being itself.Footnote 82Destruktion inspired Strauss to read the texts of the Western philosophical tradition afresh; many years later he spoke of Heidegger having opened to him “the possibility of a genuine return to classical philosophy, to the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle.”Footnote 83 Strauss never adopted a self-consciously Heideggerian (or, for that matter, Rosenzweigian) methodology in early works such as the 1926–8 Spinoza's Critique of Religion or the critique of Guttmann. But Strauss did leave clues in “The Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns” which suggest existentialism's influence on his thinking as he contemplated the medieval philosophy of law.
In his initial response to Guttmann's Philosophie des Judentums Strauss had been careful to note the omission of Franz Rosenzweig's “Neue Denken” from Guttmann's survey, an omission he judged intentional and worthy of examination.Footnote 84 Strauss launched into a counterfactual game, asking “what if” Guttmann had meditated on Rosenzweig's existential approach to Judaism and then playing through one line of reasoning that might have followed from that observation. Strauss observed that while modern philosophy had had great difficulty keeping the existence of God from becoming nothing more than a mere feature of consciousness, existentialist philosophy faced even graver challenges, for it could never understand “the doctrine of creation in its original, Biblical sense”; that is, as creation by an agent outside the world—and Strauss noted the absolute necessity of the doctrine of creation for Judaism.
The implicit conclusion Strauss drew from his thought experiment was that had Guttmann allowed himself to contemplate the weakness of existentialism, namely its incapacity to envision the world as created, he would have been forced to confront a parallel weakness in modern thought, namely an inability to envision God as an agent outside the subject. Strauss further implied that Guttmann was well aware that medieval thought's rich understanding of God as both world-creator and active lawgiver was necessary to supplement the shortcomings of modern thought, and that he had avoided a discussion of existentialism because it would have forced him to admit modern thought's insufficiency. In other words, Guttmann knew that it was not the move forward from idealism to a “new thinking” but rather a return to medieval thought that could “put an end to our present difficulty,” as Strauss put it.Footnote 85 Strauss's judgment is certainly open to question; it is far from clear that a confrontation with existentialism would have shown Guttmann the weaknesses of modern thought and the strength of archaic thinking.
More interesting, however, is that having accused Guttmann of wrongfully ignoring Rosenzweig's new thinking, Strauss himself declined to say more about existentialism. This enabled Strauss to avoid drawing attention to the basically existentialist frame that had guided his own preference for the medieval over the modern—a frame Guttmann, in his unpublished response to Strauss, showed that he understood very well. Guttmann understood, in other words, that Strauss's preference for an interpretation of revelation as law (Strauss's medievalism) was bred of Strauss's particular modern moment and the appeal of a decisive horizon line of history and politics, a horizon that existentialism had made available to him.
The degree to which Heidegger influenced Strauss, and the question whether Strauss ever truly moved from existentialism to a deep Platonism, have bedeviled many interpreters, especially those who ascribe to Heidegger a brand of nihilism and suggest that Strauss shared it not only in his youth (when Strauss read Nietzsche with enthusiasm) but also in his maturity, when he seemed to subscribe to a version of Platonism.Footnote 86 For the purposes of this essay it is worth briefly noting the partial character of Strauss's reception of existentialism. Existentialism helped Strauss to emphasize political philosophy as a way of understanding the pragmata we encounter in the world around us, but he did not follow the early Heidegger in affirming the priority of the question of Being or the priority of the pre-Socratics, and he later blamed Heidegger's inattention to politics on his fascination with Being; Strauss, politically involved since he joined a Zionist youth group at age seventeen, could never afford to divert his gaze from the political.Footnote 87 The great irony of Strauss's influence from Heidegger, who wished for a return to the pre-Socratics, is that by emphasizing the importance of politics as a horizon of human existence, existentialism prepared Strauss to accept the reading of Plato conducted by the Aristotelians al-Farabi and Avicenna, who transformed Platonic politics “into a philosophic foundation of the revealed law,” as Strauss himself put it.Footnote 88 The Islamic Aristotelians, in other words, read Plato's Laws as suggesting that the only law deserving of the name comes from a divinity, a teaching which an atheist could understand on the most existential level.
During his 1929 debate with Martin Heidegger at Davos, Ernst Cassirer claimed that “neo-Kantianism has become the scapegoat of the newer philosophies.”Footnote 89 Strauss was not an existentialist but, in his critique of Guttmann, he certainly made neo-Kantianism into a scapegoat of sorts. When Spinoza's Critique of Religion appeared in 1930, it bore a dedication to Franz Rosenzweig, who had died in 1929. The dedication of Spinoza's Critique of Religion to Franz Rosenzweig was, in plain terms, entirely understandable. Strauss had known Rosenzweig well, and admired him. It had the perhaps unintended effect of aligning Strauss's first work with the existentialist response to the neo-Kantian variant of German Jewish thought, rather than with Cohen, and thus the dedication itself can be read as foreshadowing the later Streit between Strauss and Guttmann—commemorating one teacher while signaling a rebellion against another.Footnote 90
