Leo Strauss is the philosopher of the hour. He is certainly the Jewish philosopher of the hour, though the question is, why? Why should someone—according to his own diction a “political philosopher”—be the critical thinker of Judaism in our times? Is it his defense of law as the other of philosophy? Is it his farewell to Zionism that reverberates with the current fear that Zionism, the pursuit of a Jewish state, may not have been a lasting solution to the Jewish question? Was it not Strauss who, as early as 1935, anticipated that the Jewish state might fail either politically or in other ways to provide a safe haven for the Jews or for Judaism? Was it not his intention to search for a different safe haven for Jews and Judaism, one that might be both more ancient and more durable than any state can be? What is to preserve the Jews other than what has preserved them through the past millennia, namely, Judaism and, more precisely, Jewish law? And is not Strauss the one who has most forcefully articulated that law remains the untaken bulwark of Judaism as a revealed religion, undiminished by the critique of religion of the radical Enlightenment?

Strauss is undoubtedly the most radical critic of the Enlightenment critique of religion. The centrality of this motif in Strauss's work is somewhat obscured by the focus of his more widely known writings on politics from Plato to Hobbes. However, it is not obscure for those who read him as a Jewish thinker, a thinker of the undiminished power of the law. Readers who perceive Strauss as the philosopher of the hour, of the present moment in Jewish time and experience, focus on Philosophy and Law, a set of essays published in German in 1935, a significant year in the history of political theology and atheological politics. Strauss was a thinker of the natural differences among human beings. For the Strauss of 1935 to be retrieved as the thinker of the hour for Jews and Judaism today indicates that the difference of the Jews as a political entity and hence the legitimacy of a state that is Jewish rather than based on universal human rights is in question and that a solid foundation is needed to rethink the raison d'être of a Jewish state.

Strauss was not a racist. Neither Judaism nor Zionism is racist. But Judaism is the religion of the Jews, and Zionism is the pursuit of Jewish statehood. In religious terms, the difference of the Jews arises from the revealed law to which they are beholden by dint of covenantal obligation. However, there is no necessary link between this obligation and statehood. The will to embrace the virtues needed for the establishment and perpetuation of Jewish statehood cannot simply be derived from the unbroken authority of the law that has given the Jews the will to persist as a people in the absence of a state. The early Strauss, a political Zionist, focused on manliness (virtù) as the virtue needed for statehood.

Strauss's critique of Spinoza's critique of religion explored whether Spinoza was correct in asserting that postbiblical, rabbinic Judaism and Jewish religious commitment to its perpetuation were incommensurate with the virtues needed to achieve statehood. Spinoza asserted that the foundation of a city required a manliness that religion attenuates. Conversely, if the Jews were ready and willing to overcome the effeminacy effected by their religion, they could once again choose themselves as a nation and hence God would choose them, too (the God of Spinoza being merely another word for nature).

When Strauss's critique appeared in 1930, it seemed to argue the opposite from which Strauss had started. Instead of defending the critique of religion and hence enhancing the political struggle, Strauss showed that the Enlightenment critique had been motivated by extraphilosophical motivations (the desire for the peace of society) rather than interest in theory or purely scientific motives, that it had failed to dislodge faith, and that it was itself based on irrational and unproven assumptions hidden behind rhetorical rather than substantive reliance on the natural sciences. Because the critique of religion had won only in the political and social-cultural realm but not from a rigorous philosophical perspective, religion had essentially survived the onslaught, though modern orthodoxy was unaware of this undiminished power and, instead, borrowed modern utilitarian arguments. In 1930, Strauss thus appeared as an advocate of orthodox faith and a critic of the Enlightenment. With his review of Schmitt's Concept of the Political, Strauss spelled out the political implication of his insight: modern liberalism coasted on principles borrowed from revealed religion that, turned into the goals of internationalist politics, were likely to create a dictatorship ideologically committed to the homogenization of society. Strauss remained true to this intuition throughout his career.

Back in 1925, as a sought-after Zionist theorist, publicist, and speaker on questions of religion, Strauss had turned his rhetoric against religious Zionism. “Today,” Strauss said in 1925, “the enemy is on the right.” He took recourse to such strong language because many readers of Strauss already tended to mistake him for a defender of orthodoxy. Criticism of the Enlightenment critique, however destructive not just for modern secularism but for liberalism as well, does not automatically make Strauss into an advocate of orthodoxy.

If religion's power survived the critique, it could perhaps be tamed, contained, integrated, or otherwise exploited if approached from a point of view that was truly independent, such as a point of view that was historically prior. This insight ushers in Strauss's return to the ancients. Moreover, one could engage religion critically without entering into an open struggle. This was the way of medieval thinkers, the Jewish philosophers, and their Muslim tutors. Maimonides taught a way of exploiting religion by strengthening rather than criticizing it. The most effective way of strengthening religion was to diminish the strength of conviction of its opponents, the critics of religion. From early on, Strauss did exactly that.

He identified a foundation for the political that was not indebted to secularization, that is, to an illegitimate borrowing of religious ideas. Notwithstanding his conviction that biblical tradition itself is suffused in political wisdom, in his later writings, Strauss hardly makes the effort of foregrounding these insights and experiences. Jewish readers interested in exploiting Strauss might find the most valuable contribution to Jewish political thought in the margins of some of the earlier texts, but very little in the later, more overt but also much less serious juxtapositions of Jerusalem and Athens. Strauss's ostensible, though often quite formulaic, respect for revelation, law, and Judaism and hence for Jerusalem as the city founded on belief and as the great other of Athens, is anemic in comparison with his intense preoccupation with Athens itself, the city where nonbelievers, like he himself, are able to thrive as long as they are cautious. In the final analysis, the and between Jerusalem and Athens may be a conjunction rather than a disjunction.

The early Strauss can be profitably read on the background of the “renewal of theology” he mentions in the autobiographical preface to the American edition of Spinoza's Critique of Religion (1965) as a context for his early writings. Let us accept that Strauss was familiar with the concerns of the renewal of theology, which certainly agrees with his vigorous dismissal and destruction of the great achievements of the Enlightenment. The difference between Strauss himself and the dialectic theologians, however, is that he did not return to orthodoxy and his goal remained not the renewal of theology but of the other side of the theological-political conundrum, namely, the political.

Strauss took his cue from Nietzsche's genealogical method. Strauss was also impressed by Rosenzweig who argued that paganism was an original and indelible alternative to Judaism and Christianity, and that it was to remain alive despite the advent of revelation. But Strauss goes further, and he goes in a different direction. He considered even Rosenzweig and Heidegger as indebted to the Enlightenment critique of religion, precisely in their struggle to overcome it. Proceeding from this insight, Strauss developed his own brand of antihistoricism. His mode of analysis is the undoing of historical syntheses and the search for the original or natural difficulties that set in motion the course of intellectual history at the end of which we are hopelessly entangled in prejudice and false forms of consciousness.

Of the various creative political and religious thinkers that emerged in and from Weimar Germany of the 1920s, Strauss remains perhaps the most difficult, least assimilable, and most controversial. This, of course, makes us particularly curious to understand better—beyond the caricature of polemics and beyond adulation and imitation—what exactly he was really all about and what, if anything, he may have to teach us today.

With this in mind, we turn to two recent books. Daniel Tanguay's Leo Strauss: An Intellectual Biography, which first appeared in French in 2003, and David Janssens's Between Athens and Jerusalem. Both cover more or less the same ground in almost the same amount of space. Both attempt to tackle more or less the same problem, starting from what appears to be the same assumptions. The resulting books are, nevertheless, in intriguing ways dissimilar.

An assistant professor of philosophy of law at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, Janssens cites Tanguay, an associate professor of philosophy and adjunct professor of political science at the University of Ottawa, but does not articulate how his own reading differs. Tanguay's was the first book, aside from Heinrich Meier's and Kenneth Hart Green's various contributions, to review Strauss's intellectual project on the basis of his early writings, the writings Strauss produced before he came to the United States. Janssens also looks at the early writings, but he does so more closely and meticulously than Tanguay.

Both authors take Strauss at his word when he says that the enduring theme of his writings was the “theological-political predicament.” Tanguay and Janssens, each in their own way, use this statement, found with variations, in two different prefaces Strauss published in the mid-1960s, to trace Strauss's intellectual development, while also arguing for a remarkable consistency in his preoccupations.

Tanguay and Janssens cover the same ground by following the chronological order of Strauss's publications, assuming that order to reflect a progression in Strauss's thought. At issue in both volumes are the early writings, that is, Strauss's work, published and unpublished, from 1921, when he wrote his dissertation, until 1938, when he moved to the United States. The aim in both volumes is to show consistency between the programmatic aspects of these early writings with the better known work Strauss produced later on. In terms of these later writings, Tanguay seems persuaded that the themes of Strauss's Natural Right and History are the culmination of his philosophical intentions, whereas Janssens adds, in an extensive epilogue, brief summaries of Strauss's mature readings of Plato and Machiavelli that echo the themes and convictions Strauss is shown to have developed early on.

Of the two volumes, Tanguay's is the simpler book. It has a short table of contents, dividing the thought of Strauss into four themes. Instead of reading Strauss's many major texts and smaller texts closely, as does Janssens, Tanguay tries to think through the major themes and motifs of his work. In a substantive conclusion, the author states a certain disappointment. Tanguay does not really understand Strauss, but this lack of understanding is deeply revealing, and it endears Tanguay to the reader. The reason why, in the end, Strauss remains alien to Tanguay is that Tanguay is a Christian and Strauss is not. Tanguay cannot quite accept that revealed law in the Jewish sense and revealed religion in the Christian sense are not one and the same. When Strauss speaks of revelation, he means the Sinaitic legislation or, more likely, rabbinic halakhah and its Islamic analogue, sharia law, rather than the moral legislation that is really the modern hybrid Strauss sets out to dismantle and that was never even a persuasive or existentially relevant construct for him. Strauss's point of departure, according to his own testimony, was an orthodoxy that was all ritual without superadded sentimentality or moral equivalency. This is the orthodoxy Strauss has in mind when he juxtaposes orthodoxy and atheism, not the ethical monotheism of nineteenth-century Jewish reform or the hybrid of cultural Zionism.

This ultimate disagreement of an author with the subject of an “intellectual biography” (5) would not be troubling were it not for the fact that it skews and haunts the biography throughout. Strauss never thought, as Tanguay asserts, that, “if political Zionism were to be true to its internal logic, it first had to transform itself into cultural Zionism, and following that into religious Zionism” (6). Strauss also never sought a “return to orthodoxy” (5). The critique of the Enlightenment critique of religion was to tear the veil of persuasiveness surrounding the modern liberal worldview, but for the sake of “atheism of probity,” not, as Tanguay describes it, to retrieve the orthodox position. Tanguay thus misstates the point of departure of Strauss's intellectual path. But he also misstates its end. For Tanguay, Strauss begins with an interest in revealed religion as undefeated by its modern critics, and he ends with the assertion that the “eternal struggle” between “Jerusalem and Athens” is the “most essential conflict in human history” (9). If this were an accurate description of Strauss's work, one would have to conclude that not only did Strauss never advance beyond the irreconcilable dichotomies that he toyed with in his youth (orthodoxy/atheism, belief/unbelief, religion/politics) but that he remained a lifelong decisionist (cf. 210), and that his decision in favor of “zetetic philosophy”—a decision for a “genuine Platonism” “inspired by the Platonic-Farabian tradition” (7) and hence against revealed religion—is ultimately incomprehensible. Tanguay's Strauss emerges as a kind of hedonist of a higher order, an apologist “of the philosophic life guided by the aim of delivering potential philosophers from the principal, contemporary obstacle to the free exercise of philosophic activity” (7).

The main opponent against whom this philosophic way of life must be defended, its major challenge, is “revealed religion,” according to which “man cannot attain happiness without divine assistance or without being guided by the divine law” (8). Tanguay equates “divine assistance,” a Thomistic conception, with guidance by the “divine law,” a Farabian conception. Strauss, however, learned to keep these apart. Strauss over time recognized the radical difference between revealed legislation and revealed religion. However, Tanguay cannot accept that for Strauss these are altogether different categories. Tanguay's Strauss is made to fail “in his attempt to present a defense of philosophy that might abstract entirely from History” because this Strauss must also admit that “the Law constitutes the absolute moment of history around which all other events past, present, and future revolve” (212). He is “obliged to let intervene a possibility—the revelation of the biblical God—which is historically incarnated and was essentially unknown to the Greeks” (212, emphasis added). But this is a Christian conception of the law, one that rules out the undiminished legitimacy of the city as represented by Athens. Tanguay further conflates that now diminished pagan city with its own internal other, namely, philosophy, especially the Socratic question of the right life. In the end, Strauss appears never to have liberated himself from the “theological-political predicament” that continued to provide him with the major theme of his preoccupation. In contrast to Tanguay's Strauss, the Strauss who wrote this in the 1960s, that is, in the last decade of his life and looking back at his beginnings, clearly distinguished between what had entangled him as a young Jew and from what he disentangled himself later on. In contrast, Tanguay's Strauss remains hopelessly entangled in the irreconcilable dichotomies of his youthful beginnings.

By and large, David Janssens is the more careful reader. Rather than reducing Strauss to the “central categories of (his) thought,” as does Tanguay (8), Janssens subjects his readings of Strauss's early writings to the test of allowing them to shed light on Strauss's own magisterial readings of Plato, Machiavelli, and Hobbes. While this test is executed briefly and only in the context of an epilogue, it is not just the most readable part of the book but it reminds us why we pay attention to Strauss in the first place. Strauss is an original reader of major classical texts. To be sure, the title of the book, Between Athens and Jerusalem, is misleading. One might think that, with Tanguay, Janssens juxtaposes them as complete alternatives. But they are merely two out of three, the third being the position of the philosopher, the position from which Strauss proceeded when he extricated himself from the theological-political predicament. The irony, one not completely lost on Janssens but not made explicit either, is that Strauss really ended up agreeing that philosophy, Platonic philosophy to be precise, was the middle ground or third position from which alone both religion and politics could be judged.

Janssens's table of contents is incomprehensible in that it is impossible to derive from it any kind of logic or argument about the progression of Strauss's thought. The book itself is less tedious, but the overall problem remains. Janssens diligently follows the chronological order of Strauss's published and unpublished writings and tries to reconstruct from these writings the intellectual path of Strauss. Similar to Tanguay but with more attention to detail and hence closer to the real Strauss, Janssens takes two points for granted, namely, that Strauss's writings reveal his convictions as he formed them in the process of writing and that his own later autobiographical statements about his earlier development are accurate and may serve as authoritative guides to the interpretation of his earlier writings. Strauss is taken as the authoritative guide to Strauss. Here, too, lies an irony, one also not entirely lost on Janssens. Strauss treats philosophers as fully self-conscious and all-knowing authors of their own works; in this he reads philosophers exactly the way religious readers read Scripture, namely, as indicative of the mind of an all-knowing author. But now Strauss himself is made into the object of such an exegetical exercise. Janssens makes no attempt to read beyond Strauss's texts. When he discusses Zionism (chap. 1), he only discusses Strauss's views of Zionism, views that cannot be fully grasped for what they are unless one considers the alternatives independently, namely, aside from Strauss's rather polemical early writings, something Janssens does not do.

All of this is not to say that I regard Janssens's book as a failure. To the contrary. I believe it is the best attempt to date to make sense of the early Strauss and trace the development of his thought on the relation between religion, politics, and philosophy. I would enthusiastically recommend this book for use in a course on Strauss as long as it is accompanied by reading of Strauss's own prose.