Leo Strauss was a Jew and a philosopher. But for this “citizen of Athens,” as Jeffrey Bernstein calls him (taking over a phrase from Stanley Rosen), what was the importance of Jews or Jewishness? In one of the few autobiographical passages he published in his lifetime, the preface to the 1965 publication of the German original of his book on Hobbes, Strauss famously wrote that “the theological-political problem has remained the theme of my investigations.” Others called this problem “the Jewish question,” and Strauss himself once observed, in a 1962 lecture, that “since a very, very early time the main theme of my reflections has been what is called the ‘Jewish question.’” Is the fate of the Jews or the truth of the Torah simply one particular instance of the clash between the claims of reason and the claims of revelation? Or is there something in the Torah or the claim of the people who live by it that is of fundamental and irreplaceable importance for all who think? Is the Jewish question only a question for philosophers who happen to be Jews? And if it is not, does that not open up Strauss to the charge of historicism? For if all who think need to think about the Jews, then the encounter of thought with Judaism would somehow change the possibilities of understanding for all whose primary impulse is to understand.

In Leo Strauss on the Borders of Judaism, Philosophy, and History, Jeffrey Bernstein presents Strauss as a Jew thinking and writing about might and right in the critical period of modern Jewish history. This critical period begins after the First World War with the rejection of Reform and of Hermann Cohen's claim in particular that the philosophical importance of Judaism came from its unique status as the “religion of reason.” This period comprehends the Holocaust, that is to say, the destruction of the principal Jewish communities of Europe, and the rebirth of the Jewish state in the Promised Land. It concludes with the 1967 Six Day War, in which Israel demonstrated to its enemies that the Jewish state's existence could no longer be altered by frontal attack using the means of power politics. Bernstein does Strauss scholarship an important service, in particular, by posing the question (never before formulated, I believe, in the burgeoning literature on Strauss) of the context and therefore the meaning of Strauss's 1954–1955 lectures in Jerusalem published subsequently by Strauss as the title essay of the collection What Is Political Philosophy?

Cohen and his fellow travelers claimed that Judaism was valuable because of its particular expression of a universalizable egalitarian moral and political teaching. The teaching that Cohen wrote into Jewish sources celebrated and sanctified the autonomy of man as presented by Kant. In rejecting this particular claim regarding Judaism's worthiness from the point of view of thought, Franz Rosenzweig and his contemporaries, including Strauss, cleared the ground for what Strauss called “the reawakening of theology.” Bernstein shows in his second chapter how Strauss's own encounters with Maimonides respond to the appropriations of Maimonides within so-called Jewish philosophy by Cohen, Julius Guttmann, Harry Wolfson, and others. These men sought harmonizing interpretations of Maimonides, while Strauss presented a Maimonides who points his most intelligent readers to the gulf between the philosophic life based on the quest for truth and the life of service to the revealed law of the Torah.

In chapters 3 and 4 Bernstein takes us to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1954–1955, where Strauss, on sabbatical from the University of Chicago, appears as the representative of political philosophy to the font of revelation. Bernstein shows us that we need to read this essay not only in the light of Strauss's encounters with Jewish thinkers but also in the light of his lifelong support for political Zionism and a Jewish state. Here Bernstein leaves a number of helpful indentations for the constructions of future scholars. With regard to form, Bernstein presents “What Is Political Philosophy?” as fundamentally dialogic, even though it is not a dialogue but a series of lectures in which Strauss claims oddly that “the proper form of presenting political philosophy is the treatise.” With regard to content, Bernstein presents Strauss's lectures as, inter alia, a critique of religio-political fanaticism, and, in doing so, he reads back into the mid-1950s the post-1967 concerns of thinkers such as Yeshayahu Leibowitz and Gershom Scholem. I believe that when Strauss spoke or wrote about the religious alternative to political Zionism, he had in mind not Bible-quoting territorial irredentism but the rejection of all human political action in favor of patience, prayer, and quietism. In his concluding chapter, Bernstein discusses “The Transmission of Philosophy as a Way of Life” in Persecution and the Art of Writing, and responds to Heinrich Meier's claim that Strauss showed that philosophy transcends, or (more questionably) refutes, revelation in that philosophy explains the human need for revelation to the philosopher's own satisfaction. Bernstein also responds to Miguel Vatter's claim that for Strauss, it is ultimately revelation that sets the problematics of morality with which philosophy begins and ends. Neither Meier nor Vatter, Bernstein argues, can comprehend Strauss's insistence on our confronting Jerusalem and Athens without reducing one to the other.

Bernstein poses fundamental questions about Strauss by situating him as one of the Jewish thinkers of his time, the twentieth-century critical period that separates modern Judaism from what comes after. Bernstein avoids the cheap historicism of claiming that it is this situation that defines or limits Strauss. Rather, he, uniquely, shows the ways in which Strauss leads us to think by presenting himself in dialogue with these rival thinkers.