Review Essay Leo Strauss on Maimonides

Journal of Jewish Thought & Philosophy 24 (2016) 149–161 brill.com/jjtp

Review Essay

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Leo Strauss on Maimonides

Raymond L. Weiss University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee [email protected]

Kenneth Hart Green Leo Strauss and the Rediscovery of Maimonides. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 224 pages. Hardcover. ISBN: 978-0-226-30701-5. $35.00.

Kenneth Hart Green, ed. Leo Strauss on Maimonides: The Complete Writings. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 696 pages. Hardcover. ISBN: 978-0-226-77677-4. $48.00.

Leo Strauss is perhaps best known in this country as a political philosopher. He was also part of the remarkable German-Jewish renaissance of the twentieth century, which is comparable in a way to the golden age of medieval Spanish Jewry. Strauss, along with other thinkers (such as Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Hermann Cohen) squarely confronted the grave challenge that modern philosophy and the Enlightenment posed to the Jewish tradition. He is distinguished from the others by his contention that, ultimately, an unbridgeable gulf separates philosophy from the Torah or the Jewish tradition. Whatever Athens and Jerusalem may have in common, the conflict between them cannot finally be overcome. Strauss is also differen- tiated from his peers by his experience of the power of Heidegger’s thought; although he was by no means overwhelmed by existentialism (or historicism), he knew that they had to be confronted. That Strauss found in a medieval thinker, Maimonides, a guide for grappling with these issues is the thesis of Kenneth Hart Green’s work on Strauss and

Maimonides. Two recent books from his hand merit the attention of the schol- arly community: Leo Strauss on Maimonides: The Complete Writings and Leo Strauss and the Rediscovery of Maimonides. In addition to Strauss’s well-known essays, The Complete Writings contains his lecture “Cohen and Maimonides” (1931), here translated into English for the first time. Among the lesser-known works included are “Notes on Maimonides’ Book of Knowledge” and “Note on Maimonides’ Treatise on the Art of Logic”; the appendix contains “On Abravanel’s Philosophical Tendency and Political Teaching.” One work has never been published before, namely, “Introduction to Maimonides’ The Guide of the Perplexed,” a lecture that Strauss delivered at the Hillel House of the University of Chicago (1960). This lecture differs somewhat from Strauss’s introduction to the Guide that was published a few years later with Shlomo Pines’s English translation (1963). The entire volume is enriched by Green’s erudition, which is much in evidence in his comprehen- sive and useful notes. To begin with what was fundamental for Strauss: In “How to Study Medieval Philosophy” (1944), the first lecture in The Complete Writings, Strauss depicts the conflict between the Torah and philosophy as a conflict between two dif- ferent ways of life: “between the way of life based on faith and obedience and a way of life based on free insight, on human wisdom, alone.”1 What, then, is the task of the philosophic scholar, such as Strauss was? He can undertake the task of clarifying the presuppositions of each way of life. Strauss illustrates what he has in view by taking issue with Gershom Scholem’s claim that medieval philosophy was unable to account for the “living reality of historical Judaism”; it was thus not capable of understanding the “religious sentiments or experiences” of pious Jews. According to Strauss, however, the study of medieval Jewish philosophy enables one to uncover the “elementary and inconspicuous presuppositions” of the religious sentiments or experiences of pious Jews; the sentiment or experience can then be evaluated to see whether it is more than a “beautiful dream” or an “awe-inspiring delusion.”2 To consider how Scholem might reply is not our concern here. We want only to grasp how Strauss regards the tension between a philosophic way of life and one based on “faith and obedience.” In the 1960 Hillel House “Introduction” to the Guide, we find a surprising statement that is not included in the 1963 prologue to the Guide’s English translation. Strauss says that the “relation of mystery and transparent order is the substance of Maimonides’ thought.” By “transparent order” he refers to

1 Strauss, Complete Writings, 102. Strauss’s emphasis. 2 Ibid., 102–103.

Journal of Jewish Thought & Philosophy 24 (2016) 149–161