Arousing Suspicion Against a Prejudice: Leo Strauss and the

Study of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed∗

Michael Zank, Boston

Expounding a single principle of the principles [...] is more important to me than

anything else that I might teach.1
Maimonides is a thinker of absolute intellectual integrity and remarkable depth and
clarity who struggles with the most complex questions. He is not ready to settle for
externally exposed syntheses, and he is not prepared to affirm that he knows more than
he does. He gives us, through his struggles, a classic and deeply moving paradigm of
how one can be both a true philosopher and a faithful Jew. [...] What he teaches us is
how a single human being can encompass multiple worlds with uncompromising loyalty
to each.2
The enchanting character of the Guide does not appear immediately. At first glance the
book appears merely to be strange and in particular to lack order and consistency. But
progress in understanding it is a progress in becoming enchanted by it. Enchanting
understanding is perhaps the highest form of edification. One begins to understand the
Guide once one sees that it is not a philosophic book – a book written by a philosopher

∗
Works by Leo Strauss are quoted as follows:
- Strauss 1941: “The Literary Character of The Guide of the Perplexed”, in: Essays on Maimonides, ed. Salo W.
Baron, New York 1941: 37-91 [= Strauss 1952: 38-94];
- Strauss 1952: Persecution and the Art of Writing, Glencoe/Ill 1952;
- Strauss 1953: Natural Right and History, Chicago and London 1953;
- Strauss 1963: “How to Begin to Study The Guide of the Perplexed”, in: Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the
Perplexed. Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Shlomo Pines, With an Introductory Essay by Leo
Strauss, Chicago and London 1963, xi-lvi
- Strauss 1976: “Maimonides Statement on Political Science”, in: Medieval Jewish Life. Studies from the
Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, Selected and with an introduction by Robert
Chazan, New York 1976: 355-370;
- Strauss 1987: Philosophie und Gesetz (English): Philosophy and Law: Essays Toward the Understanding of
Maimonides and His Predecessors, Translated by Fred Baumann, Philadelphia/PA 1987;
- Strauss 1988: Ma#i01monide. Essais rassemblés et traduits par Rémi Brague, Paris 1988;
- Strauss 1990: “Quelque Remarques sur la Science Politique de Maïmonide et de Farabi” (English): “Some
Remarks on the Political Science of Maimonides and Farabi”, translated by Robert Bartlett, in: Interpretation 18
(1990) 3-30;
- Strauss 1997: Philosophie und Gesetz – Frühe Schriften [= Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 2], Stuttgart und
Weimar 1997;
- Strauss 1997a: Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity. Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish
Thought, Edited by Kenneth Hart Green, Albany/NY 1997;
- 2002, The Early Writings (1921-1932).Translated and edited by Michael Zank, Albany/NY 2002.
1
Maimonides, Commentary on Mishna Berakhot 9:7, cited in Isadore Twersky, Introduction to the Code of
Maimonides (Mishneh Torah), New Haven and London, 1980: 360.
2
Marvin Fox, Interpreting Maimonides. Studies in Methodology, Metaphysics, and Moral Philosophy, Chicago
and London, 1990: 46.
 for philosophers – but a Jewish book: a book written by a Jew for Jews. Its first premise
is the old Jewish premise that being a Jew and being a philosopher are two incompatible
things.3
We are a people of teachers. For millenia, Jews have taught and been taught. Without
teaching, Jewry was an impossibility. Ravelstein had been a pupil or, if you prefer, a
disciple of Davarr. You may not have heard of this formidable philosopher. His
admirers say that he is a philosopher in the classical sense of the term. [...] I used to run
into Davarr on the street, and it was hard to imagine that this slight person, triply
abstracted, mild goggles covering his fiery judgments, was the demon heretic hated by
academics everywhere in the U. S. and even abroad.4
The growing fame of Leo Strauss is unusual for the kind of withdrawn man of letters that he
was. Judging by the great number of articles on Strauss that appeared in Western journals and
newspapers before, during, and after the second American war on Iraq, we are dealing with
the reactionary mastermind behind a cabal of conspirators trying to secure, by any means
necessary and for the foreseeable future, the position of the US as the only superpower.5 The
media love a good conspiracy, which is not to say that its very suggestion rules out such a
possibility. But the recent buzz about the impact of Strauss’s teaching on the minds of his
students, some of whom indeed occupy important positions in the US government or
influence public opinion through major conservative media and think tanks,6 sheds little if any
light on the mind of the master who is supposed to be behind it all. Writing about Strauss in
such an atmosphere, however, arouses such strong curiosity among his admirers and equally
strong suspicions of bias among his foes that it is virtually impossible to stay above the parties
of this culture war. Any neutrality toward Strauss seems to fall below the level of postliberal
critique associated with his name.
Fortunately, our task is not to evaluate Strauss’s mediate impact on current foreign policy or
civil rights in America but his contribution to the study of Maimonides. According to his own

3
Strauss 1963: xiv.
4
Saul Bellow, Ravelstein, New York 2000: 102.
5
Of the many articles that appeared in this vein, among other venues in The New Yorker, in Le Monde, the
Washington Post, I should like to mention only the following ones to which I have access at the time of this
writing, namely, Henning Ritter, “Das Orakel von Chicago” (Subtitle: “Leo Strauss gilt als geistiger Vater der
amerikanischen ‘Neokons’. Sein Denken überschreitet die Konsenslinien liberaler Demokratien”) in Frankfurter
Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, June 29, 2003, Nr. 26, p. 15, and Walter Laqueur, “Amerikas Neukonservative sind
keine bösen Geister” (Subtitle: “Wolfowitz, Perle und Kristol werden in Europa immer als Fürsten der Finsternis
hinter dem US-Präsidenten gesehen. Wer sind die NeoCons wirklich?”) in DIE WELT, Thursday June 12, 2003,
p. 6. Strauss’s daughter Jenny Strauss Clay, a classical philologist teaching at the University of Virginia,
answered to many of these articles in a beautifully penned reply, published as an op-ed piece in the New York
Times under the title “The Real Leo Strauss.”
6
On the influence of Strauss on his students see Shadia Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss, Basingstoke
1988.

2
carefully chosen nomenclature, Strauss was a political scientist rather than a philosopher. As a
political scientist, he is best known for his defense of premodern conceptions of natural law
against its modern detractors.7 But, as many recent authors have noted, our impression of
Strauss would be incomplete without attention to the duality of his works as a “political
philosopher and a Hebraic Sage.”8 It has become increasingly clear that Strauss’s work on the
political philosophy of “Athens” remains “opaque”9 as long as we fail to see it in connection
with his work on the political philosophy of “Jerusalem.” The link, in Strauss’s work, between
the two “cities” is provided by his studies on the writings of Moses Maimonides (1135-1204).
Strauss’s preoccupation with this medieval Jewish sage is not only associated with an
important phase in his intellectual development, a time of change in his orientation, but it
constitutes a lifelong pursuit.10
For readers who have considered Strauss primarily as an American political scientist with a
predilection for ancient Greek philosophy it may indeed be surprising to learn that the
contributions of Strauss that first established his reputation in wider circles, and that in some
quarters continue to rank among his most significant ones, are his works on the medieval
Arabic falasifa and on their most important Jewish student, Maimonides.11 Thus, Strauss can
be said to have “had a ‘scholarly’ presence among French orientalists and medievalists” since
the 1930’s.12 Similarly, Philosophie und Gesetz (English: Philosophy and Law), published in
1935 to support his application for a position at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem,

7
Cf. Rémi Brague, “Leo Strauss et Maimonide”, in: Shlomo Pines and Yirmiyahu Yovel (eds.), Maimonides and
Philosophy. Papers Presented at the Sixth Philosophical Encounter, May 1985, Dordrecht 1986: 246-268, here
246.
8
Harold Bloom in “Forword” to Yosef H. Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, New York
1989: xiii, as cited in Steven B. Smith, “Leo Strauss: Between Athens and Jerusalem” in: The Review of Politics
53 (1991) 75-99, here 75.
9
John G. Gunnell, “Strauss Before Straussianism: Reason, Revelation, and Nature” in: The Review of Politics 53
(1991) 53-74, here 53, speaking of the “universe” Strauss “inhabited before ‘coming to America’.”
10
Cf. Brague, Leo Strauss, 246: “(L)e rapport à Maimonide est chez Strauss central, permanent, et décisif.
Maimonide est l’objet permanent de ses recherches érudites, il est la source de ce qu’il estimait être sa grande
découverte, il est l’inspirateur de sa méthode (qui, en l’occurrence, est plutôt un style) philosophique personelle.
[...] Maimonide est présent à toutes les étapes, chonologiquement parlant, de la carrière de Strauss.” This
statement is not to say that Strauss did not also disown some of his early views on Maimonides later on,
considering them a mere “Thomistic detour” on his own intellectual path that eventually led him also to a
different, even more “radical,” understanding of the rationalism of the medieval thinker. See letter to G. Scholem
of June 22, 1952, cited in Heinrich Meier, “Vorwort des Herausgebers”, in: Strauss 1997: ix-xxxiv, here xxv n.
29. This disowning of the position Strauss had taken in the chapters of Philosophy and Law is evident already in
a letter, also addressed to Scholem, of Oct. 2, 1935, i.e., just after the publication of the book. See Meier, op. cit.,
p. xxii-iii n. 25. In contrast, David Janssens highlights some of the important continuities between positions
espoused in Philosophy and Law and Strauss’s later views. See David Janssens, “Questions and Caves:
Philosophy, Politics, and History in Leo Strauss’s Early Work”, in: The Journal of Jewish Thought and
Philosophy 10 (2000) 111-144, esp. 137-138.
11
For a bibliography of Strauss’s writings on Maimonides see Hillel Fradkin, “A Word Fitly Spoken: The
Interpretation of Maimonides and the Legacy of Leo Strauss”, in: Leo Strauss and Judaism: Jerusalem and
Athens Critically Revisited. Edited by David Novak. Lanham, Maryland 1996: 55-85, here 78-79 n. 1. A French
translation of the most important ones of these works was published by Remi Brague (Strauss 1988).

3
established Strauss’s reputation as a learned and original student of medieval Jewish thought
and philosophy, a reputation consistently nourished by his later publications on Maimonides
and his Muslim predecessors.
Whatever the impact of Strauss on other areas, he is now widely acknowledged to have
“revolutionized the study of Maimonides.”13 In a 1992 review of “Four Recent Maimonidean
Studies” David Novak judged that it was no longer possible to approach the Guide of the
Perplexed without, in some way, reacting to Strauss.
At different points in history, certain key figures inevitably have determined the tone
and substance of that discussion [viz., the discussion on how to interpret the Guide, M.
Z.], to such an extent that new discussants must begin their reflections by agreeing or
disagreeing with them. In recent times, such a key determining figure has been the late
Professor Leo Strauss who died in 1973. Strauss proposed a thesis about Maimonides’
meaning and intent in the Guide which is so powerful that, once it became commonly
known by students of Maimonides’ thought, it was inevitable that no one could
subsequently ignore it.14
Our topic of Leo Strauss and the study of Maimonides entails, at least, two major aspects,
namely, the role of Maimonides in the thought of Leo Strauss and the role of Leo Strauss in
the modern study of Maimonides. On closer inspection it emerges that these two aspects are
closely related. Although Strauss first turned to Maimonides and medieval philosophy in
connection with a work on Gersonides he undertook for his employer, the Akademie für die
Wissenschaft des Judentums, he soon became riveted by the discoveries he made in the
medieval texts. From this moment on (i. e., from around 1929 or 30), Strauss’s interest in
Maimonides is intrinsically linked to his theological-political critique of the modern liberal
tradition. From the outset, however, the interpretation of Strauss’s works is accompanied by
fundamental disagreements. Read within the parameters of standard notions of religion and
philosophy, Strauss can either be interpreted as a radical atheist or as an orthodox Jew. Yet,
according to his own declaration (in Philosophy and Law), he tries to reach beyond, i. e.,
behind the modern alternative of orthodoxy and atheism. A difficult undertaking, by any
standard. By way of Maimonides and his Muslim predecessors Strauss seemed to provide an
opening not only for political philosophy to return to the ancient Socratic question of the right
life but also for Jewish orthodoxy to retrieve an authority it had not possessed since the advent

12
David R. Lachterman, “Strauss Read from France” in: The Review of Politics 53 (1991) 224-245, here 224.
13
Kenneth Seeskin, “Maimonides’ Conception of Philosophy”, in: Novak, Leo Strauss and Judaism, 87-110,
here 87.
14
David Novak, “Responding to Leo Strauss: Four Recent Maimonidean Studies”, in: Conservative Judaism
44/3 (1992) 80-86, here 80.

4
of the modern critique of religion. While such contradictions indicate the difficulty one has in
figuring out what Strauss really intended, contemporary interest in Leo Strauss on the part of
the students of Maimonides is clearly not limited to his contribution to a merely philological-
historical deciphering of a difficult esoteric work of medieval thought but extends to the far
more important question of whether Strauss’s philology provides Judaism with a way of
regaining the authority it lost to the modern enlightened consciousness and its fundamentally
atheistic concepts of religion.
Strauss’s work on Maimonides can therefore not be sufficiently evaluated if one merely
focuses on his contributions to the history of the interpretation of Maimonides as such without
also taking a philosophical stance toward his judgments and their presuppositions.
The major obstacle before the attempt of such an assessment and evaluation of Strauss’s
views is the exoteric style Strauss ascribes not only to the Guide of the Perplexed but to all
expressions of true philosophizing, an activity which Strauss considers as invariably based on
some form of heterodoxy. The obvious difficulty arising from such a claim is the suspicion
that Strauss himself, as well as some of his most loyal interpreters, may have been engaging
in the very kind of literary game of hide-and-seek they ascribe to their predecessors.15 In other
words, if Strauss not only states but practices a form of exoteric/esoteric writing, his students
may similarly shun an all-too-open disclosure of their philosophic insights, weighing such
insights instead in light of what they perceive as their potential impact on the polis, the corpus
permixtum of vulgus and the discerning few, of their own day. Hence all ascription to Strauss,
or to the Maimonides of Strauss, of views conforming with those of any sort of Jewish
orthodoxy may be mere acts of accommodation on the part of philosophers conscious of their
political responsibility.
In the case of Strauss, until proven otherwise, it may be assumed that his writing followed the
rules of interpretation that he laid down with respect to Maimonides, foremost among them
the rule as to how to understand the somewhat puzzling rule of contradictions presented in the
Guide. As is well known, Maimonides proposes seven reasons why there may be
contradictions contained in any writing, of which he claims only two may be considered as
reasons for contradictions that may be found in his own work.16 What he means is that he
consciously used certain contradictions, contraries or divergences of another sort with the
intention of either leading his readers to a gradually more accurate conception of a difficult
subject matter or hiding his true opinion from the eyes of all but the most discerning readers.
According to Strauss, in case of a contradiction, Maimonides’ true intention conforms to the

15
Cf. Fradkin, A Word Fitly Spoken, 81 n. 21.

5
view that is stated least frequently, i. e., of two contradictory statements found in the Guide
the one stated least frequently, or perhaps just once, corresponds to the author’s true opinion
whereas standard notions repeated most often are unlikely to correspond to his true opinion.17
In the case of Strauss’s own writings, if not in the case of those of some of his followers, it
must therefore be suspected that notions conforming with the opinion of revealed religion are
merely due to an accommodation to the continued exoteric political need for the authority of
religious law. Wherever Strauss, or a Straussian, therefore speaks in favor of revealed religion
s/he in fact may be merely hiding the only possible true opinion of a philosopher, a view
inherently dangerous to the well-being of the political community because it is inimical to the
authority of the law.
This peculiar literary posture, even though it may be purely conjectural on my part rather than
descriptive of the actual stance taken either by Strauss himself or by any one of his students,
is nevertheless of some analytical value in that it suggests the possibility that Strauss may
have remained quite true to his origins in the study of the Enlightenment critique of religion.
Far from leaving modernity and the Enlightenment critique of religion behind, as some
Straussians may hope to achieve perhaps more confidently than Strauss may have done
himself, we may be dealing with the attempt of implementing the pia fraus that, according to
its critics, was the hallmark of traditional religion. The Enlightenment critics of religion
claimed that the priests of the religious communities deliberately mislead the public. This
claim entailed the assumption that revelation was the founding of the infamous three
impostors, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, whose followers merely maintained appearances in
order, by misleading the masses, to retain their political power. This staple assumption of the
modern critique of religion, i. e., the assumption of the unacknowledged atheism of the priests
who guide the masses by means of claims to truths they know to be untrue, may thus return in
the work of Strauss and the Straussians in what they perceive as the essence of the writings of
political philosophers, foremost among them the philosophical authors laboring under the
authority of a revealed religion. In light of the assumption that philosophers, such as
Maimonides, deceived their readers to evade persecution and to benefit the masses by
providing them with the maximum in intellectual guidance appropriate to their intellectual
capacity and the minimum of coercion necessary to lead them to good conduct and to the
establishment of sound habits, the original atheism of the enlightenment and their critique of
religion is revealed as more true to the essence of religion than the attempts of their
nineteenth-century successors to “reconcile” religion and rational autonomy. In other words,

16
Maimonides, Guide, Introduction to the First Part (folio 10a), Pines (ed.) pp. 17ff.

6
the radical critics of religion inadvertently spelled out the truth of religion whereas the
nineteenth-century sublation and internalization of religion created a socially and politically
devastating illusion about the natural state of man that brought in its wake the self-destruction
of a civilization built on “earthen feet” rather than on the “natural” foundations of both
classical political philosophy and its counterpart, classical revealed religion from the Bible to
Maimonides.
Once the exoteric form of exposition of premodern philosophers working within the political
framework of revealed religion has been made evident as the constitutive condition in form
and content of their thought, all philosophical communication has become irretrievably
politicized. More accurately, and in contrast to the Marxist variant of this thought, philosophy
is the only truly non-political pursuit. Yet, by virtue of having to be communicated, it is
necessarily drawn into the non-philosophical and thus necessarily political realm. Strauss thus
radicalizes the Enlightenment distinction between the private and the public, denying that
there is anything private beyond strictly personal thought and that every public uttering
worthy to be called philosophical is deeply political and must be guided by the wisdom of the
law-giver/prophet.
What renders this picture less bleak than it might seem is the fact that the city of man harbors
not only the vulgar who must be protected from the radically nihilistic implications of
philosophical truth but also the few chosen individuals who are capable of reading between
the lines, of communicating with each other across the centuries and who share their sublime
commonality beyond all difference of convention and habit. The divide between the few and
the many therefore consists in the ability of the few to recognize the natural differences
among men and to resist the illusions of historical change. This community of the cognoscenti
is constituted in their shared experience of the highest values, amicitia and theoria.
Strauss first discovered this companionship in Maimonides, but only after a certain struggle
with his own modern prejudice about what constitutes the premodern mind and differentiates
it from its modern counterpart. While the making of this discovery may have taken place at a
certain instant or in several stages, the development of the capability of communicating it to
others (in a way that remained true to the complexity of the matter) took “about twenty-five
years of frequently interrupted but never abandoned study” of the Guide of the Perplexed.18
The fruit of this labor is presented in the famous introductory essay Strauss contributed to

17
See Strauss 1952: 60-78.
18
Strauss 1963: xi.

7
Shlomo Pines’s epoch-making translation of the Guide.19 About this edition, Marvin Fox
judged,
The publication in 1963 of Pines’ new English translation of Maimondes’ Guide of the
Perplexed was an event of major importance to students of medieval philosophy and
Jewish thought. The translation and the Strauss essay have set a standard against which
to measure all other translations and aids to the study of the Guide.20
Among Strauss’s major concerns is the Platonic skeptical view of the possibility of
communicating anything worthwhile in writing, and yet he felt the surging need of
communicating just this impossibility and to do so in writing. In Maimonidean terms, the art
of this writing was addressed to those who must be considered capable of discovering the
valuable core of one’s communication quite on their own. In this respect, at least, Strauss
identifies with Maimonides and with what he perceives as the demand Maimonides makes on
himself when writing the Guide of the Perplexed. Quite aside from this engagement with the
Guide as literary work of art stands the engagement with the substantive issue Maimonides
seems to struggle with in the Guide, i. e., with the relation between philosophy and religion.21
According to the many interpreters, the struggle between the authority of reason and the
authority of the divinely revealed Torah is at the heart of his philosophizing. Is the mutual
exclusivity of philosophy and Jewish law, stated by Maimonides, part of the exoteric shape of
his work, or is it the essence of his argument? Marvin Fox’s analysis of Strauss’s essay on
“How to Begin to Study The Guide of the Perplexed” shows beyond doubt that Strauss
himself leaves this question open.22 It may be characteristic of Strauss’s intention that his
publications on Maimonides become less clear and more enigmatic with time. Whether this is
indicative of the fact that Strauss became increasingly less certain of Maimonides’s intentions
or whether he wished to force his readers to read Maimonides instead of reading Strauss
(while teaching them how to misread him as little as possible), the mimetic character of his
procedure is obvious. More Socratic, perhaps, than Maimonidean, Strauss prides himself of
following the great teacher of natural ignorance who knows that we really know very little
and that knowledge of the truth, as it is onto itself, is beyond our grasp. It is this ignorance

19
Maimonides, Guide (see Strauss 1963).
20
Fox, Interpreting Maimonides, 48.
21
According to the first monograph-length genetic study of Strauss’s intellectual biography, Kenneth Hart
Green, Jew and Philosopher: The Return to Maimonides in the Jewish Thought of Leo Strauss, Albany/NY 1993,
the substantive core of Maimonidean thought concerns the struggle between the two mutally exclusive
imperatives of the independent search for knowledge and the acceptance on faith of the prophetic authority of
Moses our Master. Cf. also Laurence Berns, “Kenneth Hart Green’s Jew and Philosopher”, in Jewish Political
Studies Review 9/3-4 (1997) 91-98 and Green, “Response to Three Comments on Jew and Philosopher”, in:
ibid., 99-130.
22
See Fox, Interpreting Maimonides, 61ff.

8
that sits rather awkwardly with the commands of the law whose meanings, according to
Maimonides, are rationally ascertainable. The law, pertaining to actions, must be considered
definite and clear. The questions that are ultimately the only ones worthwhile asking,
however, remain eternally unanswerable.
In the remainder of this essay, I shall further look in some more detail at two of Strauss’s
major writings on Maimonides, namely, at the early collection of essays published under the
suggestive title of Philosophy and Law (1935) and at a study Strauss published under the title
“The Literary Character of the Guide of the Perplexed.” This was first published in 1941 and
later included in one of Strauss’s first major publications on American soil, Persecution and
the Art of Writing (1952). The concerns of this brief review are to further highlight some of
the changes Strauss underwent in his views on Maimonides as well as to consider his
contribution to the understanding of The Guide of the Perplexed.

Philosophy and Law: Strauss’s Call for a Return to Maimonides as an

Expression of His Critique of Modernity
Philosophy and Law belongs among the early writings of Leo Strauss, representing his
intellectual career at a time before he relocated to the United States. Through its recent
American translations, however, it has found a new generation of engaged students and
enthusiastic readers. In a review, occasioned by the first translation of this work into English
(1987), Eve Adler appraised it as follows.23
This is an important and beautiful book. It contains a groundbreaking study of the
political philosophy of Maimonides and his Islamic predecessors, and it offers an
argument on behalf of that philosophy which is also a profound critique of modern
philosophy. Philosophie und Gesetz deserves to be widely recognized as fundamental to
the study of Jewish thought, but has long been out of print in German and had never
been translated into English. It was therefore cause for rejoicing ... that the Jewish
Publication Society recently brought out an English translation which will now
introduce Strauss’s work to a wider audience and stimulate interest in its subject
matter.24
The particular value of this book, as emerges from Adler’s assessment, lies predominantly in
its contribution to the analysis of modern Judaism, i.e., the “theological-political conundrum”

23
Strauss 1987, critically reviewed in Eve Adler, AJS Review 14/2 (1989) 263-288. Adler went on to publish her
own translation of Philosophie und Gesetz in the SUNY Series in the Jewish Thought of Leo Strauss, edited by
Kenneth Hart Green.
24
Adler, Review, 263.

9
of the modern Jew, as Strauss called it elsewhere, rather than in its analysis of the position of
Maimonides in the history of Jewish thought. It is a critique of the modern approach to the
history of philosophy and to the conception of Judaism as a religion in the modern sense of
the term, i.e., as an internalized spiritual value. The medieval juxtaposition of philosophy and
law is meant to replace the modernist assumption, held by Julius Guttmann and others, that
Maimonides was somehow a “philosopher of religion” in the modern sense. Yet while the
introduction to Philosophy and Law articulates this critical intention most clearly, the chapters
of the book hardly succeed in presenting a cogent elaboration of this program. The historical
studies that constitute the bulk of the work may reaffirm the unusual demand that the “crisis
of modernity” can be met only by means of a vigorous “return to Maimonides” but they fail to
present a Maimonidean philosophy one could possibly return to. Instead, the Maimonides
who emerges from Philosophie und Gesetz maintains a fideist position that resembles the
views of classical orthodoxy and entails the belief that reason itself calls for a revelatory
completion of its own limited knowledge of the ultimate. In Strauss’s words,
Ein Interesse an Offenbarung kann es nur geben, wenn man der Offenbarung bedarf.
Der Philosoph bedarf der Offenbarung, wenn er weiß, daß sein Erkenntnisvermögen
prinzipiell unzulänglich ist, um die Wahrheit zu erkennen. Die Überzeugung von der
Unzulänglichkeit des menschlichen Verstandes zur Erkenntnis der Wahrheit, d.h. der
entscheidend wichtigen Wahrheit, ist die Möglichkeitsbedingung dafür, daß ein
Philosoph als Philosoph Interesse an Offenbarung hat. Von dieser Überzeugung ist der
Klassiker des jüdischen Rationalismus im Mittelalter, ist Maimuni erfüllt.25
Hillel Fradkin’s assessment of the legacy of Leo Strauss picks up not on this standard notion
but on a rather outrageous claim advanced in the introduction to the book. As Fradkin notes, it
is here more than anywhere else in his later writings that Strauss expresses his unequivocal
enthusiasm for Maimonides. Fradkin comments on the early statement of the purpose of the
book which Strauss introduces by leaning on the authority of the towering figure of the neo-
Kantian Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) who had considered Maimonides
the “’classic of rationalism’ in Judaism.” According to Strauss,
(t)his seems to us to be correct in a more exact sense than Cohen probably meant it.
Maimonides’ rationalism is the truly natural model, the standard that must be carefully
guarded against every counterfeit. [...] The purpose of the present work is to arouse a

25
Strauss 1997: 51.

10
 prejudice in favor of this conception of Maimonides or rather, to excite a suspicion
against the powerful prejudice to the contrary.26
According to Fradkin, “this is an amazing or fantastic claim,” because
(t)aken literally and in its most unrestricted sense, Strauss’s declaration appears to claim
that Maimonides is not only the central figure in Jewish thought, but the central figure
in all human thought.27
Tempted, perhaps, by the reference to a “natural” model which, in Strauss’s later writings,
took an important place, Fradkin may be stretching Strauss’s intention a bit. Yet, like any
attentive reader, he is aware of the tension between the programmatic claims in the
introductory chapter, the far more pedestrian nature of the substantive discussions following
this introduction, and the shift in Strauss’s mature writings to emphasizing the Greek masters
of the medieval philosophers as the truly natural standard of all philosophizing.
Philosophy and Law represents an uneasy blend of Strauss’s first, still tentative, ventures into
the study of medieval prophetology with a bold philosophical critique of modernity. While
Strauss subsequently stood by the programmatic philosophical statement of the introduction,
he later dismissed his account of the Maimonidean claim to a superiority of true prophecy to
philosophy as a “Thomistic detour.” This alone may explain why Strauss never sought for
Philosophie und Gesetz to be translated into English.28
In 1935, when Strauss published Philosophie und Gesetz, he was a man of 36 years who had
left his native Germany with the knowledge that he might never return and who had to
support his wife and her child from an earlier marriage on the basis of a short-term research
grant from the Rockefeller Foundation that, at present, allowed him to pursue research on the
philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. While in Paris, the only academic position that seemed open
to Strauss (he had a doctorate but no Habilitationsschrift) was a position in Jewish philosophy
that had opened up at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Although he considered himself
intellectually superior to his competitor Simon Ravidowicz (who, however, had the advantage

26
Fradkin, A Word Fitly Spoken, 55 quoting Strauss 1987: 3.
27
Fradkin, A Word Fitly Spoken, 55f.
28
Philosophie und Gesetz was Strauss’s second youthful monograph, yet it was his first book-length study,
Spinoza’s Critique of Religion as the Foundation of His Bible Science (Die Religionskritik Spinozas als
Grundlage seiner Bibelwissenschaft. Untersuchungen zu Spinozas Theologisch-politischem Traktat (=
Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 1, ed. Heinrich Meier), Stuttgart and Weimar 1996) which, between 1925 and 1928,
he had written under the auspices of the Berlin Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentums that he later
decided to publish in an English translation to provide students a hint as to his own early thought. (Spinoza’s
Critique of Religion, New York 1965). The preface he added to this translation came as close to an
autobiographical statement as decency allowed (as Strauss described it in a letter to Gershom Scholem), and it
included several passages from the introduction to Philosophy and Law and was, thus, meant to preserve of it
what he considered of lasting value.

11
of being fluent in Modern Hebrew), the author of a book on Spinoza29 had yet to show that he
was also an expert in medieval Jewish thought. In order to prove this, he availed himself of
the help of Martin Buber who published a collection of Strauss’s essays in the only German
publishing house then available to print such a book, i. e., the Schocken Verlag in Berlin,
where Buber was the spiritus rector and his friend Lambert Schneider took care of the
publishing business.
Philosophie und Gesetz is comprised of three substantive essays. The first one, titled “Der
Streit der Alten und der Neueren in der Philosophie des Judentums,” is a critique of Julius
Guttmann’s book, Philosophie des Judentums (Munich, 1933). The second one deals with the
paradox of revealed law as the decisive pre-philosophical condition of the “unbelieving”
philosophizing of Ibn Rushd, Maimonides, and Levi ben Gershom. The third essay “on the
prophetology of Maimonides and its sources,” penned as early as the summer of 1931,
examines the “philosophical justification of the law.”
Given the fact that, in his subsequent writings, Strauss greatly modified his interpretation of
Maimonides it may seem as if Philosophy and Law, while being of particular significance to
the study of Strauss’s intellectual development and perhaps of considerable value to the study
of modern Jewish thought, it is of minor significance to the study of the philosophy of
Maimonides. This impression is confirmed by the further observation that the late Professor
Marvin Fox, who had been a student of Strauss’s at the University of Chicago and whose
work on Maimonides represents one of the most significant post-Straussian positions,
mentions Philosophie und Gesetz only once,30 namely in a reference pertaining to Hermann
Cohen’s above mentioned view of Maimonides, whereas he respectfully, critically, and
extensively debates Strauss’s mature writings, especially the introductory essay to the 1963
edition of the Guide.31
Oddly enough, when we move from Strauss-philology and -hagiography to the substantive
problems at stake, we realize that the position of Philosophy and Law is still very much with
us and represents one of the major possibilities of interpreting Maimonides. Marvin Fox’s
position, as well as that of Kenneth Hart Green who wrote his PhD dissertation on Strauss’s
“return to Maimonides” under the guidance of Professor Fox, resemble, to some degree, the
stance adumbrated in Philosophy and Law, i. e., the very stance Strauss later abandoned or
modified. While Green remains close to the analysis of the “crisis of modernity”32 which he

29
The German original of Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (1965) had been published in 1930.
30
Fox, Interpreting Maimonides, 27.
31
See Fox, Interpreting Maimonides, Chapters 3 and 4.
32
See the title of Strauss 1997a, edited by Green.

12
maintains can be successfully addressed by means of a return to the philosophic Judaism of
Maimonides as paradigmatically sketched by the young Leo Strauss,33 Marvin Fox’s fideist
embrace of the Maimonidean ability to combine within oneself the often “diverging” demands
of philosophy and revelation is based on an analysis of Maimonidean texts that proceeds in
form of critical debates with some of Strauss’s later contentions (which, as Fox shows, may
be successfully dismantled) and aims to make room for a perception of Maimonides that very
much resembles that of the younger Strauss.34
Philosophy and Law is a confusing book in that it gives rise to opposite conclusions about
Strauss’s own (but therefore also about Maimonides’) position toward philosophy and law. Is
it the book of a an atheist, is it an argument in favor of orthodoxy, is it both at the same time,
or none of the above? For those, like Fox and Green, to whom it matters to justify orthodoxy,
Maimonides (and also Strauss) is “a Greek philosopher on the outside and a Jew on the
inside.”35 In the end it depends on whether one follows Strauss’s quest for an Archimedean
point before the dichotomy of atheism and orthodoxy, no matter whether or not it may lead
one beyond the pale of revealed religion, or whether one continues to read Maimonides in
light of the “modern prejudice” that is indicated by this dichotomization. While, in my mind,
Professor Fox considered Maimonides as the paragon of the intellectual “probity” demanded
not only by the honest atheism of Martin Heidegger36 but also by the “new thinking” of Franz
Rosenzweig and the fideism of Karl Barth and others, Kenneth Hart Green seems to attempt a
third way out, namely, by seeking to reconcile the later Straussian return to Platonic political
philosophy with the earlier (orthodox) prophetology of Philosophie und Gesetz. Since the
former, i. e., Platonic political philosophy, is not just irreconcilably opposed to belief in
revelation but also inimical to the assumption of its believability in the sense of an informed
philosophical judgment, Green’s position is either an exoteric defense of orthodoxy or else a
position that may be a well-reasoned interpretation of Maimonides and a substantive
alternative to postmodernist answers to the “crisis of modernity” but not ultimately
representative of Strauss’s mature point of view.

“The Literary Character of The Guide of the Perplexed:” A Study of Genre

Philosophy and Law was written under the first impression of two important discoveries made
by Strauss in his studies of medieval philosophical writing. The implications of these

33
See the title of Green, Jew and Philosopher.
34
See Fox, Interpreting Maimonides, e. g., pp. x, 64-66, 80-90, and passim.
35
Cf. Michael Wyschogrod, “Kenneth Hart Green’s Jew and Philosopher”, in: Jewish Political Studies Review
9/3-4 (1997) 87-90, here 89.

13
discoveries, namely, the insight into the exoteric character of philosophical writing and the
Platonic source of medieval prophetology, became clear to Strauss only gradually but it is safe
to say that they are the constitutive insights for his subsequent work on Maimonides. Between
Philosophy and Law and the 1941 article on “The Literary Character of the Guide of the
Perplexed,”37 years of greatest turbulence and insecurity in his life, Strauss published six
essays and reviews dedicated to Maimonides, his Arab master Alfarabi, and on Abravanel.38
Even the work on Hobbes which had appeared in an English translation when Philosophie
und Gesetz was published in Berlin was somehow related to his interest in getting a real
handle on the Guide.39 In light of these publications it becomes clear why Heinrich Meier
characterizes Philosophy and Law as “the beginning of a revolutionary new interpretation of
Maimonides and his Arab ‘predecessors’ in the horizon of Platonic political philosophy.”40 In
a letter to Gershom Scholem of October 2, 1935, Strauss expressed the hope that, “over the
next 10 years or so,” he will be able to write an introduction to The Guide of the Perplexed.41
While Philosophy and Law had thus been “the beginning”42 “The Literary Character of The
Guide of the Perplexed”43 is the closest to a fulfillment of this promise Strauss had made to
himself, and it should be an indication of where the discovery of exotericism and of the
Platonic character of medieval prophetology had led him by then.
The answer to this simple question of a development in Strauss’s thought is complicated by
the difficulty we have raised above. As soon as it became clear to Strauss that medieval
prophetology and ancient political philosophy are in form and content concerned with the
problem of the political nature of philosophical writing (rather than, as assumed under the
influence of Christian scholasticism and its modern critiques and sublations, with the problem
of divine revelation and the limitation of human knowledge), in other words, as soon as it

36
Cf. Strauss 1997: 25f.
37
First published in Essays on Maimonides, ed. Salo W. Baron, New York 1941, 37-91, in the following cited
from Strauss 1952.
38
“Quelques remarques sur la science politique de Maïmonide et de Fârâbî” (1936), “Eine vermißte Schrift
Farâbîs” (1936), “Der Ort der Vorsehungslehre nach der Ansicht Maimunis” (1937), “On Abravanel’s
Philosophical Tendency and Political Teaching” (1937), and “Zu Abravanels Kritik des Königtums” (1937) are
now included in Strauss 1997. To this one should add the 1939 Review of Hyamson’s edition of Maimonides,
The Mishneh Torah, Book 1, in Review of Religion 3 (1939) 448-456.
39
The Political Philosophy of Hobbes. Its Basis and Genesis. Translated from the German manuscript by Elsa
M. Sinclair. Oxford 1936, a work that, in a letter to Scholem of October 2, 1935, he called “an introduction to the
Moreh” (cited in Strauss 1997: xxiii n. 25).
40
Meier, Vorwort, ix.
41
Strauss 1997: xxiii n. 25.
42
A parallel to the “10 years,” and thus the possible key to their significance, is the ten years Kant spent thinking
through his conception of the First Critique before committing it to writing, a fact mentioned by Strauss in an
earlier essay.
43
The reissuing of the essay on “The Literary Character of The Guide of the Perplexed” was followed, in short
order, by another substantive essay on “Maimonides’ Statement on Political Science,” first published in

14
became clear to Strauss that the open exposition of the political intention of the medieval
philosophers could entail a violation of the very purpose for which they wrote, he changed his
own style of exposition to one making the same demand on his readers that Maimonides had
made on his. Fortunately, Strauss initially expressed himself less guardedly and thus left us
with clear indications of the changes in his views.
The first change concerns Strauss’s view of the raison d’etre of revelation. Instead of
considering Maimonides to believe, as he had until about 1935, that prophecy had the purpose
of complementing human knowledge with respect to ultimate truths, such as the createdness
of the world, Maimonides is now believed to have assumed a radically political raison d’etre
of revelation. Thus, as Heinrich Meier points out,44 the 1936 essay “Quelques remarques”
radically calls into question the “insufficiency” hypothesis Strauss had developed in Spinoza’s
Critique of Religion (1930) and that still appears prominently in Philosophy and Law. In
1936, Strauss writes, critically looking back at his earlier position, that
(i)t has been thought that the principal end of revelation according to [Maimonides] was
the proclamation of the most important truths, above all those not accessible to human
reason. But if this is the precise meaning of Maimonides’ opinion, why does he say that
the divine law is limited to teaching these truths in a summary and enigmatic manner,
while in political matters, “every effort has been made to render precise what concerns
the governance of the cities in all its details” (Guide III, 27-28 ...)? [...] The founding of
a perfect nation, and consequently the proclamation of a perfect law which must serve
as a constitution to the perfect nation is, according to Maimonides, the raison d’etre of
prophecy.45
The second change, related to the first, concerns the assumption of a superiority, or at least of
a qualitative difference, that distinguished the medieval philosophers (as believers in
revelation) from their ancient pagan masters. By abandoning the insufficiency hypothesis,
which had allowed for the position of belief to claim superiority to the position of unbelief,
Maimonides is now resituated in the community of those who, like Avicenna, considered
Plato’s Laws as a sufficient theory of the kind of revelation the medieval thinkers were
compelled to handle philosophically. In other words, Strauss changed his opinion on

Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 22 (1953) 115-30, later included in What is Political
Philosophy?, Glencoe/Ill 1959, and here quoted from Strauss 1976.
44
Meier, Vorwort, xxiv n. 28, referring to Strauss 1997: 143.
45
Strauss 1990: 14.

15
Maimonides from viewing him as someone whose world was dominated by authorities
(Aristotle, the Bible) to someone recognizing but one authority, i. e., reason.46
The dictum, henceforth frequently referred to by Strauss, that “according to Avicenna, the
philosophic discipline which deals with prophecy is political philosophy or political science,
and the standard work on prophecy is Plato’s Laws”47 also sheds light on Strauss’s positioning
of himself within the taxonomy of scientific disciplines. As someone, whose teaching is
dedicated to the most rigorous pursuit possible of a single principle, namely, that the teaching
of Maimonides “cannot be understood by starting from modern presuppositions”48, Strauss
clearly intends for us to realize the deep irony by which he calls himself a “political scientist,”
if by this we are to understand someone dedicated to the interpretation of prophecy. Since
Strauss can only position himself in this way by undercutting the common taxonomy of
sciences we must follow along his critique of the standard sociologies of knowledge49 (whose
deficiency he sees in their being predicated solely upon modern experiences) to even begin to
see what he is up to.50
The third change concerns the turn in Strauss’s subsequent work from an interest in
philosophical claims of the sort that can be restated in different terms, to the literary character
of the philosophical work itself which now becomes the true riddle to which we must learn to
pay attention. It is only in this turn to the form of writing itself that the original intention of
the philosophers can be observed, if it can be observed and retrieved at all. Thus the emphasis
on “The Literary Character” or the subsequently even more modest attempt at showing “How
to Begin to Study The Guide of the Perplexed”51.
This is, fourthly, also a change from making mere statements about the natural ignorance
taught by Socrates to an actual practice of close reading and to a practice of the kind of
restoration to the level of natural ignorance, an excavation from the “second cave” that
otherwise remains a mere postulate, that can lead us to a state at which we may begin to
benefit from the actual teaching of the great philosophers as they themselves understood it.
The essay on the “Literary Character of The Guide of the Perplexed” may thus represent an
intermediate step to the strangely enigmatic high point of Strauss’s writing on Maimonides,
the 1963 essay on “How to Begin to Study The Guide of the Perplexed” which may have no

46
Cf. Steven Lenzner, “A Thinker’s Progress”, in: National Review, Sept. 16, 2002, online at
http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1282/17_54/90888298/print.jhtml, viewed on July 8. 2003. Lenzner’s article
is a review of Strauss 2002.
47
Strauss 1952: 10. See Meier, Vorwort, xviii n. 13, for a list of other references to this passage in the works of
Strauss.
48
Strauss 1952: 38.
49
See the introduction to Strauss 1952.
50
Cf. op. cit., Introduction.

16
other purpose than to force the reader to abandon this puzzling guide to the Guide and begin
to study it by him- and herself.
“The Literary Character of The Guide of the Perplexed” was first published in 1941, i. e.,
shortly after Strauss arrived in the U. S. It does not seem to have made a great splash at the
time. Even in 1952, when the essay reappeared as a chapter in Persecution and the Art of
Writing, Strauss was still relatively unknown. Thus it is fully only since the publication of the
1963 Pines translation of the Guide that Strauss has become a household name in the study of
Maimonides. Since neither the 1941 essay nor the introductory essay of 1963 included
lengthy passages on Strauss’s philosophical critique of modern approaches to philosophy,
religion, and politics, students of Maimonides focused on Strauss’s historical and literary
claims pertaining to the Maimonidean text itself. Since, taken by themselves, these claims are
as far-reaching as they are enigmatic, all praise of Strauss on the part of other interpreters of
Maimonides such as Joseph Buijs52 or Kenneth Seeskin53 cannot hide the fact that they are
ultimately bewildered by his claims, especially by his denial that the Guide is a philosophical
work.
Strauss himself was not just prescient enough to anticipate resistance to his interpretation on
the part of his fellow historians54 but he may have written the essay on “The Literary
Character of The Guide of the Perplexed” with the very intention of provoking bewilderment
and, thus, of generating a truly philosophical engagement with his premises.55 In other words,
what seems most fertile and exciting in Strauss’s interpretation of Maimonides are the
difficulties and obstacles he establishes between modern readers and the text that are meant to
raise the readers’ awareness of their own presuppositions. Where readers fail to engage
Strauss on the level of such principal considerations they tend to dismiss his claims as
outrageous, and their very account of Strauss’s position more often than not resembles a
caricature.

51
Strauss 1963.
52
Cf. Joseph A. Buijs, “The Philosophical Character of Maimonides’ Guide – A Critique of Strauss’
Interpretation”, in: Judaism 27 (1978) 448-457.
53
Cf. Seeskin, Maimonides’ Conception.
54
In the 1941 essay, Strauss repeatedly and consistently refers to himself and those he addresses as fellow
scholars as historians. See especially p. 38, 43, and pp. 55-60.
55
Cf. Seeskin, Maimonides’ Conception, 92-96, where he elaborates on the Maimonidean notion of “perplexity”
as suggesting the Aristotelian notions of “wonder” and “puzzlement” that are the beginning of all
philosophizing. Yet, while he understands Strauss’s overall intention quite well (see esp. p. 103), he fails to be
provoked by Strauss’s challenge to the modern notions of “philosophizing” when he orients his own
philosophizing toward the need of the “uninspired minority who want a theory that unites moral and intellectual
virtue, who believe that a Jewish understanding of God and creation is superior to the other options” (ibid.). In
Straussian terms, Seeskin imposes on Maimonidean texts a quintessentially modern concept of the
reconcilability of philosophy and religion, as well as provides a “personal interpretation” (Strauss 1952: 69) to
resolve difficulties in the Maimonidean text (see Seeskin, op. cit., p. 99).

17
The general premise of the essay, stated in a short introductory statement,56 runs as follows. It
is generally agreed among historians that “the teaching of Maimonides” is “essentially
medieval” and thus “cannot be understood by starting from modern presuppositions.” The
reason why interpreters nevertheless differ in their interpretation of Maimonides must
therefore be “traced back” most likely to differences in the interpretation of this shared
principle “or to a difference of attitude in its application.” The major concern is therefore the
identification, and overcoming, of the disposition of modern historians that prevents them
from “the most thoroughgoing application” of what is generally agreed upon as the goal of
historical interpretation, namely, “the true and exact understanding of Maimonides’ teaching.”
This is as much as Strauss tells us in the introduction to set us on the right track. As in
Philosophy and Law, therefore, the historical study of The Guide is prefaced, however briefly,
by an indication of a philosophical or methodological point of departure.
Strauss thus begins by indicating the possible sources of disagreement between the modern
interpreters of the Guide. This opening is not per chance reminiscent of the passage in Guide
I, 31, where Maimonides lists the “three causes of disagreement about things” according to
Alexander of Aphrodisias, to which he adds “habit and upbringing” as a fourth cause that did
not yet exist in ancient times, a passage Strauss first referred to in a paper he wrote in 1930.57
What Strauss meant to say then, and what he hints at again in his introduction to the 1941
essay, is that modern historians are further removed from the “natural difficulties of
philosophizing,” addressed by Socrates, than the ancients. What compounds their difficulties
is the advent of a “tradition resting on revelation that stepped into the world of philosophy”
and “fundamentally limited the freedom of philosophizing.”58 In 1931, Strauss clarifies this
intuition by referring to a “second, much deeper cave” from which we must first excavate
ourselves in order even to reach the “cave from which Socrates may lead us to light.” This
excavation is to be achieved by means of a new kind of reading the classical texts that, in
contrast to nineteenth-century hermeneutics, no longer aspires to understand the historic
authors better than they understood themselves but aspires to learn from them, to practice a
way of reading “with the burning interest of someone wishing to be taught” (“mit dem
verzehrenden Interesse dessen, der belehrt sein will”).59

56
If one includes this paragraph as a chapter of its own, the essay as a whole consists of seven chapters. The fact
that the introduction is not numbered highlights it special significance for an understanding of the essay as a
whole. Its substantive concern is reiterated and amplified later on, especially on pp. 43 and 55-60.
57
“’Religiöse Lage der Gegenwart’”, in: Strauss 1997: 386, and cf. id. 2002, Introduction.
58
Strauss 1997: 386f.

18
There may be further echoes between the structure and argument of the 1941 essay and what
Strauss sees as the literary character of the Guide. Strauss returns to the modern reader’s
difficulty, as well as to his own task, in Chapter II (“A Philosophic Work?”) where, in search
for the determination of the actual subject matter of the Guide (cf. Chapter I. “The Subject
Matter”), he examines and dismisses the common assumption that the Guide is a philosophic
book. As Strauss well anticipated, resistance to his understanding of Maimonides’ intention
was to be strongest on this point. Students of Jewish philosophy could not grant the claim that
the presumably greatest work of premodern Jewish philosophy, a work unmatched in
significance and the standard of Jewish rationalism60 even in modernity (cf. Hermann Cohen:
“Der Rambam wird’s zufrieden sein”),61 was not a philosophic work at all.62 Strauss’s claim
amounted to a deconstruction of the very possibility of such a thing as a “Jewish philosophy
of religion,” at least as applied to the work of premodern thinkers, and thus to an attack on the
principal assumption of the entire discipline to which he was presumably contributing. To
obviate this critique, or to soften the blow he was dealing, Strauss speaks of himself as a
historian rendering a service to “the philosopher of our time.”
There is, perhaps, no greater service that the historian can render to the philosopher of
our time than to supply the latter with the materials necessary for the reconstruction of
an adequate terminology. Consequently, the historian is likely to deprive himself of the
greatest benefit which he can grant both to others and to himself, if he is ashamed to be
a micrologist. We shall, then, not hesitate to refrain from calling the Guide a
philosophic book.63
Julius Guttmann, Alexander Marx, Joseph Buijs, Kenneth Seeskin, Marvin Fox, David
Novak, David Hartman, and others do not deny that Maimonides struggles with the relation
between Aristotelian philosophy, which he regards as “philosophy” pure and simple, and the
claims of revelation that contradict it, such as the creation of the world from nothing. Yet, to
the degree that it is dedicated to this struggle between philosophy and revelation, they
consider the Guide a philosophical work, whereas Strauss, basing himself on Maimonidean
dicta to the contrary, disagrees and insists on the author’s right to determine by himself

59
“Besprechung von Julius Ebbinghaus”, in: Strauss 1997: 438, quoting Ebbinghaus, Über die Fortschritte der
Metaphysik, Tübingen 1931, 8f.
60
On Maimonides as the “classic of rationalism” (Strauss 1997: 9) see Hermann Cohen, Religion der Vernunft
aus den Quellen des Judentums, Frankfurt / M 21929 (= Wiesbaden 1978), 73, 386, 410, and cf. Strauss, “Cohen
und Maimoni”, in: Strauss 1997: 395.
61
See Franz Rosenzweig, “Einleitung”, in: Hermann Cohens Jüdische Schriften, First Volume: Ethische und
religiöse Grundfragen, Edited by Bruno Strauß, Berlin, 1924: XIII-LXIV, here LIII.
62
See Buijs, The Philosophical Character, 448 n. 1, enlisting the support of Alexander Marx and Julius
Guttmann, and cf. Seeskin, Maimonides’ Conception, 109-110 n. 61.
63
Strauss 1952: 43

19
whether or not he considered the Guide a philosophic work, according to how he himself
understood the term “philosophic.” What is the point of this argument, assuming it is more
than quibbling over bibliographic terms? What Strauss does is quite clear. His major concern
is the modern inability to even perceive the natural difficulties of philosophizing. The way to
sensitize us to this inability is to undergo a propaedeutics of careful reading. Hence his task as
a “historian” is to teach us how to read with care. His first and most basic lesson in this course
is to teach us to refrain from subjecting an entire work of the complexity of Maimonides’
Guide to the nomenclature of a taxonomy whose presuppositions are alien to it. The modern
taxonomy allows one to call a “philosophy of religion,” or simply a “philosophy,” a work
aiming at a reconciliation or synthesis of religion and philosophy within a single “system” of
thought.
It is well known that Strauss was averse to all synthesizing of opposites, i. e., to the Hegelian
dialectics that is at the root of the quintessentially modern historicist worldview.64 To Strauss,
the sublation of opposites comes at the price of the sacrifice of at least one of the two
opposites, and a worldview founded on the assumption of an actual sublation is fundamentally
based on an illusion. What one can learn from Maimonides is, thus, profoundly lost if and
when we draw him into the orbit of a taxonomy based on the modern assumption that religion
and philosophy may be reconciled.
According to Strauss, “contradictions,” in other words, a form of opposites, are “the axis of
the Guide.”65 Is Strauss projecting his own philosophical program onto the Guide and thus
committing the very sin against the text that he expressely wishes to avoid, as Seeskin
suggests?66 I think not. Rather, I believe that one misses the point of the essay if one limits
Strauss’s intention to providing a few rules of exegesis that are to unlock, in a straightforward
manner, the secrets of the Guide. The question Strauss hopes to answer by speaking of
“contradictions” as the “axis of the Guide” continues to be the same one he raises at the
beginning of the essay and that he still needs to answer, namely, the question of the “literary
character” of the Guide. This question is now put more precisely by asking, to what genus this
work belongs, what other books belong to the same genus, and what are the specific
differences between them. To Strauss, contradiction is not only a device among others (e. g.,
stories, parables, ruses, hints, chapter headings, number symbolism) employed within the
Guide but it is descriptive of the very genus of which the Guide is a specimen.

64
Cf. Seeskin, Maimonides’ Conception, 102f, citing a passage from Strauss 1953: 74. See also the essay “Der
Konspektivismus” (1929) in Strauss 1997: 365-375.
65
Strauss 1952: 74.
66
See Seeskin, Maimonides’ Conception, 90.

20
 Maimonides gives here the rather undisguised answer that the genus looked for is
contradictory speech.67
The true significance of the question of the genre or genus is not the proper classification of
the Guide alone but rather the much more fundamental question of a classification of, and
thus of our approach to, the Bible itself.
“The Literary Character of The Guide of the Perplexed,” thus, seems a rather carefully
constructed act of some sort, the mimetic staging of a stance toward the Maimonidean text
that teaches by doing what it describes, namely, the Maimonidean stance toward the Torah.
Measured by the standards of conventional academic writing, Strauss’s essay is a text that
demands unusually careful deciphering, i. e., it must be approached with the same
archeological skills necessary to decipher the Guide’s deciphering of the secrets of the Torah.
It is therefore to be expected that the essay contains some form of contradictory speech,
although, just as Maimonides replaces the parables of the Bible – i. e., the biblical means of
revealing its secrets while hiding them and of hiding them while revealing them (an imitatio
dei of sorts) – with enigmatic speech of a different sort, so Strauss likely replaces
Maimonidean enigmas with other forms more attuned to the conventions and habits of the
perplexed readers he, in turn, means to enlighten. In doing so, he both transgresses and
maintains the respect due to the imperative to which Maimonides feels beholden, namely, that
the secrets of the Torah are not to be divulged to the untutored multitude. But in what way
does the “moral dilemma” (Chapter IV.) of the modern interpreter resemble that confronted
by Maimonides himself if religion no longer limits the freedom of philosophizing? Is not the
modern academy founded on the freedom of thought?
As we know from elsewhere, Strauss considered the modern freedom of thought as
incomplete as long as it is a merely negative freedom, based on the negation of religion, rather
than on some kind of undialectic natural affirmation of something, such as the simple question
of the right life. Indeed, Strauss says something along these lines quite explicitly also in the
1941 essay on the “Literary Character” when he writes that “freedom of thought [...] seems to
be incomplete as long as we recognize the validity of any prohibition to explain any teaching
whatsoever” (p. 56). The “prohibition to explain any teaching whatsoever” is, of course, the
one that is the most common assumption in the modern academy namely that a retrieval of
premodern thought as a radical alternative to post-Enlightenment thinking should be
considered at all, i. e., that the radical Enlightenment of Maimonides should in any way be

67
Strauss 1952: 68.

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able to enlighten us about the unacknowledged, and thus unexamined, presuppositions of
historicism.
The modern study of the Guide is thus caught in a bind. “The interpretation of that work is
wholly impossible for the modern historian” (p. 58) and “all present-day students of
Maimonides necessarily lack the specific training required for understanding, to say nothing
of writing, an esoteric book or commentary” (ibid.). This is so because “the rise of modern
historic consciousness” and “the interruption of the tradition of esotericism” not only “came
simultaneously,” as Strauss says, but the former is constitutive of the latter. Strauss’s
rediscovery of the art of careful reading, i.e., the exoteric reading between the lines, and the
style of writing he himself practices are constitutive of his attempt to reach beyond the
historicist mindset. The point, of course, is not the reinstatement of religious orthodoxy but
the “adequate understanding of the secret doctrine, of philosophy and politics.” (ibid.) But it
seems as if modern historicist thought had to run its course before it was possible to
rediscover the secret of exoteric writing. In order to overcome historicism, the modern
historian depends on historicism.
What are we, finally, to make of the claim – made only one page after the assertion of the lack
of qualification of “all present-day students of Maimonides [...] for undertanding [...] an
esoteric book or commentary” – that
the methods of modern historical research, which have proved to be sufficient for the
deciphering of hieroglyphics and cuneiforms, ought certainly to be sufficient also for
the deciphering of a book such as the Guide (p. 57)?
The continuation of this sentence leaves no doubt that Strauss must be speaking in ironic
terms, for he concludes that, in contrast to hieroglyphics and cuneiform, “access [to the
Guide] could be had in an excellent translation into a modern language” (p. 58). In other
words, it should be easier to decipher the Guide than to crack the code of an unknown
language. Strauss concludes the difficult and evidently contradictory chapter on the “moral
dilemma” of the modern interpreter by reducing “our problem” to the task of “detecting the
specific method which will enable us to decipher the Guide.” What follows in the last two
chapters of the essay are, firstly, the development of Strauss’s suggestion of how to determine
Maimonides’ intention in the case of making two contradictory statements (Chapter V.
“Secrets and Contradictions”) and, secondly, an examination as to whether Maimonides
regarded the Guide or his Code (the Mishneh Torah) more highly.
Much has been written against Strauss’s interpretation of the Maimonidean “method of
contradictions.” In the most incisive treatment of this method, Marvin Fox has shown that

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Strauss seems rather careless in reducing the use of contradictions in the Guide by referring to
contradictions only, whereas Maimonides himself speaks of contradictory and contrary
statements and also refers to “divergences” of another sort, namely, between statements and
actions rather than between two statements.68 If I am correct in asserting, as I did above, that
the chapter on “Secrets and Contradictions” primarily serves to complete the general
determination of the “literary character” of the genre common to the Guide and the Bible, and
if I am also correct in considering the turn to a fail-safe “method” to “decipher” the Guide as
an ironic statement, it may come closest to the truth if we conclude that Strauss, toward the
end of the essay, is no longer pursuing an “ascent” toward the truth but rather has begun “a
descent” to the level of a conventional approach, or better of a parody thereof. If this is true,
then the structure of the essay is again made to resemble the Guide itself where, after the high
point of the chapters dealing with maaseh merkavah (III, 1-7), Maimonides turns to “beings
that come into being and perish” and then to actions, in other words, from dealing with the
“secrets of the Torah” to dealing with the concern of the fiqh (the legalistic study of the
Torah). In other words, just as Maimonides “imitated, in some manner or other, the way of the
prophets”, especially with respect to “the sequence of topics in the Guide,” namely, by
arranging them in the order of “ascent, followed by descent” (p. 91), so did Strauss. One
might add, that the method of contradiction is far less prominent as an interpretive device in
Strauss’s last and most lasting writing on Maimonides, the introductory essay on “How to
Begin to Study The Guide of the Perplexed” where the question of the structure, or plan, of
the Maimonidean work dominates the interpretation.
Least visible, yet most important (and thus applying a rule Strauss explicitly articulates vis-à-
vis Maimonides) are the references, in the 1941 essay, to Platonic political philosophy. In a
mere footnote, Strauss declares that “Maimonides conceived of the prophets as statesmen.”69
Similarly he states in a seeming hyperbole that the reason why it is impossible for a modern
historian to interpret the Guide is that he would need to be like Maimonides himself, who in
turn is like the prophets, namely, “endowed with all the qualities of a Platonic philosopher-
king,” implying “an unbearable degree of presumption on the part of the would-be
interpreter” (p. 58). Finally, Strauss considers the prophet as
a man who not only has attained the greatest knowledge, indeed, a degree of knowledge
which is not attained by mere philosophers, but who is able also to perform the highest
political functions (pp. 90f.).

68
See Fox, Interpreting Maimonides, 67-90, and cf. Seeskin, Maimonides’ Conception, 105-106 n. 15, where
Seeskin adds a critique of Fox, expanding the range of possible interpretations of the “method of contradictions.”
69
Strauss 1952: 91 n. 156.

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This is followed by the revealing analogy that “(a) similar combination of theoretical and
political excellence is required for the understanding of the secret teaching of the prophets”
(p. 91) and, we might add, of Maimonides.
Maimonides, according to Strauss, clearly holds philosophy in higher esteem than the
legalistic study of the Torah. But this is hardly a secret nor does it transgress rabbinic law
since the philosophical study of the secrets of the Torah is commanded by the Torah itself.
The true secret of the Guide, the one which when divulged to the untutored multitude would
likely undermine its authority, is the political, and hence entirely non-philosophical, character
of the Torah. The non-anthropomorphic interpretation of Scripture, the proofs for the
existence of God, even under the Aristotelian assumption of the eternity of matter, and all the
rest of the elements that, according to most modern interpreters, affirm that Maimonides was
the foremost Jewish thinker who aimed at a reconciliation of revelation and reason, are to
Strauss really part of the exterior, exoteric level of the Guide hiding the secret that the Torah
itself communicates once it is read with the eyes of a philosopher-king (i. e., a prophet).
According to Strauss, it was the modern historical mind, the mind seeking a synthesis of
philosophy and politics, or perhaps rather the mind of one who critically examined and
refuted the legitimacy of such a synthesis, who rediscovered the true secret of the Guide and
with it also of the Torah. There is, therefore, an obvious continuity between the early
Strauss’s study of the Enlightenment critique of religion and of modern political philosophy
and his discovery of the Platonic grounds of medieval political philosophy, and it is becoming
clear what he meant when he called his study of Hobbes “an introduction to the Moreh.”
Strauss’s critique of the critique of religion and his conception of premodern prophetology are
mirror images of one another.
Does the essay on “The Literary Character of The Guide of the Perplexed” address, or even
resolve, the crisis of Judaism or the “crisis of modernity”? What Strauss contributes is, in my
opinion, an important critique of the academic study of Jewish philosophy, namely, of the
latter’s na#i01ve attachment to the methodological truisms of historicism. Yet, unlike one
leaves the realm of philosophy and enters into politics (and thus perhaps into a new form of
pious fraud), Strauss can hardly be said to have established the possibility of a return to
Maimonides other than in the sense of appreciating Maimonides as a political philosopher in
the Platonic tradition in the full philosophical potential of this tradition.

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