The Theological-Political Problem in Leo Strauss’s Writings on Moses Mendelssohn

Abstract

It is impossible to do justice to Martin Yaffe’s edition of Leo Strauss’s writings on Moses Mendelssohn in the present context. It amounts to a philosophical optic that allows readers to glimpse, as if for the first time, the fundamentally theological-political character of Strauss’s thinking. This character is so stark that it can be said to function as the horizon on which all of Strauss’s other distinctions (ancients/moderns, philosophy/polis, philosophy/poetry, esoteric/exoteric) come into view. In translating all of Strauss’s introductions and annotations contained in the Moses Mendelssohn Gesammelte Schriften Jubiläumsausgabe—the Jubilee Edition of Mendelssohn’s collected writings (with additional correspondence between Strauss and Alexander Altmann and relevant primary source material by Lessing and Mendelssohn),1 Yaffe has not only succeeded magisterially in presenting readers with a “whole picture”