Strauss Leo - Leo Strauss on Moses Mendelssohn

LEO STRAUSS

ON

MOSES

MENDELSSOHN

Translated

and edited,

with an interpretive

essay, by

Martin D. Yaffe

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

Leo Strauss (18991973) was one of the preeminent political philosophers of the twentieth century. He is the author of many books, among them The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, Natural Right and History, and Spinoza's Critique of Religion, all published by the University of Chicago Press.

Martin D. Yaffe is professor of philosophy and religion studies at the University of North Texas and the author or editor of several books, including Shylock and the Jewish Question.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2012 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2012.

Printed in the United States of America

21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-92278-2 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-92279-9 (e-book)

ISBN-10: 0-226-92278-2 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-226-92279-0 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Strauss, Leo.

Leo Strauss on Moses Mendelssohn / translated and edited, with an interpretive essay, by Martin D. Yaffe.

pages. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

This book is an annotated translation of the introductions written by the young Leo Strauss to ten of Mendelssohns writings.

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-92278-2 (cloth: alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-92278-2 (cloth: alk. paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-92279-9 (e-book)

ISBN-10: 0-226-92279-0 (e-book) 1. Mendelssohn, Moses, 17291786. I. Yaffe, Martin D. II. Title.

B2693.S873 2012

193dc23

2012022901

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To (Rabbi) Jack Bemporad

Yet wisdom, where can she be found?

Which is the place of understanding?

Job 28:12

C ONTENTS

by Alexander Altmann

by Martin D. Yaffe

T RANSLATORS PREFACE

I

Leo Strauss on Moses Mendelssohn is a translation of ten introductions by the political philosopher Leo Strauss (18991973) to various philosophical writings by Moses Mendelssohn (172986), the leading Jewish figure of the German Enlightenment and the philosophical founder of modern Jewish thought. Strauss composed the introductions in the 1930s as a junior editor of the Moses Mendelssohn Gesammelte Schriften Jubilumsausgabethe Jubilee Edition of Mendelssohns collected writings. This multivolume collaboration among leading German-Jewish scholars, begun in Weimar Germany in commemoration of the bicentennial of Mendelssohns birth, was soon suppressed and all but destroyed by the Nazi regime. Not until the 1970s were the Jubilee Editions previously published volumes reprinted (including two of the three volumes that Strauss worked on), delayed volumes published (including Strausss third volume), and new ones undertaken.

The Mendelssohnian writings that Strauss edited, annotated, and introducedand translated from the Hebrew in the case of two of themspan Mendelssohns celebrated literary career. They culminate in Morning Hours (1785) and To the Friends of Lessing (1786), written as philosophical defenses of the moral and theological respectability of the late Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (172981), Mendelssohns dearest friend and the German Enlightenments outstanding literary figure and theological polemicist. Mendelssohn was responding to the shocking claim by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (17431819) that toward the end of his life, having long since moved from Berlin and close proximity to Mendelssohn, Lessing had secretly become a devotee of the philosophy of Benedict Spinoza (163277). To Jacobi and Mendelssohn and their German contemporariesindeed, to any thoughtful reader in Europe during the century or so since Spinozathis would be another way of saying that Lessing had become an atheist.

To judge by initial impressions, the shocking character of Spinozist atheism shows up less in Spinozas magnum opus, Ethics Demonstrated in a Geometrical Order (1677), than in his Theologico-Political Treatise (1670), which is a sort of introduction to the Ethics. The elaborate argument of the Ethics is perhaps shocking enough, theologically at any rate. It collapses God into nature and, at the same time, elevates nature into God. Spinoza cushioned this dual shock to some extent by giving his Ethics the rhetorical look of a geometrical treatise, so as to limit its readership to those who could be expected or encouraged to negotiate its complicated internal cross-references and chains of deductive reasoning. He also took the precaution of publishing the Ethics posthumously and anonymously. Meanwhile, he interrupted writing the Ethics to publish the Treatise, also anonymously. The Treatise is the philosophical founding document of both modern liberal democracy and modern biblical criticism. In the course of its lively, spirited, semi-popular yet formidable argument, it denies the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch and, with that, any divinely revealed basis for morality. Not surprisingly, the Treatise gained widespread notoriety almost right away among its intended, theologically minded Christian readership. Compounding the notoriety was the fact that readers soon pinpointed its anonymous author, accurately, as an excommunicated Jew from Amsterdam whofor reasons made plain enough in the Treatise itselfdeclined to convert to Christianity.

A century later, the moral opprobrium attached to Spinoza reached Lessing in the following way. Spinozist biblical criticism had found its practitioners in Lutheran Germany. These included above all Hermann Samuel Reimarus (16941768), whose unpublished Apology or Defense for the Rational Worshipers of God broadens and thickens Spinozas argument about the Old Testament to include the New Testament. After his death, Reimaruss daughter Elise presented her fathers manuscript in confidence to Lessing, who by then was librarian at the Ducal Library at Wolfenbttel, in Brunswick, and as editor of the librarys quarterly publication was exempt from routine theological censorship. By 1774, Lessing began publishing excerpts from Reimaruss manuscript, while preserving their authors anonymity by calling them Fragments of an Unnamed. To the several Fragments, Les sing added editorial Counterpropositions designed to contextualize the radical views of the Fragmentist and separate his own views somewhat from them. Even so, publishing the Fragments upset orthodox Lutheran theologians, and Lessing soon found himself drawn into a lengthy controversy over the Fragments with Pastor Johann Melchior Goeze of Hamburg. Neither the Fragmentist nor Lessing as his editor presents himself as a doctrinaire Spinozist. Reimarus in his other writings had adhered to the natural or rational theology of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646 1716), which was predominant in the German universities of Lessings day in the version promulgated by Leibnizs first-generation disciple Christian Wolff (16791754) and was a respectable, if controversial, theist alternative to revelation-believing Christianity among Enlightened Lutherans. In the glare of the Fragments controversy, however, Lessing could appear to have abandoned Leibnizianism for Spinozism. Mendelssohn in Morning Hours gives voice to this opinionif only in order to rebut it while countering Jacobis assertion that Lessing had confessed his recent Spinozism to him in private conversations during the summer of 1780. Among other things,