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Book Review: Leo Strauss on Moses Mendelssohn3 4 9Leo Strauss, Leo Strauss on Moses Mendelssohn. Translated, edited, and withan interpretive essay by Martin D. Yaffe. Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 2012, 322 pp., $45.00 (hardcover).F r e d Bau m a n nKenyon Collegebaumann@kenyon.eduAll right then; so what do I think about what Martin Yaffe thinks about whatLeo Strauss and Alexander Altmann (not to mention Frederick Beiser) thinkabout what Moses Mendelssohn and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi think aboutwhat Gotthold Ephraim Lessing thinks about what Baruch, a.k.a. Benedict,Spinoza thinks about? Not as many layers as Schliemann’s Troy perhaps, butenough to go on.Before that though, some preliminary and high praise is in order. Asthe first sentence suggests, the scholarly labor alone that is necessary to dojustice to such complexity is likely to be enormous. Here the task was madeeven more difficult by the fact that the “present volume,” as Altmann calls itin preliminary remarks dating from 1974 (3), is in fact ten introductions byLeo Strauss, translated by Yaffe, to “various philosophical writings by MosesMendelssohn” (xi), which were supposed to come out in the Jubilee edition ofMendelssohn’s collected works. The Third Reich had something to say aboutthat, however, with the result that the project did not revive until the 1970s.Dr. Yaffe has translated these ten introductions, and as far as I can tell, doneso with great care and precision. Where, as often, Yaffe thinks it useful, heoffers a translator’s footnote to explain why he has translated the particularGerman word as he does. To me his explanations are just about always persuasive.Let the reader consult, for instance, footnote 21 on page 62 aboutthe various uses of vorstellen, which exemplifies Yaffe’s linguistic sensitivity© 2015 Interpretation, Inc.