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3 5 0 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 41 / Issue 3and nuanced judgment. In addition, Yaffe has transformed Strauss’s ownparenthetical notes into numbered footnotes “interspersed among my owntranslator’s footnotes.” For the scholar who wants to consult the Germanedition, the relevant page appears in boldface in curly brackets. Then thereare the appendices. Just to whet the appetite: Yaffe offers a “Chronology ofWritings Mentioned in Strauss’s Introductions,” and of course a set of abbreviationswhich make references to the various Mendelssohn works that arebeing introduced easier to handle. Then too there is, as mentioned above, atranslation of Altmann’s preface written after Strauss’s death and serving,Yaffe says, as a kind of eulogy. And after all this come English translations ofStrauss’s preface for a book on Lessing which he never, alas, wrote, “a hithertountranslated Mendelssohnian passage that Strauss cites in his Natural Rightand History,” and a particularly relevant passage from Lessing’s famous (i.e.,I’ve actually read it once) “The Education of the Human Race” (xviii). Then,in the lengthy second appendix, we reach further elucidations of Yaffe’s ownnotes, most of them taken from Strauss’s writings on related subjects, somefrom other thinkers.Only then do we get to part 2, which is Yaffe’s own interpretive essay.Thus, even if (as I hasten to emphasize, is manifestly not the case) that essaycontributed little to the understanding of the issues involved in these works,we would have to conclude that Dr. Yaffe had performed a remarkable feat.The staggering amount of work and its (I keep wanting to avoid this word asoverused but find I can’t) meticulous execution would require of those whowant to understand the origin of Strauss’s thought or who concern themselveswith the essential issues in these introductions, to offer Dr. Yaffe theirheartfelt gratitude.Yet perhaps all the intellectual archaeology we are about to embark onis of essentially pedantic interest. Could it be that, since Strauss was such animportant figure, anything he deigned to write on, even antiquated quarrelsabout things that might have been shocking once but are commonplacetoday, must be ipso facto interesting but not much more than that? As it happens,no. For, as it turns out, and as Yaffe knows well, the work he has doneilluminates perhaps the single most important turn in Strauss’s developmentand explains from within what caused the single greatest substantive obstacle—I’dsay esotericism is the single greatest methodological obstacle—toStrauss’s acceptance by the academia of his time and ours. When I was doingmy best to translate Philosophie und Gesetz, I remember being struck, notentirely pleasantly, by Strauss’s judgment that the moderate Enlightenment