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Book Review: Leo Strauss on Moses Mendelssohn3 5 1had had to suffer (as I translated it) “a contempt from which even the greatestfair-mindedness of historical judgment cannot save it” (5). In Yaffe’s bookwe get first from Strauss, and then from Yaffe himself, an account of the rootintellectual experiences which led Strauss to this judgment, spelled out withgreat care and insight. As Yaffe puts it in his interpretive essay: “For Strauss,it [the Pantheist Controversy] is an ongoing theologico-political issue whoseripple effects extend, for example, to his own, pressing situation as a Jewishescapee from the Germany of the 1930s, where Jewish life in its assimilationto German life had been radically shaped by Mendelssohn’s oeuvre” (238).From that account it is possible to develop an understanding of how Strausswas forced to a kind of philosophic radicalism, which viewed with knowingdismay the efforts of his American contemporaries to cobble up the weaknessesof a regime based on, if not Mendelssohn’s moderate Enlightenment,then on another, similar though by no means identical, historically produced,moderated Enlightenment, with the inadequate remedies and toolsthat were thought to be available (whether social scientific, pluralist, or, later,what Allan Bloom was to call “Left Nietzschean”). Hence the irony of themistaking of Strauss as an enemy of free government by those who thoughtthey were its only true friends.The central issue at stake in these writings is the dispute between Mendelssohnand Jacobi about whether Lessing had become a Spinozist pantheistin his old age, the “Pantheism Controversy.” (Here I follow Yaffe in the translator’spreface [xi–xiii].) This was partly a very personal matter, with Jacobimaliciously trying to show Mendelssohn that he had never understood Lessing,who had been Mendelssohn’s ticket to respectability among Germangentiles and philosophers, and that he, Jacobi, was really the one favored withthe deep and secret insights—so there! But there was much more to it.To begin with, the real issue with “pantheism” is atheism. Could the twobe distinguished? It was then generally understood that if everything is Godthen there is no transcendent God. And Spinoza forced that point on theworld in the Theological-Political Treatise, which attacked the authenticity ofthe Mosaic revelation. A century later Hermann Samuel Reimarus extendedthe historical critique of revelation to the New Testament as well. He remainedunpublished, but Lessing published him without attribution, though he added“Counterpropositions” in his own name, as Yaffe says, to “separate his ownviews somewhat from them.” The respectable theist alternative to Spinoza’saccount was found in Leibniz. Publicly Reimarus had presented himself asa Leibnizian. A controversy with the orthodox theologian Goeze about the