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3 5 2 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 41 / Issue 3Reimarus “Fragments” led to suspicion that Lessing may really have been aSpinozist, though nowhere did Lessing present himself as an orthodox Spinozistin print.Jacobi however set a trap for Mendelssohn by alluding in a private letterto Reimarus’s daughter Elise to a conversation he had had with the recentlydeceased Lessing in which the latter allegedly had confessed his allegiance toSpinozism. Jacobi affects to leave it to her whether to tell Mendelssohn (andpretends not to know that Lessing had not already revealed this to Mendelssohn),but Strauss concludes that he was desperately eager for Mendelssohnto find out so that he could compel a public dispute which he knew, havingLessing’s comments up his sleeve, that he would win. The reason Strauss givesfor Jacobi’s malice is a prior brush between the two men where, in short,Jacobi had, while seeking to enlist Lessing in the cause, pushed the democraticimplications of the Enlightenment from critique of the church to oppositionto princely rule. The more cautious Mendelssohn had demurred. The quarrelin other words was from the outset about the conflict of the radical Enlightenment(perversely championed, for the sake of its greater clarity, by Jacobieven though he ultimately wanted to reject it) with the moderate Enlightenment(Mendelssohn). It is, as Strauss says, a conflict, started by Jacobi, aboutwho was the true heir of Lessing (62–65; see also 67, 75, 77).Jacobi (about whom Strauss wrote his doctoral dissertation) figures inStrauss’s description as something of a contrarian, whose consistent principlewas a preference for radical thought, whether he agreed with it or not, to anykind of wishy-washy compromise (75). So, while in this dispute he insists thatLessing was a Spinozist and uses the most radical understanding of pantheismto eviscerate Mendelssohn’s effort to maintain a middle position betweenreason and revelation, in fact he was a critic of the Enlightenment and ofSpinoza. Jacobi himself thought that rationalism, as he understood it, lednecessarily to atheism and nihilism, and it was Spinoza who proved for Jacobithat the Enlightenment was headed into a dead end. (If the reader begins todraw parallels between Jacobi’s view of Spinoza and Strauss’s eventual viewof Nietzsche in the significance of his thought for modernity, the reader is notalone.) Yet, as Strauss tells the story, above all Jacobi had a visceral disdain forintellectual muddiness, which in the end he understood as a moral failing, asself-centeredness (77). This allowed him to excuse his bad behavior towardsMendelssohn with self-righteous moralism.The story plays itself out in stages. First, Jacobi is out for a war. Mendelssohn,to whom Jacobi appears to matter far less than he mattered to Jacobi