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3 5 6 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 41 / Issue 3Yaffe’s essay is a faithful guide to Strauss’s introductions. It does what itshould; it clarifies what could use clarification. It is, as far as I can see, alwayshelpful and always to the crucial point. But Yaffe does not merely rehearseStrauss’s argument. His epilogue, which looks forward from Jacobi’s critiqueof the Enlightenment to the second, Rousseauan, and third, Nietzschean,“waves” of modernity, does much to demonstrate the ultimate significancefor Strauss’s later thought of these early works. Yaffe also describes the backgroundof Strauss’s engagement with Mendelssohn and his turn, after theSpinoza book, to Jewish things. Additionally, Yaffe deals with competitiveaccounts of the Pantheist Controversy.For Frederick Beiser, perhaps the leading contemporary historian of theperiod (and whom Yaffe discusses in his translator’s preface [xiii–xvi]), Jacobiis a critic of rationalism as such. Beiser also thinks that Jacobi was simplycorrect about Lessing’s Spinozism. Strauss, by contrast, notes that the conversationJacobi reported falls short of outright confession of adherence toSpinoza. For Lessing had only said that if he had to name himself after onephilosopher it would be Spinoza. And he also said he hoped Jacobi would notmake his credo any one book. This turns out to be crucial for Yaffe’s Strauss,because in his view, while Jacobi wholly accepted the modern understandingof reason as instrumental, that is, Hobbes’s view (thus leading him to theperceived necessity to reject reason altogether as more than a tool), Lessinghad already begun to see the power of ancient thought (xv). (Thus, if Strausstook from Jacobi the lesson of the need for philosophic clarity, he found inLessing a kind of predecessor in the return to classical thought.) It is worthremembering, in this regard, the first footnote in Philosophy and Law—myversion again—which reminds us that “‘Irrationalism’ is only a variety ofmodern rationalism, which is ‘irrational’ enough itself” (111).Alexander Altmann, to put it simply, bought Mendelssohn’s story abouthaving known about Lessing’s “purified Spinozism” all along. Similarly, hefound no deep contradictions in Mendelssohn’s own position in MorningHours (238–39). For him the synthesis that is enlightened Judaism seemedsatisfactory. Yaffe is with Strauss in doubting it. Still, Strauss does write aletter at the end of his life accepting that Altmann may have discoveredsomething that would cause Strauss to rethink things. Altmann thus claimedthat it may not have been stress over Jacobi’s final attack, but a symptom ofthe disease that was killing him, that accounted for Mendelssohn’s strangebehavior on one occasion (227–29). In itself, not a big point, perhaps, but Yaffethinks that it led Strauss to want to undertake a larger reconsideration. This