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Book Review: Leo Strauss on Moses Mendelssohn3 5 7would involve reconsidering Lessing and “clarifying what was at stake forMendelssohn, not only personally. . . but also theologically and politically,as the philosophical founder of modern Jewish thought.” That carries withit, Yaffe points out, the “prospect of a non-ghettoized life for Jews as Jews inmodern times.” Yaffe goes so far as to suggest, strikingly, in view of Strauss’sdevastating critique of Mendelssohn as a philosopher, that “Strauss writes asMendelssohn’s theological-political heir.” That is, Strauss wanted at the endof his life to “illuminate the combined private and public perplexities thatMendelssohn bequeathed to subsequent Jewish life and thought,” but whichMendelssohn had “never quite succeeded in illuminating for himself” (229).To say this is, I think, to say something very important about how Strausssaw himself. I do not know if Yaffe’s suggestion is right, but I would like itto be. For it accords with my own hunch (unphilosophic natural Mendelssohnianthat I am), that Strauss’s concern for how nonphilosophers live wasfar from a trivial one, that his philosophic radicalism went along with a kindof decency, itself a philosophic taste though not an argument, which in partperhaps even explains his refusal to go with the Jacobis and their heirs, bothfideist and fanatical, and which brings him back, with a desire to be of someassistance, to the Mendelssohns and their latter-day heirs. (Alas, predictablyand foolishly, those heirs generally spurn that assistance with pious horror,and turn instead for aid to precisely those proffered remedies which containthe most lethal poisons.) But the possibility remains open, and it is one ofthe many things for which one needs to thank Martin Yaffe, namely that hisgreat scholarly effort also reminds us of that.