Strauss on the Religious and Intellectual Situation of the Present

Abstract

This chapter focuses on two talks of startling freshness given by Leo Strauss in 1930 and 1932, translated into English for the first time by Anna Schmitt and Martin D. Yaffe.¹ Addressed to a Jewish audience, the talks were given in the most politically unsettled years for Germany, and the richest, intellectually, for German Jews. Among the topics they address is “[t]he Jewish problem, whose urgency in the age of National Socialism perhaps does not need to be proved [any]more to anyone.” Since the talks address other problems of both “modernity and ultramodernity,” or what today goes by the name postmodernism, their questions are still with us, in sometimes sharpened, sometimes degraded, forms. The talks offer guidance for those who wish to liberate themselves from the crippling presuppositions through which Strauss himself had—as we see here for the first time—fought his way to clarity.