ABSTRACT

Leo Strauss left two principal accounts of his early personal and intellectual development. With the 1965 edition of an English translation of his book, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, published in German in 1930, Strauss took the opportunity to provide a preface situating the text in biographical terms, casting himself in the third person. “The author,” he wrote, “was a young Jew born and raised in Germany who found himself in the grip of the theological-political predicament.”1 In 1970, three years before his death, Strauss appeared together with his friend Jacob Klein at a gathering at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, where both were then teaching, to give what the college dean who introduced them termed “their own accounts of the origin and development of their thoughts in those matters of greatest interest to us, their students.”2 After some preliminary remarks, Strauss began his account with the comment, “I was brought up in a conservative, even orthodox Jewish home somewhere in a rural district of Germany.” He continued:

The “ceremonial” laws were rather strictly observed but there was very little Jewish knowledge. In the Gymnasium I became exposed to the message of German humanism. Furtively, I read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. When I was sixteen and we read the Laches in school, I formed the plan, or the wish, to spend my life reading Plato and breeding rabbits while earning my living as a rural postmaster. Without being aware of it, I had moved rather far away from my Jewish home, without any rebellion. When I was seventeen, I was converted to Zionism-to simple, straightforward political Zionism.3