ABSTRACT
The political and cultural Zionisms that Strauss wrestled with in the early 1920s he understood to be situated within the modern sensibility: they were “innermodern.” In order to better understand these currents and the critiques of Orthodoxy they contain, in 1925 he began a study of the seventeenthcentury philosopher Benedict Spinoza, whose Theologico-Political Treatise Strauss claims initiated the modern approach to Biblical study. “In our time scholars generally study the Bible in the manner in which they study any other book,” Strauss writes in the introduction to the result of his turn to Spinoza, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion.1 The presupposition of such an approach is rejection of revealed religion, and Spinoza’s book is of importance because it represents the Enlightenment’s critique of revelation. If Spinoza’s critique is sound, there is no basis for Orthodoxy because Orthodoxy rests upon the possibility of revelation.
