ABSTRACT
This essay examines two Jewish thinkers—Moses Mendelssohn and Leo Strauss—whose work includes detailed exegetical treatments of key documents within the Jewish philosophical archive. Both thinkers approached the exegesis of these documents only after having given careful attention to their interpretive methodology and its relation to the texts under study. Both thinkers claim to be answering questions that the archive itself raises; they do not, in their own estimation at least, bring extraneous questions to bear upon their archive. But despite their claim to be doing exegesis within the traditionally defined hermeneutic horizon of the archive, neither thinker is able to be characterized as unqualifiedly “devotionist.” I argue that both thinkers are replying to Spinoza's critique of Jewish tradition (Does Jewish law retain validity in the absence of a theocratic state?) and that they argue that this critique, far from distancing them as “modern Jews” from their Jewish archive, actually allows them to penetrate to its transhistorical core.
