ABSTRACT
In 1930, when he published his book Spinoza's Critique of Religion as Basis of his Biblical Science, Leo Strauss was already well known in the German Jewish world. In Weimar Germany — as Strauss describes those years — there was a struggle between the defenders of those liberal and democratic institutions which made the political constitution of the Republic close to that of France or England, and the defenders of a tradition, considered typically German, which was grounded on Christian faith, immediate knowledge, or poetic imagination. Strauss recalls, in his Preface, how those who defended theology or faith had the aspiration to reestablish Christianity as the public religion recognized by the State, and were nostalgic for medieval works and institutions. In his Preface Strauss also deals with the Jewish situation in the Weimar Republic.
