Was Leo Strauss a modern Jewish thinker? Was this even a category that Strauss recognized? The question is not an idle one. It is not self-evident that Strauss belongs to the canon of modern Jewish thinkers in which one might expect to find names like Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, and Emmanuel Levinas. His work dealt characteristically with the philosophical tradition rather than the Jewish tradition. His studies on Jewish thinkers and themes occupy a relatively small portion of his total corpus of writing. And his most important (or at any rate, his most widely read) book, Natural Right and History, contains scarcely a word about any Jewish topic. Given these considerations, what has Strauss contributed to modern Jewish thought?

Before trying to answer these questions, some biography. Leo Strauss was born in the Hessian village of Kirchhain in 1899. He was brought up in an observant household, where he remarked later that the Jewish laws “were rather strictly observed.” After graduating from a humanistic Gymnasium and a brief service in World War I, Strauss attended the university at Marburg that was then the center of the neo-Kantian revival inspired by Hermann Cohen. Strauss received his doctorate from the University of Hamburg in 1921, where he prepared a dissertation under the direction of Ernst Cassirer.