Chuck, It might be useful to also think about Friedrich Nietzsche and his influence on religious theories at the time (or prior to the time) Leo Strauss would have been developing his own theories of religion.
Diane Monaco -------
Oh yes. It's a good thought. But that's all next. What I posted was the positive side. Next comes the negative, the bad stuff, the critique of modernity, the reaction, the relativity of morals etc. The seeds as it were, are present in Jacobi. The relativity was to some extent in Kant, because of the absence of absolutes. But the way that Strauss goes about this is through discovering the loss of an authentic Jewish culture and belief, the seemingly positive parts of assimulation---then their reaction in Zionism, then the definition of Jews, through anti-Semitic Christian theology where Jews are the enemy alien within the national body.
After the essays in the section I posted, he writes about Paul de Lagarde. At first I though Lagarde was French, but no. He's German and changed his name. Strauss uses Lagarde's anti-semiticism as the means to define Jews in a way that can not be done in the positive by either the Jewish theological and philosophical scholars like Cohen andGutmann or by the political Zionists. Strauss uses what amounts to a dialectic of enimty. This leads to Hobbes, his work in the middle Thirties. Strauss's interest and connection to Schmitt is through their mutual interest in Hobbes and anti-Semiticism (war of each against all).
What he takes most from Nietzsche (at this point, 1924) is the idea of trashing the liberal tolerance of modernity and returning to some prior age, rehabilitated into some new form of noble cause, etc... (All the stuff you note). This thread instead of following Nietzsche, goes to Heidegger's reaction to modernity as a loss of some primodial crap about being, etc... The romanticism of Neitzsche and Heidegger are the path that Strauss takes to the Greeks, but that comes later, after Spinoza, Maimonides, etc...
But he doesn't write directly on Nietzsche or Heidegger. Nietzsche is there as the background---well the looming giant pink elephant. It is almost as if Strauss had tried to become the Jewish Nietzsche some how---identifying with him completely. In this regard, Strauss takes the basic posture of becoming an enemy of the present, more or less in the spirit of Nietzsche. The brave new mind goes backward....
I realize this is confused, but what leads Strauss into the night is confused and complex, mainly because it is lived.
What I decided to try to do was something like archeology, discover Strauss as he was, locked in his times. In the 20s, he hasn't sorted these ideas out, he doesn't know where these ideas or his society is going, but it is coming apart---while at the same time it is at its most creative. All these mixed threads will be sorted out and simplified later in Strauss, pared down once he leaves Weimar.
What fascinates me about this is all the interesting and great people that Strauss reacts against. Guttmann for example is just wonderful to read, classic scholarship, great theological historian. But oh no. Nasty Leo doesn't like it. Not pure enough. Yet it is Guttmann who opens up the history of Judaism to Strauss, sponsor's his book on Spinoza, and turns him on to Maimonides, Farabi(?), etc.
I am in the middle of reading Guttmann at the moment (The Philosophy of Judaism).
Thanks by the way. I need to be reminded that Nietzsche who is always there in the background, needs to be brought foreward. The problem is when and how. It will probably be after this Zionist and Guttmann phase. Maybe in relation to Spinoza...
Chuck Grimes