Jews don't do revelation. jks
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Okay, I'll take your word for it. But then you have to unravel a fair amount of Guttmann for me:
``Solomon Ludwig Steinheim (1789-1866) whose book Offenbarung nach dem Lehrbegriff der Synagoge (Revelation according to the Doctrine of the Synagogue) was issued in four volumes between 1835 and 1865, was opposed in principle to all philosophic rationalism. In a broad attack against rationalistic religious philosophy in all its forms, he developed the doctrine that reliious truth was given exclusive in revelation. In his antirationalism Steinheim went much further that Judah Halevi had in the Middle Ages: not only was reason impotent to grasp religious truth, but there was essential opposition between reason and revelation. Reason must abandon itself in order to find the truth which is in revelation...'' (345p Guttamann, The Philosophy of Judaism)
Now revelation here is historical in the sense that the basic tenents of Judaism, Moses, the Ten Commandents, and the age of the Prophets, founding of the Temple, etc. were the period of revelation.
This isn't the same kind of revealed truth as that of the Christian saints who see God or the Virgin in the trunk of the car or in the face of a blind child.
At any rate, the point is that there was more to truth that could be comprehended in a rational metaphysics.
BTW the above quote just happened to be a few pages back from where I was reading. The historical development that Guttmann is tracing is the problem of reconcilling a subculture of Jews and and European Jewish scholars who arrive at the brink of emacipation and potential assimulaton within the broad scope of the Enlightenment---and are faced with this dilemma between reason and religion. It's Guttmann's history this is expressed as a conflict over the category of truth as dependent on revelation or reason.
The underlying point in regard to Strauss is he studied Jacobi and did his thesis on exactly this sort of conflict, reason v. belief in Jacobi.
Now I don't disagree that Nietzsche plays a part here. But at the moment I haven't entirely sorted that part out yet. It is more complicated than just God's dead. It has to do with the idea of uberman and a new moral (return) to a lost spiritual purity (with Heideggerian overtones.
This idea of a lost spiritual purity is not all that far removed from the historical idea that truth within Judaism was revealed, i.e given by God. Maybe only to Moses and the prophets, but it was revealed. That means that the foundation of both cerimony and ethics finds its way back to God, not to rational justifications.
At least part of the reason Spinoza was excommunicated was because he maintained that somebody wrote the Pentateuch and it wasn't Moses and the boys. The implication was that the OT was not revealed truth, but historically bound.
Strauss, at the point I am reading at the moment (1925) is starting to work on Spinoza, following Jacobi's lead via the Lessing and Mendelsshon letters on Spinozism, i.e. revealed truth v. history.
At any rate, I am pretty sure Strauss did want to believe, and agree, he didn't. I suspect he might have thought that if he didn't believe, he wasn't a real Jew. If not that, then to be caught between wanting to believe and not believing was some how the very essence of what he thought it was to be Jewish---at least within a philosophical frame. Whatever is going on with him, it is seriously involved in this junction between belief and its negation.
Why did I bring up Guttmann? Because Guttmann is sponsoring Strauss to write a book on Spinoza in this period (1925-28), and the book I am reading at the moment is what Guttmann was working on.
Now, I won't argue that Strauss didn't evidentually develop some elite v. masses theory. But at the moment that sort of division can only be seen in the division between Jew and anti-Semite, when anti-Semitism is becoming a formal political weapon. In this period for Strauss the way that is expressed is between the Zionists and Jews who hold out for assimulation on the one side and on the other the anti-Semites like Lagarde and later Schmitt. Both sides of this division are attempting to define the concept of a `nation' based on purity. It hasn't quite reached the point of identification with race, but that is only because both sides in this particular arena conceive identity as something other than race. Race is too materialistic. Or put another way, race doesn't tap the theological-spiritual, political-ethical dimensions for Strauss, Lagarde and Schmitt.
All of this is provisional, of course.
(just read the post on Jews and Revelation, so yes... but I'll leave this post as it is.)
Chuck Grimes