[lbo-talk] Re: "One Palestine, Complete"

[Chuck Grimes]

...what we really need is a good intellectual biography of Strauss --
alas, his disciples are adverse to that sort of analysis, and none of
his critics have done the necessary spade work. If I had a smart
graduate student that knew German, I would get them working on
Strauss's bio. Jeet

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Agreed. I am sort of working along that route, but I am still in the
reading stages, the spade work. 

Let me tell you the spade work is very, very heavy lifting. There is a
reason nobody has done a serious intellectual biography of Strauss. It
starts with understanding that Strauss was a serious philosophy
student and worked under giants like Cassirer and Heidegger to begin
with, and in a period that was both a German and Jewish
renaissance. The level of analysis is very high and requires a huge
amount of erudition. It also requires following the wild patch work of
intellectual currents in Weimar. 

So far the way I am trying to approach it is to read Strauss, then
read who Strauss was writing about, then read his contemporaries who
were writing about the same topics, then go back and reconstruct the
intellectual events and history that surround these writings, then go
back and read the history of the people who Strauss is writing about,
then finally re-read Strauss again. 

As you can tell at the moment I am trying to learn the nuances of
Zionists arguments and movements, which I don't really understand. If
you feel like it, outline in crude terms what Jabotinshy is in
relation to say Julius Guttmann.

Strauss had a fellowship under Guttmann and was writing for several
different Jewish magazines---also I don't know the political bend of
them either. These were Der Jude, Die judische Rundschau, and Der
judische Student. Michael Zank's introduction is very good, but it
lacks concrete political detail and presumes a knowledge of Zionism in
the period that I lack.

Unfortunately, it is looking like Strauss's relationship to Zionism in
all of its nuances in the period, is important to understand. The
reason is that couched in this realm are the seeds to Strauss's later
concept of the relationship between philosophy, religion, law, state,
and social value. 

What happens as far as I can tell is Strauss becomes very
disillustioned with the Zionist movements in the late 20s, and returns
to a more hermeneutic approach starting his research on
Maimonides(?). His letters and exchanges with Carl Schmitt (somebody
else I haven't read!) take place just after he drops out of the
Zionist internal battles. This is where I have to re-read sections of
Arendt to figure out where she stood at the time, since she is also
dappling in Zionism at the same time. 

Chuck Grimes