> I also need to know about that diffusion, because Strauss takes on
> Hobbes as his next project and Rousseau after that. Strauss's PhD
> thesis on Jacobi centers around the Spinoza controversey Jacobi
> generated about Lessing and Mendleshonn. It is followed up indirectly
> in Hegel's Philosophy of the Right, which has Jacobi and d'Holback in
> a couple of footnotes.
And:
> I have to say, the reading I've done hasn't paid enough attention to
> the Netherlands in this period. For example, Spinoza's family lived on
> the same block in Amsterdam as Rembrandt and the synagogue that
> excommunicated him was in the center of the block across the
> street.
Another book you might enjoy is Steven Nadler's "Spinoza's Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind", which is a follow-up to the biography you mentioned later in your post that concentrates on Spinoza's excommunication from the Amsterdam synagogue.
Nadler argues that it's likely that Spinoza was known for his denials of the immortality of the soul at the time he was kicked out, and he provides a lot of detail both on the history of arguments about the immortality of the soul within Jewish philosophical and religious tradition and on why the Jews in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century had a particularly strong commitment to the idea, and might therefore be pretty intolerant of someone who denied it. Quite a bit of the book is speculative, but it's a very well-wrought discussion of a fascinating topic, and I certainly learned a lot about Spinoza, Amsterdam's Jews and mediaeval Jewish philosophy from it along the way.
Not a Straussian book (obviously), but it touches on a lot of topics that Strauss was interested in - Jews, the conflict between religion and philosophy, persecution, Spinoza, etc - and so if you're chasing up those angles, you might want to take a look.
It's certainly in paperback in the UK, and probably is in the US, too.
There's a fairly detailed review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=1048
Chris