While Kelsen never denied his Jewish origins, Lieblich provides indisputable evidence that he rejected both anti-Semitic and Zionist attempts to label his thought “Jewish.” More importantly, Lieblich moves beyond biography to show that the monism of Kelsen’s Pure Theory is an attempt to assimilate the individual into the international community. Lieblich’s analysis illuminates a tension, if not a paradox, that is at the heart of Kelsen’s legal theory, and his conception of international law especially, which is the undeniable appeal to progress embedded within the purported ideological purity of the Pure Theory of Law.

The student of modern Jewish political theory is immediately faced with what may seem an insurmountable problem: almost all modern Jewish philosophers claim that Judaism is not centrally concerned with politics. By this they do not deny that Jewish people have been, and are, involved in modern political life. Rather, they claim that Judaism as Judaism was not historically and is not today concerned with political life. Zionist and non-Zionist Jewish thinkers have both made this claim. For Zionists, Zionism is the rejection of the nonpolitical character of Judaism and the Jewish past. Different as they are, Moses Hess, arguably the first socialist Zionist, and Zvi Yehudah Kook, arguably the first religious Zionist, agree that Jews need to throw off the shackles of exile in order to return Jews and Judaism to the political life of the Jewish nation. In contrast, for non-Zionists, such as Moses Mendelssohn, Hermann Cohen, and Franz Rosenzweig, the nonpolitical character of Judaism allows Jews and Judaism to coexist with (either comfortably with or alienated from) their contemporary political realities. In this way, the Zionist and non-Zionist positions are two sides of the same coin. And clearly, if Judaism is by definition not political, then the attempt to articulate a modern Jewish political theory of any sort would be meaningless at best.

In the premodern era, a Jewish individual was defined legally, politically, and theologically as a member of the Jewish community. Jewish modernity represents the advent of the modern nation-state and the subsequent shifting of the locus of political power from the corporate Jewish community to the individual Jew. The fundamental question for modern Jewish thought in all its variations thus becomes the following: What value is there to Judaism in an age in which Jews do not have to be defined as Jews, at least from the perspective of the modern nation-state? Modern Jewish philosophy is an attempt to answer this question. While the modern Jewish thinkers discussed in this chapter often differ significantly in their respective understandings of philosophical reason and the meanings of Jewish revelation and law, all of them share in the attempt to argue for the continued significance of Judaism in the modern world, not just for Jews but for modern society as well.

As they delineate the meaning of Judaism in the modern world, the thinkers discussed in this essay remake Jewish self-understanding. This is the case for the expressly modern liberal philosophies of Moses Mendelssohn and Hermann Cohen, whom I discuss in the early sections of this essay. It is also true for Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, who attempt to return Jews to what they consider authentic Jewish experience.

In the 1965 preface to the English translation of his first book, Spinoza's Critique of Religion, Leo Strauss describes the beginnings of his intellectual journey by stating that “This study of Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise was written during the years 1925-28 in Germany. The author was a young Jew born and raised in Germany who found himself in the grip of the theologico-political predicament.” Also in 1965, Strauss's The Political Philosophy of Hobbes was published for the first time in German. There Strauss refers to the “theologico-political problem,” deeming it “the theme of my investigations.” With the term “theologico-political predicament,” Strauss links his early intellectual development to his later intellectual themes, including what he calls the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns, the relation between Jerusalem and Athens, and to his diverse studies in the history of political philosophy, of Plato, Hobbes, Maimonides, Alfarabi, and Spinoza, among many others. This essay considers what Strauss meant by “theologico-political predicament,” suggesting that there are at least two senses in which he employs the term, the first diagnostic, the second reconstructive. In its diagnostic sense, “theologico-political predicament” refers to the ultimate results of the early modern attempt to separate theology from politics. However, Strauss in no way favors a return to theocracy or, like his contemporary Carl Schmitt, a turn toward political theology.

The turn to language in twentieth-century philosophy is well known. Despite the profound methodological differences and ultimate philosophical disagreements between them, many if not most Anglo-American and Continental-European philosophers continue to emphasize philosophical reason’s intimate relation to, if not dependence on, language. But there is of course an enormous difference between the more minimalist thesis that reason is expressed in language and the more maximalist statement that reason depends on language. This difference goes to the heart of the question of what “philosophy” actually is and does. Can and should philosophy stand above our particular language games and articulate some deeper truth behind the cultural and historical contexts in which all human life is embedded? And what are the scientific, ethical, and indeed the theological implications of how we might answer this question?

While suggesting that these questions are philosophically and historically tied to modern philosophical discussions about the relations between reason and revelation, this chapter explores twentieth-century Jewish philosophical approaches to language. For a number of Jewish philosophers, the turn to language is a turn away from the historically implicit Christian assumptions of much of Western philosophy. As many have observed, the linguistic turn brought philosophy much closer to some of the central concerns of the Jewish historical tradition, and Jewish thinkers were quick to pursue their work in this new area of overlap. To appreciate these Jewish philosophical arguments, and their similarities to and differences from each other as well as to twentieth-century philosophies of language generally, this chapter has been laid out in four parts. Part I describes briefly how the linguistic turn in philosophy redefines the notions of both “philosophy” and “revelation.”

Both levinas and strauss had an ambiguous relationship to Zionism. Much to the consternation of various critics, particularly in Levinas's case, they both loyally defended the establishment of the State of Israel and its continued right to existence. Yet at the same time, and perhaps more importantly, both were deeply ambivalent about the Jewish nature of the state and its potential to affect future Jewish identity positively. As I suggest in greater detail in this chapter, this shared ambivalence is rooted in a deeper ambivalence for both Levinas and Strauss about the possibility of political solutions in general. In Strauss's case, this characterization might seem odd, given Strauss's American reception especially in recent years as a, if not the, political dogmatist. Part of the goal of the third and final portion of this book is to complicate contemporary political views of Strauss by looking more deeply at the relatively few instances of concrete political reflection on his part. At the same time, while Levinas has been faulted by some (including myself in the last section of this book) for his lack of engagement with politics, it is on the question of Zionism that his potential political theory is ramified most fully. By examining Strauss's and Levinas's respective relations to Zionism, we can simultaneously recognize Strauss's often unappreciated ambivalence about politics qua politics and Levinas's underappreciated attempt to think through concrete political realities.

In part 1 of this book i describe levinas's commitment to a particular modern philosophical project as embodied in his messianic claims for philosophy. We turn now in Part 2 to what I argue is Levinas's commitment to modern philosophy and Strauss's criticism of modern philosophy in the context of their claims about revelation and engagement with early-twentieth-century German-Jewish thought. Levinas and Strauss both profess a strong debt to the philosophy of the German-Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929). Levinas's first major philosophical work, Totality and Infinity, includes the following now-famous note in its preface: “We were impressed by the opposition to the idea of totality in Franz Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption, a work too often present in this book to be cited.” As both Robert Gibbs and Richard Cohen have shown, an appreciation for Levinas's claim about his debt to Rosenzweig takes us far in appreciating the theological-ethical import of his thought. Although Steven Schwarzschild did remark some decades ago that “[T]he Rosenzweigian motivation for Strauss's work in general becomes quite clear and should be explicated by someone soon,” far less attention has been paid to Strauss's debt to Rosenzweig. But Strauss dedicated his first major book, Spinoza's Critique of Religion, to Franz Rosenzweig's memory. And as Strauss acknowledged more than thirty years after this dedication, in the preface to the English translation of his book, Rosenzweig's thought provided the impetus for the development of his own arguments about philosophy and revelation.