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.