Through his early confrontation with Spinoza’s philosophy and its impact on modern German and Jewish thought, Leo Strauss began to rethink the relationship between Reason and Faith, and to call into question the alleged victory of modern philosophy over religion. Il testamento di Spinoza, edited by Riccardo Caporali, collecting three essays written between 1924 and 1932 not yet published in Italian, allows the reader to fully appreciate the complexity of this encounter. Overcoming Cohen’s critique of the Dutch philosopher, Spinoza, “a great man, but not a good Jew”, becomes for the young Strauss a symbol of his own struggle between the loyalty to the philosophic enterprise as restless quest for truth and the loyalty to his Jewish identity, and of the never-ending conflict between the freedom of thought and the protection of society. But the Straussian understanding of these problems will lead to a different solution: with the failure of the Weimar Republic and the crisis of modern thinking in the background, Strauss will start to acknowledge that, while philosophy is always immoderate, the philosopher must be, inside the city, politically moderate and careful not to destroy the moral and religious values of his or her society.
