The Jewish Question as the Human Question: Isaiah Berlin, Leo Strauss and the Pursuit of a Tragic Zionism

Isaiah Berlin and Leo Strauss are often thought to represent opposing approaches to the collapse of European liberalism. Berlin saw the rise of fascism as a consequence of what he called the “monism” of enlightenment reason. He sought instead a liberalism grounded in the notion that human goods were plural and incommensurate. Leo Strauss, on the other hand, viewed such an attempt as reflective of the very incoherence that had left philosophy so ill equipped to respond to the rise of National Socialism.

Given their respective narratives of modernity, it is not surprising that the most common way of reading both figures would set them against each other. This stark division begins to blur, however, when their intellectual endeavors are placed within the context of their shared motivation – a life-long reflection on “the Jewish question.” Both were skeptical that the Jewish question might be resolved, because both believed that politics could not and must not attempt to answer the most persistent contradictions and dilemmas of human life – among which the Jewish question was representative.

In this paper, I will explore how Berlin and Strauss grounded their political thought in the irresolvable nature of the Jewish Question. This allowed each to develop a novel approach to the matter of how liberalism and nationalism might cohere, by suggesting that such coherence was ultimately impossible. This made for a more ambivalent Zionism than generally recognized, and provided dual philosophical frameworks that continue to shape and trouble American Jewish political thought.