Cheating between the Lines: On Leo Strauss’s Misreading of Gershom Scholem

In his famous essay Progress or Return? Leo Strauss analyses the two fundamental religious concepts – progress and return – in the context of Jewish messianic tradition. He powerfully argues that the messianic idea in Judaism has been primarily associated with restoration, not progress; progressive messianism is merely a secular, political distortion of its original, restorative message. To support this thesis, Strauss refers to Gershom Scholem’s influential studies on Jewish mysticism and maintains that even the messianic idea of the Lurianic Kabbalah, reputedly utopian if not revolutionary, was theorized by him as restorative and solely focused on the origins. However, by limiting himself to a handful of scattered quotes from Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Strauss seriously (and, as I argue, perhaps deliberately) misreads his interpretation of Lurianism to make it look past-oriented and quasi-Neoplatonic, thus appropriating it for his own philosophical ad fontes.

I am going to demonstrate that in a less selective reading, Scholem’s theory of the Lurianic Kabbalah advocates neither progress nor return but forces a dialectical wedge into Strauss’s antithesis to argue that Lurianic messianism is an unceasing interplay of the regressive and the progressive, or restoration and utopia. The purpose of my paper is thus twofold: first, to use Scholem’s theory of the Lurianic messianism to deconstruct the apparent opposition of progress and return advocated by Strauss’s essay; second, and no less importantly, to expose Strauss’s exegetical abuse (which, surprisingly enough, has so far escaped the critical attention of scholars and commentators) and demonstrate that his favourite interpretive tool of “reading between the lines” is used in Progress or Return? so discretionarily that it ends up as cheating between the lines.