As far as I know, Strauss never identified himself as a conservative. Rather, if memory serves (and I don't have the book in front of me), Strauss claimed himself as a part of the liberal tradition in Liberalism: Ancient and Modern.
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Leo Strauss, (letter to editor) “The State of Israel,” National Review (January 5, 1956), 23.
“I am, therefore, tempted to believe that the authors in question are driven by an anti-Jewish animus; but I have learned to resist temptations.”
“The first thing which strikes one in Israel is that the country is a Western country, which educates its many immigrants from the East in the ways of the West: Israel is the only country which as a country is an outpost of the West in the East. Furthermore, Israel is a country which is surrounded by mortal enemies of overwhelming numerical superiority, and in which a single book absolutely predominates in the instruction given in elementary schools and in high schools: the Hebrew Bible. Whatever the failings of individuals may be, the spirit of the country as a whole can justly be described in these terms: heroic austerity supported by the nearness of biblical antiquity. A conservative, I take it, is a man who believes that ‘everything good is heritage.’ I know of now country today in which this belief is stronger and less lethargic than in Israel.”
“A conservative, I take it, is a man who despises vulgarity; but the argument which is concerned exclusively with calculations of success, and is based on blindness to the nobility of the effort, is vulgar.”
“A conservative, I take it, is a man who knows that the same arrangement may have very different meanings in different circumstances.”
“The men who are governing Israel at present came from Russia at the beginning of the century. They are much more properly described as pioneers than as labor unionists. They were the men who laid the foundations under hopelessly difficult conditions. They are justly looked up to by all non-doctrinaires as the natural aristocracy of the country, for the same reasons for which Americans look up to the Pilgrim fathers.”
“I wish to say that the founder of Zionism, Herzl, was fundamentally a conservative man, guided in his Zionism by conservative considerations. The moral spine of the Jews was in danger of being broken by the so-called emancipation which in many cases had alienated them from their heritage, and yet not given them anything more than merely formal equality; it had brought about a condition which has been called ‘external freedom and inner servitude’; political Zionism was the attempt to restore the inner freedom, that simple dignity, of which only people who remember their heritage and are loyal to their fate, are capable. Political Zionism is problematic for obvious reasons. But I can never forget what it achieved as a moral force in an era of complete dissolution. It helped to stem the tide of ‘progressive’ levelling of venerable, ancestral differences; it fulfilled a conservative function.”
I am still reading the last paragraph...as presented in the excerpts Strauss present a conservatism that is truly alive in Israel, and because of its geographic location a fort on the frontier of the West. I am still puzzling over the place of Zionism.
ReplyDeleteCould not Norman Podhoretz have written this, or William Kristol, or a hundred others who have, with one inflection or another, insisted upon a world historical position for what is now an Israel that does not honor the God of the Hebrew Bible?
ReplyDeleteJohn, so little in modern political Israel reminds me of my Jewish friends of childhood and ever onwards: Americans, Europeans and Asiatics, all of whom have been reflective, profoundly ethical, moderate and wise. It was David Ben Gurion who said "it doesn't matter what the goyim think but what the Jews do," justifying too much.
ReplyDeleteMy office-mate Ralph de Toledano complained that the original NeoCons, and their fellow Ashkenazim running Israel, were "low-class shtarkerai" or bully-boys, "with no culture apart from the knout," who "still have the shit from the shtetls (East European ghettos) on their boots." I remember the conversation vividly. An Asiatic Jew himself (his ancestor led the Jews out of Toledo in 1492), Ralph thought that including the downtrodden Sephardim would have leavened and moderated Israeli politics. "We Asiatic Jews have no illusions about the Arabs," he explained to me, "but at least we know how to live together after a millenium of experience." Of course, another generation of partisan horse-trading has landed the Sephardim on the Israeli far-right along with the fundamentalists and the largely irreligious Russian emigres.
Herzl as a conservative takes some work. He was was much a visionary, seeking to create a semi-fictitious past, as was Sayyid Qutb, the Suslov of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose historical Islam was half-imagined. The socialism of the kibbutzim was a fanciful, modern, ideological invention. If his nationalism was not (being charitable) it sought to revive something not wholly clear and 2,000 years gone. Modern Hebrew is largely an invented language. In order to convince wealthy, cultured Jews to leave the cafes of Vienna and Berlin, he coined the great fib about "a people without a land and a land without a people." The Holocaust showed that he was right that Jews were tolerated rather than fully welcome and safe in Wilhelmine Europe, but his "conservatism" sought to promulgate a Zionist ideal no less Romantic than Wagner's medieval guilds and Rhine Maidens. Dr. Strauss tells us less of conservatism here than about his capacity for wishful thinking and his weak ability to identify ideology.