Strauss brings a boatload of scholarship to this "guide" to understanding ancient philosophers generally, and Maimonides specifically -- really all pre-Gutenberg/printing press writers. Strauss reveals basic methods used by writers to stay alive while transmitting truth. The essential example is Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed, which is basically a guide to understanding Torah. Suddenly it becomes clear what Maimonides was trying to say about the invisible God, and the theophanies are all drawn from dreams.

Strauss's argument is not that medieval writers reserved one exoteric meaning for the many and an esoteric hidden meaning for the initiated few, but rather that their writings' respective core meanings extended beyond their texts' literal and/or historical dimension. Where it is politically dangerous to speak ill of God, or to deny His Existence, one technique Strauss finds is that authors write in opposites. They speak of God, and mean the opposite, as part of the style of writing. By human writing God into existence it is to show that he does not exist.

Strauss acknowledges Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's lead with his nod toward the detailed scholarship of Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786). Strauss indicates that medieval political philosophers, no less than their ancient counterparts, carefully adapted their written words to the dominant moral views of their time, lest their writings be condemned as heretical or unjust. This is because writing is a exoteric medium, although it may carry esoterica. Strauss does not claim the masses were incapable of understanding. Before mass printing post-Guttenberg, "the many" simply could not read. The danger was posed by those "few" whom the many regarded as the most righteous guardians of morality. It is those few righteous personalities who are most inclined to persecute or ostracize anyone who is in the business of exposing the "noble lie" which supports the authority of the few over the many. Strauss thus presents Maimonides doing battle against forces of tyranny, who is himself not defending tyranny. We fairly conclude that Maimonides--and a grand boatload of other ancient writers--where nonbelievers in the cults and frauds of religion. In the Guide, Maimonides necessarily obfuscates his message for political reasons.

This collection of Strauss' writings includes some of his essays on Judah Halevi’s "Kuzari", and Spinoza’s "Tractatus Theologico-Politicus", touching upon the same lifesaving methods. This work is clearly about "political philosophy", in the practical and liberating sense.

Strauss notes that while former generations publicly denounced Spinoza as an atheist, today it is almost a heresy to point out that fact. Strauss analyses this phenomenal shift of perspective on the same text. He notes that today (in the late 1900s) we enjoy more detachment from religious fanaticism, and that the phenomenon and the causes of exotericism have almost completely been forgotten. Esoteric priesthoods lost their power with the mass printing of the press.

Strauss points out, and I quote, that Spinoza's Treatise is addressed to Christians, not because Spinoza believed in the truth of Christianity or even the superiority of Christianity to Judaism, but because "ad captum vulgi loqui" means "ad captum hodierni vulgi loqui" or to accommodate oneself to the ruling opinions of one's time, and Christianity, not Judaism, was literally ruling. In other words, Spinoza desired to convert to philosophy "as many as possible". Since there were many more Christians in the world than there were Jews, Spinoza addresses the largest number of the public.

Strauss himself apparently never thought it worth his while to write a single essay on a Christian thinker. His chosen ones or authorial limits for himself, are the Greeks, medieval Jews and Arabs, and the secular moderns (Spinoza, Hobbes, Rousseau, etc.). One 1952 reviewer, Irving Kristol, suspected that for Professor Strauss, Christianity is an unstable synthesis of doctrines. (Irving Kristol died in 2008, known as the "godfather of neo-conservative thinking", and father of William Kristol, editor of Weekly Standard). https://www.commentary.org/articles/irving-kristol/persecution-and-the-art-of-wr.... Professor Strauss' invocation by neo-conservatives has been profoundly disputed. He was not a fascist apologist, according to actual scholars, to his academic and attending daughter [https://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/07/opinion/the-real-leo-strauss.html], and to myself as one of his students. ( )

This is an essential book; it is an unfortunate consequence of Strauss being suspect in the eyes of many contemporary "leftists" that this book isn't read more often. Strauss argues that our interpretation of the great texts in the history of philosophy suffers from the modern assumption of freedom of conscience. Once we recognize the prevalence of varying degrees of censorship and threat of persecution throughout history, we will see (according to Strauss) that many of the great books must be read "between the lines." We as readers must adopting a particular interpretive strategy keyed to lacunae, leaps of reasoning, exclusions, and so on that will allow us to sort out an author's true meaning/intention from the guise in which they, of necessity, had to present it.

The first chapter, which is methodological and theoretical, will be of interest to and understandable by anyone; lack of familiarity with Maimonides, Halevi, and Spinoza will make the subsequent chapters less accessible--indeed, a more-than-cursory knowledge of the texts under consideration is crucial to adequately follow Strauss' argument.

While overall I find much of what he says compelling, the entire edifice of the book is premised on certain conceptions of a "great work" and a "great author" that are neither explicitly defended nor, I suspect, entirely defensible. ( )

I have lost count of the number of good scholarly books I've read which have offered praise (or at least positive citation) of Persecution and the Art of Writing. It was on my list of books to read for about five years, which is impressive in itself, and even more peculiar in light of the fact that it's only about 200 pages long.

Although well and carefully written, Persecution and the Art of Writing is no easy read. The larger part of the volume is taken up with case studies from the writings of Maimonides, Halevi, and Spinoza, and readers unfamiliar with the the medieval and early modern Jewish intellectual traditions will benefit from reading a good encyclopedia article on each before approaching their respective treatments by Strauss, who assumes an informed, even elite reader for his exploration of the hermeneutical methods to be used with these writers.

Strauss proposes that prior to the liberal regimes of modernity, the greatest and most careful philosophers necessarily wrote in an apparently incoherent fashion, so that their true conclusions could remain "between the lines," cloaked by statements of permissible but dissimulating opinion. His notion of the "exoteric text" is one that is not merely accessible to the vulgar public--those whom Maimonides called "people of the earth"--but which conceals heterodox lures for "potential philosophers" under the cover of more conventional positions.

The admiration of certain Neoconservative pundits for Strauss has contributed to a posthumous view of him as a political reactionary favoring domination by rulers who deceive the populace. My own reading of Persecution and the Art of Writing does not support this claim; Strauss consistently represents his dissembling philosophers as seeking to perpetuate their ideas in the face of bigoted tradition. But given his insistence on the method of textual ambiguity, and the justification of answering fools according to their folly, my confidence in having interpreted his genuine thoughts is far from full.