Once I got to college, my study of philosophy intensified my history with the Jews in a number of ways—and, as I’ll discuss, the fact that so many of the scholars I encountered were Jewish may not have been an accident. First of all, my interest in Plato and ancient Greek philosophy, which started in a sophomore honors philosophy course with John Silber and his teaching assistant James Devlin, led me to a whole cadre of Jewish Plato scholars, many of whom had come to America to escape the Nazis. The first great interpreter of Plato to take the dialogue form seriously was Leo Strauss, a German Jew who ended up teaching at the University of Chicago. In The City and Man, he famously said:

In none of his dialogues does Plato ever say anything. Hence we cannot know from them what Plato thought. If someone quotes a passage from the dialogues in order to prove that Plato held such and such a view, he acts about as reasonably as if he were to assert that according to Shakespeare life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

But another Jewish scholar from that generation, Jacob Klein, originally from Russia, was just as important to my study of Plato. His book on the Meno and his book on Plato’s Eleatic trilogy, both dense and difficult as hell, engaged and inspired me. Once I became a professor, for many years I assigned a lecture he gave on liberal education at St. Mary’s College, California, in 1965. Klein taught at St. John’s College in Annapolis from 1938, when he escaped Nazi Germany, to his death in 1978. When my wife taught at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Klein was no longer alive, but we got to know his wife, and she gave me handwritten notes Klein had taken in a class taught by Heidegger in Marburg in the 1920s.

Most of the Plato scholars that inspired me were Jewish—Seth Benardete, Hans Jonas, Stanley Rosen, Allan Bloom, to name a few. The students of Leo Strauss, many of them Jewish, dominated Plato scholarship for a good while. In an essay in Commentary in 1967, Strauss said the two foundations of western civilization were Jerusalem and Athens, but he stressed the incommensurability of biblical faith and Greek rationality. So why are so many of the greatest scholars of Greek thought Jewish? Perhaps Jacob Howland has some insight into that. As Howland points out in Plato and the Talmud, the study of Plato’s dialogues helped prepare him for his study of the free-wheeling conversations of the Talmud that value questions over answers. The old joke about “two Jews, three opinions” is a recognition that human understanding is always provisional and open-ended. Influenced by Strauss, many Plato scholars in the last few decades, many of them Jewish, have argued that Plato’s dialogues are exploratory, rather than doctrinal, an insight that a 2,000-year tradition of doctrinal philosophy made difficult to see. Flipping Howland’s point, perhaps coming out of the Rabbinic interpretive tradition in which unsettled disagreements are central allowed Jewish scholars to see Plato’s works as irreducibly dialogical and open-ended. Their own writings about Plato tend to combine diligent close readings of the texts with unresolved questioning.

My other great interest in philosophy has been Martin Heidegger, and, given my admiration for Judaism, that created a great internal conflict for me. Heidegger was rector of the University of Freiburg under Hitler in 1933 and a member of the Nazi party for ten months. When he was asked to remove two Jewish deans he had appointed, he refused and resigned. Did that exonerate him? That debate is still going on, and likely will continue as long as Heidegger’s philosophy is taken seriously. I won’t try to resolve it here. So my experience of Germany included a trip to Todtnauberg in the Black Forest to see the hut in which Heidegger wrote parts of Being and Time and a trip to Dachau to see the memorial of the concentration camp.

Aside from his brief membership in the Nazi party and my personal struggle with that, Heidegger’s relation to the Jewish philosophers I studied was complex. Heidegger’s teacher, Edmund Husserl, was Jewish.  Hannah Arendt was his student and, apparently, his lover. She wrote a largely favorable essay for The New York Review of Books about Heidegger on his eightieth birthday. Hans Jonas, a German Jew, also studied with Heidegger. Both Jacob Klein and Leo Strauss studied with Heidegger. Strauss rarely spoke of Heidegger, and when he did he condemned him; but a number of Strauss’s students, including Stanley Rosen, have talked about how seriously Strauss was engaged with Heidegger’s thought and how he probably learned a great deal from Heidegger’s radical way of reading ancient Greek texts. Rosen himself wrote extensively about Heidegger. He engaged in a lifelong Auseinandersetzung with Heidegger, including a criticism of Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato, but he seems to have instilled in some of his students—most notably Drew Hyland—a more sympathetic appreciation for the importance of Heidegger’s thought for understanding Plato.

In part because of my concern about Heidegger’s relation to the Nazis, but even more so because of my interest in the Jewish people, I’ve studied the Holocaust extensively. I mentioned Hannah Arendt’s account of the banality of evil in her assessment of Eichmann, and that desire to go along may well explain how Hitler came to power, even if the average German was not an anti-Semite in the way Hitler himself was. But Hitler’s hatred of Jews was not banal. It was the epitome of active evil. After reading numerous accounts trying to explain Hitler, I finally concluded that it’s impossible to fathom that kind of evil. It’s almost as if a full understanding would require entering into it. I can’t help but think about the final scene in the Coen Brothers’ Fargo. Marge Gunderson, the police chief, has captured Gaear Grimsrud, who has just put his dead associate into the wood chipper. As she drives the patrol car with him in the back seat in handcuffs, she says, more to herself than to him, “And for what. For a little bit of money.” Then she says, “There’s more to life than a little money, you know.  Don’t you know that? And here you are, and it’s a beautiful day.” The camera then pulls back to reveal the squad cars and an ambulance coming towards us in an almost total whiteout of snow. “I just don’t understand it,” Marge says. She can’t fathom his evil, and that’s not her shortcoming; it’s because of her goodness.

 Stalin and Mao probably killed more innocent people than Hitler, and, yes, there have been genocides other than the Holocaust. But Hitler’s attempted genocide was unique. All of the other genocides I’m aware of involved a piece of land. The Bosnian Serb massacre of Bosniak and Bosnian Croats, for example, was motivated by religion and race, but it was an attempt to remove them from that land. There was no indication that the Serbs would have tracked them down worldwide to exterminate them. Likewise the 1915 massacre of Armenians by the Turks, the Khmer Rouge killing of several million Cambodians in the 1970s, and the murder of the Tutsi by the Hutu in Ruwanda also in the 1970s. Hitler’s genocide, by contrast, was global. His intention was to kill every Jew on the planet. For that reason, for my generation, whose fathers fought in World War II, Hitler is the epitome of evil.

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