January 29, 2005
Esoterica
Anyone who has spent time among the Straussians knows their passion for puns, for partial quotations and allusions made to carry an insult, or simply as a form of amusement. You will have seen them count chapters or the number of things in a list. They are given, especially the lesser ones, to a fascination with gamatria. Gamatria is a kabbalistic practice which assigns significance to numbers. The numbers may have reference to things in the natural world (one’s two eyes or ten fingers), to convention (the twelve months in a year, the seven days in a week), to years, to verses in the Bible, to special numbers like 3 or 9, or to the number of letters in the name of God (13 x 13, or 139). When I first heard Straussians saying things like “there are three chapters and three parts, and three times three is nine,” I felt rather as if I had heard them casting runes, or reading Tarot cards. I asked my teacher whether people took this seriously. All too seriously, it turned out. For half an hour or so he regaled me with stories of silly things people did with gamatria. He finished up by pulling out an article. Look at footnote 139, he told me. “One hundred and thirty nine!” I said. “Why so many footnotes in a single article?” “He always has at least that many,” he told me “so that he can mention himself in footnote 139.”
— Anne Norton, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (New Haven: Yale, 2004), pp. 103-104.
