 Strauss was born on September 20, 1899 in Kirchhain, a small, rural town in Germany. He was raised in an orthodox Jewish home and also studied at a Gymnasium in nearby Marburg where he received a broad humanistic education. At the age of seventeen Strauss became a devoted advocate of political Zionism. He spent a year in Belgium as an interpreter for the military after which he began his studies at the University of Marburg, where the neo-Kantian Jewish philosopher, Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) had established a thriving school of neo-Kantianism. In 1921, Strauss completed his dissertation, “The problem of Knowledge in the Philosophical Doctrine of F.H. Jacobi,” under the direction of Cohen’s student, Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945). Strauss’s dissertation considered the implications of Jacobi’s notion of revelation for the problem of knowledge. Although Strauss would come to regard his dissertation as “a disgraceful performance,” the question of the meaning and status of divine revelation would continue to occupy him throughout his life.