Leo Strauss was a German-American philosopher and philologist of ancient Greek text. In his early years studying in Germany he acquainted himself with seminal German thinkers of the 20th century such as Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl and Ernst Cassirer. As a person of Jewish ancestry, Strauss fled to the United States during the rule of Third Reich and taught at the University of Chicago. There, he wrote commentaries on ancient Greek thought of Plato and Aristotle, as well as the medieval philosophy of Maimonides and Islamic philosophers, and expounded his thought on political philosophy. His legacy remains in the realm of political theories to this day.