Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) was born in Kovno, Lithuania, to a middle-class Jewish family where Yiddish and Russian were spoken. He received a secular education in a Russian-speaking school and later entered a Jewish secondary school where he learned Hebrew. At 17, he moved to France to study at the University of Strasbourg and a few years later enrolled at the University of Freiburg, Germany, to study with Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger.

He returned to France, where, after earning his doctorate, he taught Jewish students from traditionalist families at the Ecole Normale Israelite Orientale in Paris. In 1930, he married Margarita Levi and became a French citizen in 1931. In 1939, already in the midst of the war, he was recruited by the French army as a Russian and German interpreter, but a year later he was taken prisoner, spending the entire war in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. Meanwhile, his friend Maurice Blanchot helped him secure refuge for his wife and daughter in a convent, thus avoiding the Holocaust, a fate that sadly eluded his relatives in Lithuania.

After the war, he was director of the École Normale Israelite until 1961, when he joined the University of Poitiers as a professor of philosophy. He then took a position at the University of Nanterre in 1967, and finally, in 1973, he was appointed professor at the Sorbonne.

As a philosopher after the war, Levinas dedicated his life and work to the reconstruction of ethical thought. Unlike his colleagues who were focused on the study of being, on «ontology,» he argued that the study of ethics was more important than knowing what «being» is. Levinas said that the purpose of Judaism was not to produce good Jews, but good human beings, and good Jewish human beings are therefore good Jews. Judaism’s mission in the world is to help produce a good and just humanity. Being religious is nothing other than this: kindness to others and a just world for all.

For Levinas, the truly religious person is one who makes ethics and justice their true purpose. They are the ones who put the mitzvot «ben adam lechavero,» the commandments between man and his neighbor, before the mitzvot «ben adam la makom,» the commandments between man and God. This «neighbor» is what Levinas calls «The Other.» For him, being a moral person is alleviating the suffering of «The Other» and being responsible for it without expecting reciprocity. Without «The Other,» man cannot be ethical. Tarzan becomes an ethical man until he meets Jane.

Levinas describes the religion of children as one in which we expect God to help us or save the innocent, where God is a dispenser of favors or a magician. Many people prefer the irresponsibility of children, who like to obey orders and be told what to do, as if such formality were all that God demands. On the other hand, adult religion is when humans accept their responsibility in the process of improving the world, without waiting for someone superior to command them. Childhood is one thing; adulthood—bar mitzvah—is another. In the Talmud and other Jewish texts, Levinas consistently discovers this call to moral responsibility and justice. For him, ethics is not only a component of Jewishness; it is Judaism at its highest.

By Marcos Gojman

Bibliography: Articles by Allan Brill, Peter Steinfels, Richard A. Cohen, Julia Urabayen, and others.