Modern Judaism

The late Benny Levy's last book, Etre juif, is a study of Emmanuel Levinas's 1947 essay "Etre juif" and a vigorous criticism of his philosophy. Levy maintains that philosophy and Judaism are mutually exclusive. He lauds Levinas for having heralded an intellectual "return" to Judaism (une pensée du retour) but charges that Levinas himself stopped halfway because of his inveterate attachment to philosophy. For Levy, Levinas set down the intellectual road map to teshuvah but did not himself complete the journey. He remained, as it were, too much of a philosopher and, therefore, not enough of a Jew.¹

This claim generated two reactions among French Levinassians. Levy's friends and disciples, who admire his spiritual transforma-tions—from his Maoist political activism and his close association with Sartre to his "discovery" of Judaism and his studying in an ultra-Orthodox yeshiva—defend his reading and his criticism of Levinas.² However, more traditional Levinassians refuse to see an apology of "return" in Levinas. They argue that to be a philosopher and a Jew never constituted a contradiction for Levinas and, indeed, Levinas was the thinker par excellence who gave a modern meaning to the concord between philosophy and Judaism.³

There is no doubt that the relationship between philosophy and Judaism stands at the core of Levinas's thinking and that he became popular among Jewish intellectuals because he conceptualized this relationship as a positive one. As a result, it may sound outrageous or simply frivolous to criticize Levinas for being a philosopher. Nonetheless, there are at least two reasons why one should not blindly reject Levy's claim in its entirety. First, many of Levinas's previously estranged Jewish readers have in fact "returned" to Judaism under his influence, and many Jewish intellectuals who have "returned" to Judaism consider that Levinas's philosophy grants them intellectual legitimacy. Levy might thus be right when he writes that Levinas promoted a return to Judaism, and consequently it might not be irrelevant to examine the status of "return" in his thought. Second, Levinas did not try to synthesize Judaism and philosophy. He said: "I have never aimed explicitly to 'harmonize' or 'conciliate' both traditions."⁴ In his work, the link between the Greek and the [End Page 15] Hebrew traditions is not as smooth as one might have thought. He even sometimes seems to imply what Levy asserts explicitly, namely, that Judaism and philosophy are mutually exclusive.

Some of Levinas's most perspicacious readers, among them Robert Gibbs and Hilary Putnam, have already offered excellent analyses of the relationship between philosophy and Judaism in Levinas's thought and have connected it to the relationship between universalism and particu-larism.⁵ It has, for example, been observed that the dialogue between universalism and particularism in Levinas exists not only between philosophy and Judaism but within philosophy and Judaism themselves. For instance, in some of Levinas's writings the Bible is regarded as an expression of universal ethics, and the Talmud, as a particular tradition of exegesis. In other texts, the Talmud constitutes a version of universal wisdom, and the Bible is taken as the revelation of God to a particular people. At the same time, in some of Levinas's writings, Western philosophy is understood as a totalizing or even totalitarian imperialist power, whereas in others it signifies the invaluable recognition of otherness and difference. The same dichotomy and the same interaction and interdependency between universal and particular appear in different contexts throughout Levinas's philosophy.⁶

However, Levy's controversial claim indicates that in Levinas's thinking not everything about the relationship between Athens and Jerusalem is clear. Levy addresses the problem from an unusual perspective. By "being Jewish," he does not mean a particularism; he means—quoting Levinas—an inescapable "fact" or "total passivity" ungraspable by philosophy. He develops this starting point in two different directions. On the one hand, he highlights Levinas's notion of "return" to Judaism, arguing that he did not succeed in fully elaborating it. On the other hand, he explores Levinas's conception of the place of suffering in Jewish existence...