Emmanuel Levinas's Talmudic readings: Between tradition and invention

Prooftexts - Journal of Jewish Literature History

Volumn 23, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 338-364

  Moyn, Samuel ^a  

^a Och Spine at New York Presbyterian Hospitals

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EID: 60950587909     PISSN: 02729601     EISSN: 10863311     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2979/PFT.2003.23.3.338     Document Type: Article

References (62)

1. Leo Strauss, preface to Spinoza's Critique of Religion, trans. E. M. Sinclair (New York: Schocken, 1965), 24-25,
2. citing Hermann Cohen, Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums (Leipzig: Fock, 1919), 205.
3. T. W. Adorno, "Bach Defended Against His Devotees," in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), 139.
4. I cite from Pierre Vidal Naquet et al., Questions au judaïsme: Entretiens avec Elisabeth Weber (Paris: Desclée De Brouwer, 1996), 147;
5. the interview originally appeared in Elisabeth Weber, ed., Jüdisches Denken in Frankreich (Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag, 1994).
6. For a similar testimony, cf. François Poirié, Emmanuel Levinas: Qui êtes-vous? (Lyon: La Manufacture, 1984), 67.
7. See Judith Friedlander, Vilna on the Seine: Jewish Intellectuals in France since 1968 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990);
8. and Emmanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. and intro. Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
9. R. Chaim Volozhiner, L'Âme De la vie, trans. Benjamin Gross (Lagrasse, France: Verdier, 1986).
10. Cf. Levinas, "'De l'image De Dieu' d'après R. Hayim Volozhiner," in L'au-delà du verset: Lectures et discours talmudiques (Paris: Minuit, 1982),
11. trans. as "'In the Image of God' According to R. Hayim Volozhiner," in Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, trans. Gary D. Mole (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
12. See Marie-Anne Lescourret, Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 19-50.
13. Levinas, Difficile liberté: Essais sur le judaïsme (Paris: Albin Michel, 1963), 84;
14. Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Séan Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 59.
15. Poirié, Emmanuel Levinas, 79-80.
16. See Samuel Moyn, "Judaism against Paganism: Emmanuel Levinas's Response to Heidegger and Nazism in the 1930s," History & Memory 10, no. 1 (spring/summer 1998): 25-58, as expanded in my forthcoming book on Levinas's early philosophical development.
17. Chouchani is a character who, in some ways, defeats the project of contextualizing intellectual history. It is unknown where he originated and what background shaped him, and those who encounter him do not even attempt to localize or specify his teaching. Cf. Salomon Malka, Chouchani: L'É́nigme d'un maître du XXe siècle (Paris: J. C. Lattès, 1994).
18. Levinas, Quatre lectures talmudiques (Paris: Minuit, 1968);
19. Du sacré au saint: Cinq nouvelles lectures talmudiques (Paris: Minuit, 1977).
20. More recently, see Levinas, Nouvelles lectures talmudiques (Paris: Minuit, 1996),
21. in English as New Talmudic Readings, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999).
22. On Heidegger's attitude to history, see, for example, Charles R. Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).
23. Levinas, Difficile liberté, 95-96;
24. Difficult Freedom, 68.
25. Levinas, Quatre lectures talmudiques, 14-16;
26. Nine Talmudic Readings, 6.
27. It is perhaps worth noting, however, that Amos Funkenstein considered traditional rabbinic culture to be proto-historicist rather than counterhistoricist, for in it one can "find clear distinctions of time and place throughout: distinctions concerning customs and their context, exact knowledge of the place and time of the messages and teachers of halakha, the estimated monetary value of coins mentioned in sources, the significance of institutions of the past." Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 17.
28. Similarly, in the colloquy after one of his presentations before the Colloque d'intellectuels juifs De langue francophone, Levinas argued that the fact that, in tractate Rosh Hashanah, Xerxes and Darius are thought to be the same person by the Rabbis should not so satisfy "malicious historians who reveal the scandalous ignorance of the rabbis in historical study." These historians "do not ask themselves whether, from the perspective of eternity from which Judaism judges history, the identity of and distinction between political powers are established on the basis of the criteria of before and after." See Éliane Amado Lévy-Valensi and Jean Halperin, eds., La Conscience juive: Données et débats (Paris: Presses universitaires, 1963), 147.
29. Ernst Troeltsch, "Die Krisis des Historismus," Die neue Rundschau 33 (1922): 572-90.
30. John Baillie, The Idea of Revelation in Recent Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956) is useful.
31. d ed. (1922), trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), 140.
32. In a typical statement, Husserl suggested that "historical science can advance nothing relevant against the possibility of absolute validities in general." Edmund Husserl, "Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft," Logos 1 (1911): 289-341;
33. "Philosophy as Rigorous Science," in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 127.
34. Barth, Epistle to the Romans, 1. The preface to Barth's Epistle to the Romans, Leo Strauss later recalled in a clue of fundamental significance to the historical origins of his own later work, "is of great importance also to nontheologians: it sets forth the principles of an interpretation that is concerned exclusively with the subject matter as distinguished from historical interpretation."
35. Leo Strauss, "A Giving of Accounts," The College 22, no. 1 (April 1970): 1-5;
36. rpt. in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought, ed. Kenneth Hart Green (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 460. Thus, the counterhistoricist thesis now preserved only in a diluted and bastardized form in the running discussion between the so-called Cambridge school in the history of political thought and those contemporary followers of Leo Strauss who deny the relevance of mere history to some final set of perennial questions originated in a powerful Weimar debate. In fact, the homologies between Levinas and Strauss are profound.
37. See Moyn, "A Comparison of Levinas and Strauss," a paper delivered at the Association of Jewish Studies Conference, December 2000, and Leora Batnitzky's forthcoming book on this pair.
38. Rosenzweig, 'Atheistische Théologie," in Kleinere Schriften (Berlin, 1937),
39. available in English as "Atheistic Theology," in Philosophical and Theological Writings, trans. Paul W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000);
40. cf. Paul Mendes-Flohr, "Franz Rosenzweig and the Crisis of Historicism," in Mendes-Flohr, ed., The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1988), esp. 142-45.
41. This is the English translation in Levinas, Difficult Freedom, 60-61.
42. Difficult Freedom, 61. Such a passage occurs, for example, at Shabbat 63a and Berahot 34b.
43. Levinas, Difficile liberté, 96, 90;
44. Difficult Freedom, 69, 64.
45. As cited in Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 11, who usefully points out that Marx's (and Jochanan's?) linkage of politics and morality in history is not just an attack on morality; from another perspective, it is simply a different moral vision.
46. See Tony R. Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
47. Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1963), 11.
48. On the French scene, see, for example, Jean Mesnard, "Kierkegaard aux prises avec la conscience française," Revue De littérature comparée 9 (1955): 453-77;
49. also, Jean Wahl, "Kierkegaard: son influence en France," Revue danoise (1951): 34-36. Levinas also reviewed a book on Kierkegaard by the Russian-Jewish philosopher Lev Shestov in the 1930s.
50. See Shestov, Kierkegaard et la philosophie existentielle (Vox clamantis in deserto) (Paris: Amis De Léon Chestov, 1936);
51. for Levinas's review, see Revue des études juives 52, nos. 1-2 (July-December 1937): 139-41.
52. See Lévy-Valensi and Halperin, eds., La Conscience juive: Données et débats, 231-440,
53. and Lévy-Valensi and Halperin, eds., La Conscience juive face à l'histoire (Paris: Presses universitaires, 1965), 3-148.
54. See Lévy-Valensi and Halperin, La Conscience juive: Données et débats, 287-88, 138, 144.
55. I have discussed Levinas's Kierkegaardianism in great detail in "Transcendence and Ontology: Emmanuel Levinas and the Discovery of Søren Kierkegaard in Inter-war France," Yale French Studies 104 (Fall 2003, forthcoming).
56. Levinas, Totalité et infini: Essai sur l'extériorité (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961), 26-29;
57. Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1976), 55-58.
58. The citations are from Levinas, "Etre juif," Confluences 7, nos. 15-17 (1947): 260;
59. Christian Descamps, Entretiens avec "Le Monde" (Paris: La Découverte, 1989), 147. Or again: "[J]udaism is an essential modality of every human."
60. Salomon Malka, Lire Lévinas (Paris: Cerf, 1986), 108.
61. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermenentik (Tübingen: Mohr, 1960);
62. d rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1993).