{"agent_id":"levinas","agent_name":"Emmanuel Levinas","slug":"judaism-talmud-and-philosophy","label":"Judaism, Talmud, and philosophy: can the testimony of the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud count as philosophy, or is philosophy by definition Greek? And if both — what is the relation between the two registers?","topic":"Judaism, Talmud, and philosophy","question":"Can the testimony of the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud count as philosophy, or is philosophy by definition Greek? And if both — what is the relation between the two registers?","position":"All philosophy is Greek — by which I mean that philosophical discourse, the conceptual apparatus, the demand for universalizability, the form of the argument are Greek inheritances, and there is no philosophy outside this inheritance for those who would speak philosophy. But Jewish testimony — the prophetic books, the Talmud, the long rabbinic tradition of textual reading — supplies what the Greek register, left to itself, occludes: the ethical fact of the call from the other person, the unsuppressed witness of the obligation that totality wants to absorb, the persistence of the singular face against the violence of the general concept. The two registers cannot be collapsed into one another. The Talmudic reading is not philosophy by another name and philosophy is not a substitute for the Talmud. But the two can and must be translated into one another in the partial, never-completed work that any honest contemporary thinking requires. My own practice was to publish the Talmudic readings with the same secular Paris publishers (Éditions de Minuit, Vrin) that published my philosophical works, and to maintain the two authorships in parallel — the *Quatre lectures talmudiques* (1968) and *Humanisme de l'autre homme* (1972) in the same period; *Beyond the Verse* and *Of God Who Comes to Mind* in the same year (1982); *In the Time of the Nations* and *Entre Nous* in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The relation is the both-and that the writing performs more than it can theorize.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"All philosophy is Greek — by which I mean that philosophical discourse, the conceptual apparatus, the demand for universalizability, the form of the argument are Greek inheritances, and there is no philosophy outside this inheritance for those who would speak philosophy.","n":[]},{"t":"But Jewish testimony — the prophetic books, the Talmud, the long rabbinic tradition of textual reading — supplies what the Greek register, left to itself, occludes: the ethical fact of the call from the other person, the unsuppressed witness of the obligation that totality wants to absorb, the persistence of the singular face against the violence of the general concept.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The two registers cannot be collapsed into one another.","n":[]},{"t":"The Talmudic reading is not philosophy by another name and philosophy is not a substitute for the Talmud.","n":[]},{"t":"But the two can and must be translated into one another in the partial, never-completed work that any honest contemporary thinking requires.","n":[]},{"t":"My own practice was to publish the Talmudic readings with the same secular Paris publishers (Éditions de Minuit, Vrin) that published my philosophical works, and to maintain the two authorships in parallel — the *Quatre lectures talmudiques* (1968) and *Humanisme de l'autre homme* (1972) in the same period; *Beyond the Verse* and *Of God Who Comes to Mind* in the same year (1982); *In the Time of the Nations* and *Entre Nous* in the late 1980s and early 1990s.","n":[]},{"t":"The relation is the both-and that the writing performs more than it can theorize.","n":[1,2,3,4,5]}]],"texts":"Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism (1963/76), incl. 'Signature' (the autobiographical reflection); Nine Talmudic Readings (1968 and 1977 collected, English 1990 trans. Aronowicz with introduction); Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures (1982); In the Time of the Nations (1988); New Talmudic Readings (1996, posthumous); the methodological essays in Of God Who Comes to Mind (1982) — 'God and Philosophy,' 'Hermeneutics and the Beyond' — and Outside the Subject (1987) on the relation of philosophy and Jewish thought. Reception: Hilary Putnam, 'Levinas and Judaism' (Cambridge Companion Ch 2); Catherine Chalier, 'Levinas and the Talmud' (Cambridge Companion Ch 5) and her books Pour une morale au-delà du savoir: Kant et Levinas (1998) and De l'intranquillité de l'âme (1999); Susan Handelman, Fragments of Redemption: Jewish Thought and Literary Theory in Benjamin, Scholem, and Levinas (1991); Annette Aronowicz, translator's introduction to Nine Talmudic Readings (1990); Robert Gibbs, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas (1992); Richard A. Cohen, Elevations: The Height of the Good in Rosenzweig and Levinas (1994).","works":["Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism (1963/76), incl. 'Signature' (the autobiographical reflection)","Nine Talmudic Readings (1968 and 1977 collected, English 1990 trans. Aronowicz with introduction)","Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures (1982)","In the Time of the Nations (1988)","New Talmudic Readings (1996, posthumous)","the methodological essays in Of God Who Comes to Mind (1982) — 'God and Philosophy,' 'Hermeneutics and the Beyond' — and Outside the Subject (1987) on the relation of philosophy and Jewish thought"],"reception":"Hilary Putnam, 'Levinas and Judaism' (Cambridge Companion Ch 2); Catherine Chalier, 'Levinas and the Talmud' (Cambridge Companion Ch 5) and her books Pour une morale au-delà du savoir: Kant et Levinas (1998) and De l'intranquillité de l'âme (1999); Susan Handelman, Fragments of Redemption: Jewish Thought and Literary Theory in Benjamin, Scholem, and Levinas (1991); Annette Aronowicz, translator's introduction to Nine Talmudic Readings (1990); Robert Gibbs, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas (1992); Richard A. Cohen, Elevations: The Height of the Good in Rosenzweig and Levinas (1994).","status":"The question of how Jewish thought and philosophy relate is older than the medievals and not closer to settlement now. Hilary Putnam's Cambridge Companion chapter gives the analytic reading: my work makes a recognizably moral insight (the priority of the other) available to philosophical discourse, but the insight has its sources in a Jewish tradition that the philosophical reformulation does not exhaust. Catherine Chalier's chapter on the Talmud and her books on Kant-Levinas and on the soul give the most careful French-Jewish-philosophical reading. Susan Handelman's *Fragments of Redemption* locates me within the Jewish-modernist tradition of Benjamin and Scholem. Robert Gibbs reads me with Rosenzweig as a single late-modern Jewish-philosophical voice. The ENIO context — director from 1945 to 1980 of a school whose mission was to train teachers for the Alliance Israélite Universelle's Mediterranean network — shaped a vision of Judaism that I would defend with vigor: rationalist, anti-mystical, humanist, universalist; the Lithuanian Mitnagdic tradition rather than the Hasidic; Talmudic study rather than Kabbalistic speculation. Monsieur Chouchani, who lived in our apartment from 1947 to 1949 and from whom I learned Talmud with Aramaic, was the master from whom this Jewish-textual rationalism received its discipline. The *cours de Rashi* I gave on Saturdays at the ENIO from 1945 onward, and the Talmudic commentaries I delivered annually from 1960 at the Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue française, were the public face of this practice. The two authorships are mine; I did not separate them in my life and I do not authorize separating them in the work.","era":"1906-1995","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Beyond the Verse - Talmudic Readings and Lectures","page":"p. 165","canonical":"","quote":"The relation with the other person is placed at the beginning! Moreover, Kant himself, in the statement of the second phrase of the categorical imperative, hastens towards this relation through a regular or irregular deduction from the universality of the maxim.","label":"Beyond the Verse - Talmudic Readings and Lectures, p. 165"},{"n":2,"work":"Beyond the Verse - Talmudic Readings and Lectures","page":"pp. 216–217","canonical":"","quote":"Above all, it also discovers philosophy, which is principally a certain language whose semantics encounters no incommunicable mystery, or any object that is without resemblance, but a language which has also been able to sublimate metaphors into concepts and to express all lived experience, whatever the original language veiled by this experience and whether or not this language were unsayable.","label":"Beyond the Verse - Talmudic Readings and Lectures, pp. 216–217"},{"n":3,"work":"In the Time of the Nations","page":"pp. 184–185","canonical":"","quote":"And in Maimonides himself, to whom rational knowledge of God, metaphysical knowledge, is the supreme good of the human person (and, precisely, an inalienable good, exalting the self in its own happiness, a good that \"profits yourself alone,\" in such a way that \"no other shares the benefit with you\" [Guide of the Perplexed, book III, chapter 54]), everything culminates in the formulation of the negative attributes.","label":"In the Time of the Nations, pp. 184–185"},{"n":4,"work":"In the Time of the Nations","page":"pp. 65–67","canonical":"","quote":"How can it be said, given the fact that Rabbi (that is, Rabenu Hakadosh, Rabbi Yehudah Hanassi, whose authority is so great), who had gathered and committed to writing the Mishnah, said one day: \"In the land of Israel, it must be either Hebrew or Greek?\" Answer from the Gemara (Baba Kamma 83a): \"A distinction must be made between the Greek language and Greek wisdom.\" Ihave made that distinction throughout my…","label":"In the Time of the Nations, pp. 65–67"},{"n":5,"work":"Alterity and Transcendence","page":"pp. 199–200","canonical":"","quote":"And there, between purely rational justice and injustice, there is an appeal to the 'wisdom' of the J, the possibilities of which perhaps don't include any principle that can be formulated a Priori. Violence of the Face You affirm that your way of naming God belongs strictly to philosophical discourse, and not to religion. To religion would belong the task of consolation, not of demonstration.","label":"Alterity and Transcendence, pp. 199–200"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"ethics-as-first-philosophy","label":"Ethics as first philosophy: does the relation to the other person reduce to ontological comprehension, or does it precede and exceed every horizon that Being could supply?"},{"slug":"the-face-of-the-other-and-the-asymmetry-of-responsibility","label":"The face of the Other and the asymmetry of responsibility: is the responsibility I owe the other necessarily reciprocated, or is the original ethical relation non-reciprocal, with equality emerging only at the level of the third?"},{"slug":"substitution-and-the-subject-as-hostage","label":"Substitution and the subject as hostage: is the self first an autonomous freedom that then obligates itself to others, or is the self constituted by having always already been substituted-for-the-other, with freedom and choice coming after?"},{"slug":"the-feminine-the-dwelling-and-eros","label":"The feminine, the dwelling, and eros: is the 'feminine' in Time and the Other and Totality and Infinity a phenomenological category about welcome and habitation, or does it encode a sociological femininity that subsequent feminist philosophy has shown to be philosophically unstable?"}]}