Emmanel Levinas

Abstract

Abstract Emmanel Levinas (1906-1996) was born in Kovno (now Kaunas), Lithuania, on 12 January. He grew up in the intensely Orthodox Jewish atmosphere of that city. His first languages were Hebrew and Yiddish while he learned Russian from a tutor. During World War I, when Kovno was occupied by German forces, the Levinas family moved to Kharkov in the Ukraine and here Levinas was one of the few Jewish children admitted to the Russian Gymnasium. In 1923 he began his university studies, concentrating in philosophy, at the University of Strasbourg (France). In 1927, he received his first degree in philosophy. He then continued his studies at the University of Freiburg in Germany where he attended seminars given by both Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. He then returned to Strasbourg where he completed his doctoral studies by writing his thesis on The which was published in Paris in 1930. Levinas then began his teaching career at the Alliance Israelite Universelle in Paris. During the 1930s, he published a wide variety of essays on philosophical and topical issues and became a well-known younger member of Paris’s extraordinary intellectual community, which included individuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Gabriel Marcel. In 1939, the threat of war saw Levinas drafted into the French army. In June 1940, he was taken as a prisoner of war and sent to a military prisoners’ camp. There, the Jewish prisoners were separated from the others and made to wear special uniforms with the word Jud on them. His wife and young daughter were hidden in Paris by friends and then by the sisters of a Vincentian convent outside Orleans. Both survived the war and were reunited with Levinas in 1945 at the liberation of France.