Emmanuel Levinas’s Talmudic Turn: Philosophy and Jewish Thought by Ethan Kleinberg

Abstract

Reviewed by: Emmanuel Levinas’s Talmudic Turn: Philosophy and Jewish Thought by Ethan Kleinberg Annabel Herzog Ethan Kleinberg. Emmanuel Levinas’s Talmudic Turn: Philosophy and Jewish Thought. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021. 220 pp. Levinas’s essays on the Talmud and other texts of the Jewish tradition (his “talmudic readings”) have been studied from various perspectives. Some consider them a mere illustration of Levinas’s phenomenology. Some try to fathom their philosophical meaning. Some read them in a purely Jewish context, as examples of modern midrash. Some emphasize their historical impact on the Jewish renewal that took place in intellectual circles in Paris in the late 1950s and in the 1960s. In his excellent book, Emmanuel Levinas’s Talmudic Turn, Ethan Kleinberg proposes a truly original twist: his historical account focuses on Levinas’s teaching and transmission of Talmud. In emphasizing primarily neither the French Jewish scene of the time, nor the midrashic relevance of Levinas’s endeavor, but the passages between them, Kleinberg asks how Levinas came to teach the Talmud and what this move meant. The answer is presented in two parallel discussions: one classically historical and one that delves into the arguments of some specific talmudic readings. This double strategy, appearing visually on the page as two columns of text, is influenced by Derrida’s writing in Glas and in Margins of Philosophy—which [End Page 213] is in its turn influenced by the Talmud’s page layout—and aims at opening the text and challenging the process of reading. Kleinberg’s project starts with the realization that, contrary to what is too often believed, Levinas never had formal talmudic training. While he was born and grew up in Lithuania, he did not study in a traditional yeshiva. This point is important and Kleinberg comes back to it several times, to emphasize that the centrality of Talmud in Levinas’s thinking is not the result of religious upbringing but of choice. The discussion that Kleinberg elaborates from this point forward, however, goes beyond the simple exposition of a biographical fact. Indeed, it is now well known that for many Jewish secular scholars and intellectuals in France and in other countries, Levinas’s idiosyncratic interpretations of the Talmud opened a way back to the Jewish tradition. This, I must add, is not a unique phenomenon. Buber, Rosenzweig, and Heschel also gave Jewish intellectuals a new taste for Jewish texts and sometimes Jewish practice. Yet, the question that Kleinberg asks is about the meaning and composition of tradition: If we acknowledge that Levinas began his talmudic investigations at quite a late moment of his life, can his teaching be considered tradition? Can a tradition whose thread has been broken be reconstructed? Is a talmudic commentary that includes insights taken from other realms of thinking (such as Western philosophy or French humanism) still talmudic, still Jewish? What did Levinas exactly do in suggesting that his universalist understanding of the Jewish tradition is the Jewish tradition? Should his endeavor affect our presumptions about that tradition? These are fascinating questions. Some of them have already been raised in Levinas’s scholarship, but not as the basis for such a far-reaching discussion. In addition, Kleinberg shows that Levinas himself formulated versions of these questions in his talmudic readings, which deal with the meaning of tradition and transmission beyond their specific topics. The argument of the book, therefore, is that Levinas “inserted himself” into the Jewish tradition (99). And this implies two things. The first is that he opened that tradition to make room for himself. This was made possible by the fact that tradition had already been transformed, shaken, or even broken by a series of processes and events: the Jewish emancipation, secularism and assimilation, Nazi rule, and the decolonization wars that brought Sephardic Jews to Paris and created a new Jewish conversation. In other words, Levinas used the crises of his time to find his way into the talmudic chain of transmission. The second is that entering tradition from outside, he would almost necessarily start a new tradition or reformulate the tradition in a new language reflecting that outside realm, and dialoguing with it. This is what Levinas meant when...