Levinas's Jewish Thought: Between Jerusalem and Athens (review)

Abstract

Levinas's Jewish Thought: Jerusalem and Athens, by Ephraim Meir. Jerusalem. The University Magnes Press. 301 pp. $100.00. spite of, or maybe because of, those scholars who continue to keep Levinas's writings unproductively segregated into two categories - writings on Judaism and philosophical writings - there has been a proliferation of work attempting to stitch categories together. Most recently, Ephraim Meir's book, Levinas's Jewish Thought: Jerusalem and Athens, joins this group with stated objective to Levinas's Jewish and [discuss] relationship between his philosophical and his Jewish thinking (p. 3). The question which guides this discussion - In what way is Levinas's philosophical discourse on a non-eudaimonic ethics related to his Jewish writings? - was formulated at 2006 Levinas Congress held in Jerusalem, where a substantial number of attendees were in fact willing to entertain productive relationship between these bodies of writing. As a result, Meir uses tension that typically characterizes discussions of Athens and Jerusalem as a productive starting point for his own examination. The book is divided into an introduction, five main chapters, and a conclusion. Meir begins with a discussion in first chapter, Between Professional and Confessional Writings, that draws two sets of writings closer together. He moves from this chapter, which successfully blurs or removes boundary between these bodies of writing, to Chapters Two and Three, which examine ways that the Greek and the Hebrew each play off each other. By addressing this relationship in two chapters rather than one, and by inverting relationship in each chapter, Meir demonstrates that each is dependent on other, without privileging one over other or subordinating one to other. Finally, in Chapter Five, Meir turns specifically to Levinas's Jewish thought and considers a selection of themes that permeate Levinas's thought from his conception of revelation, a term deployed in both his philosophical (professional) writings and his writings on Judaism (confessional writings) to State of Israel. Meir opens his conclusion with following puzzlement: is strange that Levinas's philosophical thought draws so much attention, whereas he devoted so much of time to on Judaism, which scholars hardly discuss. This is even stranger since positions adopted by Levinas and many terms used overlap in both kinds of writing (p. 255). It is strange indeed. Meir s line that Levinas was not schizophrenic, while humorous, is also a propos. Quite literally, Levinas did not have a split mind, and indeed, as scholars, we should be more concerned if these two sets of writings were completely unrelated. What kind of mind could accomplish such a task? We would have to say literally that one side did not know what other side was doing or to extent that there was overlap or influence, these were not significant. …