The Lévinas Family

The surname Lévinas is part of the vast constellation of names derived from Lévi, the priestly tribe to which tradition entrusts the service of the Temple and liturgical song. In the immense corpus of Jewish names of Eastern Europe, the forms issuing from Lévi — Levin, Levinson, Levine, Levitan, Levinas — count among the most frequent in the Russian Empire and the Kingdom of Poland [Dictionaries of Jewish Surnames of Eastern Europe, Beider — Russian Empire 2008; Kingdom of Poland 1996]. This denomination is not neutral: it symbolically ties those who bear it to a vocation of service and transmission, the Levitic calling, the memory of a responsibility turned toward the community rather than toward oneself.

The family was established in the region of Kaunas (Kovno), at the heart of historic Lithuania, the land of mitnagdism — that rigorous Judaism, devoted to study, of which Vilna and its Gaon had made the center. This world placed the study of the Law at the summit of virtues: it honored less wealth than Talmudic learning, less brilliance than mastery of the text. Emmanuel Lévinas would be born in this horizon, and he would bear its mark throughout his life, claiming the heritage of a Judaism "that placed the Book at the center" and made reading a major spiritual act [Ethics and Infinity, Levinas, 1982].

The home of his childhood already illustrates a hierarchy of values peculiar to this Jewish Lithuania. Although the family spoke Yiddish at home, the boy was usually surrounded by people speaking Russian: his father kept a bookshop that sold Russian literature. The book trade — a modest economic activity but directed toward culture — speaks by itself to the place accorded to the written word in this lineage: here, earning one's living and cultivating the mind did not oppose each other.

Emmanuel Lévinas was born in Kaunas in 1906 (December 30 in the Julian calendar, or January 12, 1906 in the Gregorian calendar), the eldest son of Yehiel Lévinas and Deborah Gurwitch, in a family of the educated petite bourgeoisie. His father ran a bookstore there, where the child spent part of his childhood among books. The future of the children — Emmanuel Lévinas had two brothers — was shaped in Russian, the language spoken at home. For Hebrew, a private tutor came to teach him using innovative pedagogical methods.

This dual education — the Hebrew Bible and the great Russian novelists, Pushkin and especially Dostoevsky — shaped a sensibility in which the question of responsibility toward the other occupied a central place very early on. Lévinas would later recall how Russian literature, haunted by sin, fault, and the burden that each person carries for all, had prepared him for his philosophy of responsibility [Emmanuel Lévinas. La vie et la trace, Malka, 2002].

History erupted in childhood. In 1914, at the declaration of war, the family fled the advance of German armies and eventually settled in Kharkov, in Russia (present-day Ukraine). The adolescent there lived through the years of the 1917 Revolution, an experience of a world turning upside down. The family returned to Lithuania, which had become independent in the early 1920s. This first exile — undergone, not chosen — inscribed in the family biography what the Memory of Israel has known since Abraham: the departure toward the unknown, the precariousness of settlement, fidelity maintained within uprooting. Lévinas would later make this Abrahamic figure — he who leaves his homeland without hope of return — the very emblem of ethics, opposed to Ulysses who thinks only of returning home [L'au-delà du verset, Levinas, 1982].

In 1923, the young man crossed a new frontier: he came to study philosophy at the University of Strasbourg, a pivotal city where German and French cultures met. There he formed a lasting friendship with Maurice Blanchot. In 1928-1929, he went to Freiburg im Breisgau to follow the teaching of Edmund Husserl, founder of phenomenology, and to discover that of Martin Heidegger [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Emmanuel Levinas"].

Levinas became one of the first introducers of Husserlian phenomenology in France; his thesis on the theory of intuition in Husserl (1930) was groundbreaking. But Heidegger's commitment to National Socialism in 1933 caused him a profound and lasting rupture. From this intellectual wound would be born one of the mainsprings of his work: to wrest philosophy from the primacy of being — ontology — and replace it with the primacy of ethics, that is, of the relation to the other. In this conversion of perspective, the most contemporary philosophical knowledge is put at the service of an intuition drawn from the Hebrew source: man is first and foremost responsible for his neighbor [La trace de l'infini, Chalier, 2002].

Naturalized as a French citizen in 1930, Levinas married in 1932 Raïssa Lévi, a childhood friend met in Lithuania, a musician. He then entered the Alliance Israélite Universelle, an institution devoted to the education of Jewish communities in the Mediterranean basin — an engagement in service of transmission that extends, in another form, the vocation of the bookseller of Kaunas.

World War II marks the lineage with a double ordeal. Mobilized as a Russian-French interpreter, Lévinas was taken prisoner in 1940 and interned in a Stalag reserved for Jewish prisoners of war; his status as a French soldier paradoxically protected him from deportation. There he kept a notebook, meditated, and remained faithful to study.

Meanwhile, a chain of solidarity saved his closest relations. Maurice Blanchot helped Lévinas's wife and daughter spend the war in a monastery, thus sparing them from the Shoah. Blanchot, at considerable personal risk, also ensured that Lévinas could remain in contact with his immediate family through letters and other messages. This act of kindness from a non-Jewish friend — the hospitality offered to the threatened stranger — would become for Lévinas a living figure of what he would theorize: the welcoming of the vulnerable face as the foundation of ethics.

But the branch that remained in Lithuania was annihilated. Other members of Lévinas's family were not as fortunate. His father Yehiel, his mother Deborah, his two brothers Boris and Aminadab were murdered by the Nazis and their auxiliaries in Kaunas in 1941, in one of the massacres that liquidated the "Jerusalem of Lithuania." The entire subsequent work — dedicated "to the memory of the closest beings among the six million murdered by the National Socialists" — bears this wound. Lévinas's philosophy is born in a sense from this mourning: to think ethics after Auschwitz is to refuse that the death of the other could ever be a matter of indifference [Autrement qu'être, Levinas, 1974].

After the war, Levinas directs the École normale israélite orientale of the Alliance in Paris, training teachers for communities around the Mediterranean—patient work of rebuilding a decimated Jewish world. At the same time, he develops a body of work that transforms philosophy.

In Totalité et infini (1961), he posits that the relationship to the Other, irreducible to knowledge and possession, precedes all ontology: the face of the Other, at once defenseless and sovereign, commands me "thou shalt not kill" even before I understand it [Totalité et infini, Levinas, 1961]. In Autrement qu'être (1974), he pushes the analysis to the point of substitution: the subject is "hostage" to the Other, responsible even for the responsibility of others [Autrement qu'être, Levinas, 1974]. It is the complete reversal of philosophical tradition: no longer "I think," but "here I am," in response to the call of the neighbor.

This thought makes justice, kindness, and care for the Other not ornaments of morality, but the very structure of subjectivity. It thus joins what the Jewish tradition has continually taught: that man is the keeper of his brother, that the Law commands us to love the stranger, that holiness is measured by the attention given to the widow, the orphan, and the poor. By translating this imperative into the rigorous language of phenomenology, Levinas offers the contribution of Jewish thought a universal reach, audible to all—believers and non-believers alike [De Dieu qui vient à l'idée, Levinas, 1982].

The son of the Kaunas bookseller never severed himself from the Book. From the 1950s onwards, within the framework of the Colloques des intellectuels juifs de langue française, Lévinas gave "Talmudic readings" that would prove landmark: he approached pages of the Gemara with the instruments of the philosopher, yet with scrupulous respect for the text and the tradition of interpretation.

These readings — gathered in Quatre lectures talmudiques (1968), Du sacré au saint (1977) and L'au-delà du verset (1982) — reveal a conviction: the Talmud is not an object of religious archaeology but a living source of ethical wisdom, capable of dialogue with Greek philosophy and modernity. Lévinas deploys there a demanding conception of halakha, where the passage "from the Sacred to the Holy" means the demythologization of the religious in favor of concrete responsibility toward the Other [Du sacré au saint, Levinas, 1977]. In these pages the two heritages of the Kaunas household converge — the Hebrew letter and secular culture — and the tradition transmitted by the masters of Lithuania is found there both honored and confronted with universal thought.

Gathered in Difficile liberté (1963), his essays on Judaism define a piety without ease: an adult fidelity, exacting, which refuses both sentimental devotion and renunciation, and which makes study a form of prayer [Difficile liberté, Levinas, 1963]. The sobriety of Lithuanian mitnagdism survives there, transposed into the language of French philosophy. Recognized, Lévinas taught at Poitiers, at Nanterre, then at the Sorbonne (Paris-IV); he died in Paris on 25 December 1995 [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Emmanuel Levinas"].

From the library of Kaunas to the chair at the Sorbonne, the Lévinas lineage traces a trajectory where the great trials of European Judaism can be read between the lines: the Lithuanian anchorage devoted to study, the exile of 1914, French naturalization, captivity, the annihilation of the branch that remained in the homeland, and finally the surviving work born of mourning. The Levitic name of the family — a name of service and transmission — found its highest fulfillment in a son who made responsibility for the other the first of truths.

Among all the virtues that the tradition of Israel has carried through the centuries — justice, piety, talmudic learning, hospitality — it was the care for the other, the ethics of responsibility toward the neighbor and the stranger that this lineage expressed better than any other. In elevating the face of the other to a first commandment, Emmanuel Lévinas did not merely write a philosophy: he made audible, in the universal language of thought, what Judaism has repeated since Sinai — that man is called, before all else, to answer for his brother. The memory of those assassinated at Kaunas watches, discreet and undying, at the heart of this word. Thus the destiny of a family of Lithuanian booksellers joins the collective memory of Israel: that of a people who, from exile itself, made a school of responsibility.