Excerpt

Emmanuel Levinas's Talmudic readings were given as lectures at the Colloque des Intellectuels Juifs de Langue Française, a conference that has been held every year in Paris since 1957. His commentaries on the Talmud purported to be non-technical, accessible, and popular adaptations of his philosophical thinking, which had been developed in difficult books written in the technical language of Husserlian phenomenology.¹ In fact, however, a full understanding of these Talmudic readings often requires knowledge of their philosophical assumptions. Conversely, Levinas used his biblical and Talmudic interpretations to formulate philosophical arguments: There are two ways of reading a…