Nine Talmudic Readings

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

The true goal of the mind is translating: only when a thing has been translated does it become truly vocal, no longer to be done away with. Only in the Septuagint has revelation come to be at home in the world, and so long as Homer did not speak Latin he was not a fact. The same holds good for translating from man to man.

—Franz Rosenzweig¹

TRANSLATING INTO GREEK

These talmudic commentaries are, as Emmanuel Levinas tells us himself, an attempt at translating Jewish thought into the language of modern times. That is, they are simultaneously an attempt at letting the Jewish texts shed light on the problems facing us today and an attempt at letting modern problems shed light on the texts. Levinas sometimes refers to this approach as translating the Jewish sources into Greek, Greek being his metaphor for the language Jews have in common with other inhabitants of the Western world.²

These talmudic commentaries, then, can be viewed as a mark of the secularization of the Jewish tradition, for today the majority of Jews live not in a world apart but in the world at large. They too need to worry about the State and nuclear war, revolutions and the relation between the sexes, all the burning issues of the times; and, what is more, they are used to expressing these issues in a language derived from sources other than the traditional Jewish ones. As a result, the Jewish texts’ way of posing problems—in particular, the Talmud’s way of posing problems—is no longer intelligible or meaningful to a large majority of Jewish readers. The very polemic Levinas wages in every one of his commentaries against people for whom the Talmud is but a disjointed folkloric remnant or a dated discussion is a sign of its lack of transparency, its inability to communicate to most contemporary Jews.³

The impenetrability of these texts is due not so much to a different historical context as to the Talmud’s allusive, elliptical, seemingly incoherent style, so different from the expository logic that Western, university educated readers expect. Translating the Talmud into a modern idiom, translating it into the problems of the times, means, then, for Levinas, presenting its teaching in an expository, conceptual language that would be accessible to any educated, even if uninitiated, listener. This attempt at utter intelligibility, at clarity, at an exposition that aims at every human being regardless of background or prior assumptions, in un langage non-prévenu is also what Levinas means by translating into Greek.⁴

But if the fact of translation can be read as a sign of modern Jews’ distance from the language of their own tradition and from their own spiritual resources, as a sign of secularization, it is also for Levinas the sign of a secularization in a very different sense, for he claims that the texts always need to be translated into secular language, into the language of contemporary issues, into the language that strives to be understood by all, into the language of prose and demystification. The very distance we might feel with respect to these traditional sources is, in a sense, a gain for these very sources, for it allows their universal import to manifest itself in yet another of its aspects. For Levinas, the capacity of these texts to signify is infinite, and only successive secularizations, translations into the language of the times, can bring these infinite meanings to light.⁵ Translation, and thus secularization, is here not a sign of regret for a lost past but the very life of a tradition. It is, no doubt, in this context that we should understand his comment that the translation of the Septuagint is not yet complete, [and] that the translation of biblical wisdom into the Greek language remains unfinished.⁶

But why should modern Jews, at home in Western (Greek) intelligibility and Western (Greek) wisdom, go back and attempt to translate these obscure Jewish sources? Levinas addresses this question often in his talmudic commentaries; but beyond the answers he suggests explicitly, the very richness of meanings his readings bring to light has its own eloquence. But what made him decide to undertake the task of translation, when there were no commentaries such as his available to persuade him? Here, a brief sketch of his life, with special attention to the tension of Greek and Jew within it, might provide us with a clue.

THE GREEK AND THE JEW

Emmanuel Levinas was born in Kovno, Lithuania, in 1906, into a Jewish community in which, as he put it, to be Jewish was as natural as having eyes and ears.⁷ The first language he learned to read was Hebrew, at home, with a teacher, but it was also part of his formal education at the Hebrew Gymnasium he attended after the family’s return to Kovno in 1920. During World War I they had moved to Kharkov, in the Ukraine, and while there Levinas was one of a small number of Jews admitted to the Russian Gymnasium.

While the Jewish influences in his childhood and early youth were very much present, so much so that one can hardly speak of mere influences, we can also see that other cultures were already exercising their strong pull. His parents knew Yiddish, yet Russian was spoken at home. In the Jewish Gymnasium, he developed an abiding love for the great Russian classics, which he credits with the awakening of his philosophical interests. And there he learned of Goethe and yearned, as he put it, to know the cathedral of Cologne.⁸

In 1923, at the age of seventeen, Levinas went to France to study at the University of Strasbourg, and for the next decades it would seem that it was the non-Jewish cultural influences that aroused his passion and commanded his time. He became particularly engrossed in the thought of Husserl and Heidegger, both of whom he studied with in 1928–1929 at the University of Freiburg. His was the first complete work on Husserl in France, and it was Levinas who introduced Heidegger into the French intellectual world.⁹ As he once put it humorously: It was Sartre who guaranteed my place in eternity by stating in his famous obituary essay on Merleau-Ponty that he, Sartre, ‘was introduced to phenomenology by Levinas.’¹⁰ Levinas’s career in the French intellectual world culminated with his appointment as professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1973, an appointment preceded by two other university positions (Poitiers and Nanterre) and by many and frequent contacts with the great figures of French intellectual life.

It would seem that during these years—a good part of his adult life—the square letters, as Levinas calls Hebrew and the Jewish sources with which he had become acquainted in his childhood and early youth, had receded completely. Indeed, there is little evidence of a living encounter with Jewish texts in the 1920s and 1930s. It should not be forgotten, however, that soon after his arrival in France, Levinas joined an organization of considerable importance in the world of modern Western Jewry, the Alliance Israélite Universelle.

The Alliance was established in France in 1860 by a group of Jews prominent in French life. Inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment, they wished to promote the integration of Jews everywhere as full citizens within their states, with equal rights and freedom from persecution.¹¹ While the eagerness of the Western Jews in the nineteenth century to enter into their host cultures has subsequently been criticized as an abandonment of the vital core of the Jewish tradition and as self-serving, Levinas underscores the religious nature of this move toward emancipation.¹² For nineteenth-century Jews it was not a mere desire to shirk their Jewish identity in order to make life more comfortable. They were also spurred by a vision of the unity of humankind, a sense of coincidence between Jewish and modern European values, and an ardent desire to participate in movements promoting this unity.

One of the many goals of the Alliance Israélite Universelle was to establish schools in areas where Jews were not receiving the kind of education that, members of the Alliance believed, would make them fit to enter the modern world as productive citizens. The Alliance thus saw itself as having a civilizing mission, the regeneration of its brethren in the Mediterranean Basin who were not educated in the Western tradition.¹³ This civilizing mission expressed itself in the creation of a curriculum that would train the Jewish youth of North Africa and the Middle East in modern languages, French taking a chief place, and in secular disciplines such as mathematics, (European) history, and science. These schools also taught Hebrew and some Jewish subjects.¹⁴ However, the status of these latter subjects was lower than that of the secular curriculum. They were taught by local teachers who were not trained by the Alliance and who were very poorly paid, and the number of hours devoted to these subjects was small in comparison to the hours devoted to the others. Much tension often arose between the Alliance teachers and the local community over how, what, and by whom these subjects should be taught.¹⁵

The history of these Alliance schools reveals what nineteenth-and twentieth-century Western Jews (the Alliance had members outside the French community, as the word universelle in its title indicates) perceived to be the relation between European culture and the Jewish heritage. It seems clear that the Alliance took it for granted that there was a coincidence of ideals between the two traditions. As a result, anything in the Jewish sources or way of life encountered in the communities of North Africa or the Middle East that pointed in a direction other than that of modern French culture was not deemed worth transmitting.¹⁶

Levinas’s membership in this organization soon after his arrival in France would seem to imply that he too saw the relation of Jewish and Western traditions as primarily one of a coincidence of ideals. But if this were so, events of the 1930s punctured this assurance. With the advent of fascism and all it brought in its train, Levinas, in a number of essays written for, among others, the journal of the Alliance, began to reflect upon the necessity of discovering the specificity of Judaism.¹⁷ If we are being forced to admit our difference, what does this difference really amount to? In one of these essays he wrote:

Modern Jewish consciousness has become troubled. It does not doubt its destiny but cannot calmly be witness to the outrages overwhelming it. It has an almost instinctive nostalgia for the first, limpid sources of its inspiration. It must once again draw its courage from it and again rediscover in it the certitude of its worth, its dignity, its mission.¹⁸

There is a groping in these essays for a return to one’s own inner resources, reminiscent of the talmudic injunction (which Levinas discusses in Damages Due to Fire) to withdraw into one’s home, rentrer chez soi, in a time of epidemic.

It was the failure of emancipation, then, the refusal of admittance to the City, that led Levinas back to a rethinking of the relation between the Jewish and the European, or Greek, traditions. But it would be altogether inaccurate to see in this rethinking, which was eventually to lead to a return,¹⁹ any sort of closing oneself off again into a purely Jewish world, even if that were possible. For Levinas, the rethinking of the relation of Jewish to Greek sources would have to include the vision of universality, of one humanity in which all related as equals and in which all participated responsibly, the ideals of the Alliance.²⁰ The difference now was that in order for this one humanity to come into being, Western sources of spirituality, Western wisdom, would no longer suffice. In order for a genuine human community to emerge, it was Jewish wisdom, the Jewish vision of the human being, which must be understood and made available to everyone else. In one of his many essays on this subject, he insists

upon the remarkable role that devolves upon the actuality of Israel, in its very exception, as formation and expression of the universal; but of the universal insofar as it unites persons without reducing them to an abstraction in which the oneness of their uniqueness is sacrificed to the genus; of the universal in which oneness has already been approached in love.²¹

Levinas’s return to the specificity of Judaism, its difference, is thus not merely an attempt to retain some sort of identity in the homogeneity of modern life. It is not an ethnic loyalty. Rather, for him, the return of the Jews to Judaism is necessary for the weal of the world. Perhaps it is because of the immense obligation that Levinas sees devolving upon the Jewish tradition, in addition to the intellectual riches that he has revealed within it, that a commentator has said that he has succeeded in giving back to Judaism its lettre de noblesse, the stamp of nobility.²²

Levinas’s desire to rediscover and reformulate the specificity of Judaism, which is present in the essays of the 1930s, began to be fulfilled through his meeting with an extraordinary teacher, Mr. Chouchani, with whom he studied from 1947 to 1951. Chouchani is the master whom Levinas mentions frequently in the course of his talmudic commentaries. He was apparently very learned, both in Western knowledge and in the Talmud, which he knew by heart. Levinas’s studies with Chouchani were tremendously intense and provided a way of entering the text that left all parochialism far behind. The aura of mystery surrounding Chouchani is very pronounced in Elie Wiesel’s account of him (for Wiesel also studied with him, although neither Levinas nor he was aware of having the same teacher) and apparent even in Levinas’s descriptions.²³ Chouchani obviously did not fit into any categories, seems to have appeared and disappeared as he pleased, and commanded tremendous respect and affection. The hiddenness of Chouchani, the fact that, outside of a small circle, he remained completely unknown, the fact that his own history was not particularly clear to those who did know him, makes one think of the talmudic passage in which Moses retires to his tent; Levinas’s reaction to this passage is that sometimes Judaism remains alive only in one man and yet this suffices to ensure continuity. Perhaps it is not altogether without significance, then, that Chouchani died in 1968 during the publication of Quatre lectures talmudiques, the first collection of Levinas’s talmudic