ABSTRACT
Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) was born in Kovno, Lithuania. His parents, devout Jews, were part of a distinguished Jewish community. In 1923 he moved to Strasbourg, where he studied philosophy. In 1928-1929 he studied under the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl in Freiburg. Soon after he discovered the work of Heidegger, whom he would later criticize for his complicity with Nazism. In 1939 he began serving as a translator of German and Russian in the French military but was captured a year later by the Nazis who, on account of his officer’s uniform, put him in a prisoner of war camp rather than a concentration camp. He described his life as dominated by the memory of Nazi horror. After the war, he studied Hebrew Scriptures and the Talmud in Paris with the famous Monsieur Chouchani (who was then also teaching the young Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, another Lithuanian). In addition to his philosophical works, he wrote a number of important essays on the Talmud.
