Throughout his career Levinas understood Western culture and society as a combination of two worlds, the Biblical and the Greek – what others have called Hebraism and Hellenism or Athens and Jerusalem. Levinas, of course, has his own special way of interpreting this trope, as we shall see, and his own way of envisioning it in order to estimate the value of Jews and Judaism for Western culture (and world culture). In part, it is a philosopher's perspective on that culture and the themes and tendencies that constitute it. At the same time, it is a Jew's perspective on what Jewish life means, both to Jews and to others. In this chapter, I want to look at this conglomeration of issues. We will cover a number of themes, for Levinas's relationship to Judaism is multifaceted.

Let us first step back and place this task within the context of Levinas's philosophy. Recall that for Levinas the face-to-face encounter or the self's infinite responsibility is a structural feature of all social existence; all human experience is grounded, that is, in the ethical. Every human relationship is an ethical relationship. But, as we have seen, this interpretation of Levinas's claim that ethics is primary to human experience implies that responsibility occurs alongside a myriad of human social and cultural relationships and is concurrent with all our everyday experiences.