I am not a particularly Jewish thinker, said Emmanuel Levinas, I am just a thinker. This book argues against the idea, affirmed by Levinas himself, that Totality and Infinity and Otherwise Than Being separate philosophy from Judaism. By reading Levinass philosophical works through the prism of Judaic texts and ideas, Michael Fagenblat argues that what Levinas called ethics is as much a hermeneutical product wrought from the Judaic heritage as a series of phenomenological observations. Decoding the Levinass philosophy of Judaism within a Heideggerian and Pauline framework, Fagenblat uses biblical, rabbinic, and Maimonidean texts to provide sustained interpretations of the philosophers work. Ultimately he calls for a reconsideration of the relation between tradition and philosophy, and of the meaning of faith after the death of epistemology.
