Levinas was born on 12 January 1906, into a middle-class Litvak family in Kaunas, in present-day Lithuania, then Kovno district, at the Western edge of the Russian Empire.
Because of the disruptions of World War I, the family moved to Kharkiv in Ukraine in 1916, where they stayed during the Russian revolutions of February and October 1917.
[6] Upon his family's return to the Republic of Lithuania, Levinas spent two years at a Jewish gymnasium before departing for France, where he commenced his university education.
In 1929, he was awarded his doctorate (Doctorat d'université degree) by the University of Strasbourg for his thesis on the meaning of intuition in the philosophy of Husserl, published in 1930.
Levinas was assigned to a special barrack for Jewish prisoners, who were forbidden any form of religious worship.
Meanwhile, Maurice Blanchot helped Levinas's wife and daughter spend the war in a monastery, thus sparing them from the Holocaust.
Other members of Levinas's family were not so fortunate; his mother-in-law was deported and never heard from again, while his father and brothers were killed by the SS in Lithuania.
[10] After the Second World War, he studied the Talmud under the enigmatic Monsieur Chouchani, whose influence he acknowledged only late in his life.
[12] He participated in 1957 at the International Meeting at the monastery of Toumliline, a conference focused on contemporary challenges and interfaith dialogue.
Levinas explicitly framed several of his mature philosophical works as attempts to respond to Heidegger's philosophy in light of its ethical failings.
In the 1950s, Levinas emerged from the circle of intellectuals surrounding the philosopher Jean Wahl as a leading French thinker.
For Levinas, the irreducible relation, the epiphany, of the face-to-face, the encounter with another, is a privileged phenomenon in which the other person's proximity and distance are both strongly felt.
[22] The very metaphysics of signification subtending theological language is suspected and suspended by evocations of how traces work differently than signs.
He had a major influence on the younger, but more well-known Jacques Derrida, whose seminal Writing and Difference contains an essay, "Violence and Metaphysics", that was instrumental in expanding interest in Levinas in France and abroad.
"[26] His works have been a source of controversy since the 1950s, when Simone de Beauvoir criticized his account of the subject as being necessarily masculine, as defined against a feminine other.
[27] While other feminist philosophers like Tina Chanter and the artist-thinker Bracha L. Ettinger[28][29] have defended him against this charge, increasing interest in his work in the 2000s brought a reevaluation of the possible misogyny of his account of the feminine, as well as a critical engagement with his French nationalism in the context of colonialism.
[31] For three decades, Levinas gave short talks on Rashi, a medieval French rabbi, every Shabbat morning at the Jewish high school in Paris where he was the principal.