The texts presented here have been translated into Hebrew for the first time by Rama Ayalon, and belong to a decisive period in Emmanuel Levinas’s intellectual formation. They include the essay “Some Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” published in 1934 in Esprit—the journal of avant-garde progressive Catholicism—as well as a series of articles published between 1935 and 1939 in Paix et Droit (“Peace and Law”), the journal of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. Taken together, these writings constitute one of the earliest and most penetrating philosophical engagements with fascism, antisemitism, and Nazi neo-paganism. Levinas approaches these phenomena not merely as political dangers or sociological facts, but as threats to what he calls the very humanity of the human being.
A single guiding concern runs through all of Levinas’s pre-war writings: the defense of freedom. The human task, as he repeatedly formulates it, is to escape the chains that bind one to mere existence—chains that historical catastrophe reactivates in the form of brutality, heaviness, and oppression. Hitlerist racism, in particular, is analyzed as a merciless mechanism that shackles the human being to the body, transforming corporeality into destiny and denying the possibility of transcendence. At the same time, Levinas seeks to restore affirmation within Judaism itself, which unprecedented antisemitism has turned, for Jews, into a lived experience of curse and fatality. Freedom thus appears not as an abstract political value but as an existential and spiritual necessity.
This diagnosis raises a troubling question: can one still philosophize—maintain a serene or neutral stance—when one’s very existence is under threat? Can philosophy continue unperturbed in the face of a danger that menaces not only Western civilization but the very meaning of the human? In Levinas’s stark formulation, there are moments when philosophy is inappropriate. Yet Levinas does not renounce philosophy. On the contrary, his aim is to disclose the meaning of the events unfolding before him. At the risk of scandal, he speaks of a philosophy of Hitlerism and even of a metaphysics of antisemitism. Hitlerism, he insists, is not an irrational eruption. The basic emotions it mobilizes conceal a coherent worldview—a new conception of the human being, of society, and of truth. Likewise, antisemitism cannot be reduced to a sociological or political phenomenon; it possesses a spiritual essence.
In “Some Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” Levinas exposes the radical novelty of Hitlerism and the opposition it establishes with European civilization. The humanistic ideal of freedom stands at the center of his defense of that civilization. The racial principle through which Hitlerism defines humanity is not a peripheral error but the core of its philosophical rupture with Europe. From this perspective, the classical duality of body and soul acquires renewed significance. To grant primacy to the spirit is to affirm its capacity to shake off determinism and to make freedom the principle of human creativity—from the founding of society to the pursuit of truth. By contrast, to make the body the foundation of identity is to condemn the human being to a form of imprisonment.
It is therefore no accident that Levinas assigns a central role in the struggle for freedom to Judaism. Against a long tradition that marginalizes Judaism within European thought, Levinas insists that it is an integral component of European civilization and an inexhaustible source of its humanistic impulse. He illustrates this through the Jewish concept of teshuvah (repentance). Regret and atonement are not merely moral sentiments but moments in the liberation of the soul. Repentance, understood as a return to oneself and to one’s past, opens the possibility of beginning anew and affirms the autonomy of reason with respect to physical matter and historical fate. Whereas the sick person longs to be freed from bondage to the body, Hitlerism elevates precisely this bondage into the source of all value.
The radical innovation of Hitlerism thus lies in its constricting the human being to the body, defined by fictitious racial traits. The glorification of biological life and racial vitality becomes the basic principle of its conception of humanity. On this basis there emerges a society founded on blood ties and a conception of truth, defined not as the communication of meaning but as the expansion of power. War, conquest, and the annihilation of the human are not aberrations but the logical continuation of this philosophy.
Paganism and “Anti-Paganism”
The struggle against Hitlerism continues in Levinas’s articles from 1935 to 1939, whose rhythm mirrors the escalation of events from the Nuremberg Laws to the eve of the Second World War. For Levinas, the measure of a philosophy’s greatness lies in its relevance—its capacity to address the present. When confronting a great thinker, one must ask what he is for us. For example, in this sense, The Guide of the Perplexed remains profoundly actual, fulfilling the task Maimonides assigned to it: to dispel the confusion of Jewish consciousness. Levinas identifies the racism inherent in Hitlerist antisemitism as the deep source of the bewilderment experienced by a consciousness confronted with the verdict of being Jewish.
Faced with a doctrine that transforms Jewishness into fate or imprisonment, Judaism must be endowed with positive content. This requires spiritual renewal, grounded in renewed commitment to study and Jewish life—an impulse that shaped Jewish youth in the 1930s. The return to Jewish sources enables the wounded Jewish soul to recover certainty regarding its value, dignity, and mission.
The fundamental opposition between paganism and the Judeo-Christian orientation does not concern the number of gods, but a mode of relation to the world. Paganism is characterized by attachment, rootedness, and stability; Judaism by concern, unease, and insecurity. Against the Nazi ideal of truth as the expansion of power, Levinas understands paganism as a form of impotence. The pagan dwells intimately within the world yet remains imprisoned by it, populating it with gods and spirits that reinforce its solidity. By contrast, the Jewish relation to the world—marked by suspicion and distance—becomes a source of spiritual strength, enabling escape from the world’s self-enclosure.
This pagan orientation has ancient roots, already articulated by Aristotle and perpetuated throughout Western history, from the Church to a liberal society ultimately incapable of resisting its resurgence. Hitlerism thus marks, in one sense, a return to an outlook as old as the world itself. Yet its novelty lies in radical antisemitism: the elevation of hatred of Jews to the status of doctrine and even metaphysics. Because of its very vocation, Judaism embodies anti-paganism. It negates the world’s attempt to divinize itself and to sanctify nature as ultimate. Racial persecution thus appears as the direct outcome of a metaphysical hatred unique to Hitlerist antisemitism.
Conclusions
Must we ask ourselves whether liberalism is sufficient to grant authentic greatness to the human subject? This is the question Levinas formulated late in life. He never offered blind apologies for Western civilization. Already in 1934 he warned against the European temptation to retreat into private subjectivity, secure in its autonomy yet absolved of responsibility toward others. Yet Levinas does not abandon the European ideal of humanity. Liberalism fails when it guarantees freedom without responsibility, but it can still serve the human good insofar as the political, economic, and social structures of liberal democracy are placed at the service of justice—justice owed to third parties, and to all the others who are, each in turn, my others.
