Ethics for Scapegoats - The Problem with Levinas’s Universalization of Judaism

Bibliographic Data

ID8133640
AuthorsDaniela Tolchinsky (0009-0006-6042-9257, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, corresponding author)
Year2026
Pages1-22
Publication date2026-02-10
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePolitical Theology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1462-317X • E-ISSN: 1743-1719
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/1462317x.2026.2627743
OpenAlexW7128494645
LanguageEN
References cited17

This article treats the thought of Emmanuel Levinas as an intervention into a Jewish-Christian theological framework. It begins by reading Levinas’s secular ethics as theorizing a distinction between what I call “self-other” relations characteristic of a violent totality, and “I-Other” relations through which one takes ethical responsibility for another. The paper then maps this distinction onto a Christian-Jewish difference that, I argue, Paul and the rabbis structured as unbridgeable, and that prefigured the Jew as something of a Christian scapegoat. Levinas’s intervention is to universalize the Jewish figure’s responsibility, and he conceives of this universalization as a solution to totalized violence and to Jewish scapegoating. Levinas’s gesture thereby bridges the Christian-Jewish difference, but it simultaneously infinitizes the exceptional value of the Judaic. The paper argues this ultimately has the effect of creating a Jewish exceptionalism more extreme than even the rabbis (or Paul) intended.

Criticism · Judaism · Moral imperative · Universalization · Hermeneutics and Narrative Identity · Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism

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