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reading of Plato, at the same time as he encountered the dead ends of the “political conception of the world,” that led to the storm that he called his “turning.” And then there’s myself, if you allow me to say so, who came to a reading of the Jewish text at the end of an intellectual—I almost said conceptual—journey, whose major stops were philosophical ones …

So you understand, don’t you? When I talk about ruah, when I contrast the narrative of Genesis with that of De rerum natura, when I say that I’m more a follower of Jerusalem than of Athens, I’m not juxtaposing faith with reason, spiritualism with materialism, a “legendary” revelation with your “set of rebuttable assertions”—I’m merely juxtaposing one book with another, beyond all that, in that zone that’s very vague and yet decisive and in which, for each speaking being, the philosophical and life choices we make are located.

At the end of the day, there aren’t many “fundamental” books.

There are very few “universal” books in the sense intended by Borges when he spoke about books that contained other books, indeed encompassed the whole library.

There’s Homer.

There are the Old and New Testaments.

There’s Lucretius’s poem, and I feel that I’m honoring him by placing him in this company.

There are also, depending on each person’s inclination and language, the Divine Comedy, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, or the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas.

And I’m saying simply that for me, this is how it works. I know that there’s nothing better than the Iliad to see what war is really about, the extermination, the destruction of cities. I know that Greek thought, in particular that of the Epicureans, can be very useful in thinking about free will. I’m certain that there would be no human rights without the highly audacious Christian hypothesis of man as a creature in God’s likeness and therefore inviolable. But I also believe that in order to think about what makes me a human being and connects me with other humans, to understand what, to use your own words, distinguishes people from animals and is the reason why my compassion for a rabbit caught in a trap will never be of the same order as what I feel for the inhabitants of Sarajevo under siege, to provide a foundation for that idea of human dignity on which I’ve staked my belief and so needed the philosophical resources to defend and illustrate, I’ve found nothing to match the lesson of Rabbi Akiva and Emmanuel Levinas.

It is there, at a level that goes beyond (or is perhaps more basic than) the question of whether or not we’re living in the “truth.”

It is there, in that region of the soul where positivism (or what you call that) is bound to lose its footing.

And none of this has anything to do with either “disloyalty” or “metaphysics.” It’s axiomatic, truly axiomatic: these are the first principles of thought, indemonstrable, or, as in arithmetic, irreducible and from which, for each one of us, everything else proceeds.

*Competitive civil service examinations, which those aspiring to teach at the second or third level must pass.

*Joseph Haïm Sitruk, former chief rabbi of France.

*Marcellin Cazes, owner of Brasserie Lipp, a Parisian institution.

†French poet and writer.

‡French author awarded the Nobel Prize in 1937.

**Jean-François Champollion, French classical scholar and orientalist who deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphs.

*Emil Cioran, Romanian philosopher and essayist who became prominent in France. The comment referred to here is that “without Bach, God would be a second-rate figure.”

*Cross of Fire, French far-right league during the interwar period. It was dissolved with the rest of the leagues in the Popular Front period (1936–1938).

†Cercle de l’Union interallié, a social and dining club established in 1917.

*Vilna Gaon, otherwise known as the Rabbi Eliyaha of Vilna (1720–1797): a Talmudic scholar and Kabbalist.

†Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935), a Latvian-born rabbi, scholar, and Zionist who became chief rabbi of Jerusalem in 1919.

*German-Jewish theologian and philosopher