Born in Kaunas (Lithuania) in 1906, from early childhood reads the Hebrew Bible, Pushkin and Tolstoy. Live the Russian Revolution of 1917 in Ukraine. In 1923 he moved to France, studying at the University of Strasbourg and befriends Maurice Blanchot. In 1928-1929, stay in Freiburg, where he learns to discover the existence of the hand of Husserl and Heidegger. The result of this learning will, among other texts, his theory of intuition in Husserl's phenomenology (1930). Shaken by the political commitment of Heidegger, seeking a new way to "get out of being." After the years of captivity during the war, taught from 1947 (coinciding with the publication of Time and the other and from the existence to existing) conference at the College Philosophique, founded and run by Jean Wahl. Directs the Ecole Normale Israelite East, "in daily fellowship with Dr. Nerson" and in connection with Mr. Shushaní 'prestigious -e implacable master of exegesis and Talmud. "From 1957 lectures on Talmudic texts. After the thesis state (Totality and Infinity, 1961), teaches at the University of Poitiers; since 1968, at the University of Nanterre and Paris, since 1973, at Paris-Sorbonne. The next year he published Otherwise than being, or beyond essence. Retired in 1976 from his teaching duties, continues its activities with articles, seminars and conferences, then collected, among many other books, on Maurice Blanchot (Trotta, 2000), Of God who comes to the idea, Ethics and Infinity, Out of subject, etc. Also meet his Talmudic readings and essays on Judaism (From the sacred to the saint, Afterlife of verse, among others). It is from the eighties when his work is achieved recognition and object of study and interpretation. In his biography will tell you "is dominated by the presentiment and the memory of the Nazi horror." He died in 1995.