“The very fact of coming into the world with a past harbors the promise” (Le nom de l’homme, by Benny Lévy)

Cairo               1945-1956
Brussels          1956-1963
Paris                1963-1984
Strasbourg      1984-1995
Jerusalem        1995-2003

Cairo, 1945-1956

Benny Lévy was born in Cairo, in 1945, the youngest of a family of four children, three boys and a girl.

His paternal grandfather, Mayer Lévy, was a sales representative who traveled from village to village, plying all kinds of samples. It was a modest but satisfactory business. His son Joseph, Benny’s father, broadened the field of action to the larger world, by entering the import-export trade. After a few successful ventures and many more failures, the entire family, with three-year old Benny, went to live with the maternal grandparents, where Jewish life was self-evident, “without having to make any special decisions on its behalf” (Lévinas).

At the outbreak of the 1948 war with Israel, life became very difficult for the Jews of Egypt. It was a period of suspicion, with numerous arrests of Jews for involvement in Communism or Zionism.  Following the Suez war in 1956, the Jewish population left Egypt en masse and were forced to abandon all their possessions. The Lévy family was also obliged to give up their Egyptian nationality. On arrival in Europe, they were given the status of UN refugees, and settled in Brussels.

Brussels, 1956-1963

As a counter-reaction to the strangeness of the city and his family’s precarious situation, Benny Lévy established a network of solid friendships at the Lycée Francais of Brussels. He authored and staged a play: he was awarded the prize for eloquence in a competition between all the French-speaking schools of Belgium : and already an avid reader of Jean-Paul Sartre, he defended – before a mezmerized audience – the politics of the FLN (Algerian National Liberation Front). But he could not benefit from the prize he had won (a trip to Morocco), as he was refused an entry visa.

On the advice of his philosophy teacher, Lévy decided to besiege the temple of French culture: the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris’s rue Ulm.       

Paris, 1963-1984

Lévy was admitted to the preparatory class (Hypokhâgne) at the Lycée Louis le Grand. He and his brother Tony lodged in a Jewish students’ residence financed by Rothschild. During this period, Lévy  divided his time between classes, political meetings, scuffles with “fascists” together with Pierre Goldman (a Communist revolutionary), and libraries – it was in the Sorbonne library where, in 1964, he met Léo (Léopoldine Aronowicz), his future wife.

Lévy passed, at his first attempt, the ENS-Ulm entrance examination, in the foreigners’ category – 22 B. As a result, he was entitled him to lodge at the school but was not accorded a grant. At this time, Louis Althusser and Jacques Derrida were in charge of the students’ work. Incensed at never receiving a paper from Lévy, Derrida locked him up in the Resistors’ room until he completed a dissertation. Lévy had a different relationship with Althusser who, to advance his own internal struggle within the Communist Party, surrounded himself with young students who studied Marxist literature and published their reflections in the Cahiers Marxistes-Leninistes (Marxist-Leninist Journal). Lévy was assigned the task of indexing all thirty six volumes which comprised Lenin’s corpus. Other ENS students, such as Jean-Claude Milner and Jacques-Alain Miller, grouped themselves around Jacques Lacan and founded Cahiers pour l’analyse (Journal for Analysis).