Levinas, Pio XI, and the «community of persecution» against National Socialist paganism [Levinas, Pío XI y la «comunidad de la persecución» contra el paganismo nacionalsocialista]

In «Quelques réflexions sur la philosophie de l’hitlérisme» (1934), facing the rise of Nazism to the power, Levinas exhorts the Western traditions, from Judaism to Marxism, to meditate on their sources, original intuitions and decisions, about the «spirit of freedom» which animates them, opposed to the awakening of «elemental feelings» by the «Hitlerism». A few years later, in his own articles Paix et Droit(1935-1939), the philosopher convokes a Judeo-Christian alliance against the national-socialist «paganism». This work aims to analyze Levinas’ call to a joint struggle between the «Church» and «Israel», in virtue of an alleged shared «vocation» or «reason of being», against the racist «neo-paganism», and the difficulties and ambiguities of the levinasian initiative