 The relationship between Levinas’ thought, its Jewish influences, and phenomenological philosophy has given rise to multiple evaluations. Martin Kavka argues that “Levinas understood both Judaism and Western philosophy as engaging in structurally similar forms of thinking” (Kavka 2010: 20–21). He situates the structural similarity in that “both [these intellectual corpuses] consist of texts that point to what cannot be brought to presence” and consequently work on, or between, the dimensions of reference, explanation, and hermeneutic pre-comprehension (cf. Ouaknin 1993: 225 [1995:  155–156]).[37]  Yet Kavka adds that Levinas’ relationship to the Jewish canon is also “inherently muddy”, though it is also clear that there is more than one canon, more than a single interpretation thereof. Indeed, both Michael Fagenblat and Kavka agree that “it is not clear … that … a ‘new direction’ in Jewish philosophy is [ever] really new” (Kavka 2010: 21). Moreover, Fagenblat has argued that Levinas’ ethics prolongs, in a phenomenological-hermeneutic register, “the dispersal of [modern approaches to the] Judeo-Christian God in social life” (Fagenblat 2010: 196).[38]  He also examines the hermeneutic extension that Otherwise than Being gives to Totality and Infinity. Both commentators suggest that Levinas’ increasingly critical stance toward the epistemological and foundationalist aspects of Husserlian phenomenology motivated him to extend his hermeneutic recourse beyond Heidegger’s Existenzphilosophie toward Jewish thought, including Neo-Platonic currents and Maimonides (Fagenblat 2010: 97–110).[39] , [40]  But it can also be argued that Levinas’ hermeneutics begins well before Otherwise than Being. His reinterpretation of being-in-the-world, the meaning of facticity, the creation of a dwelling, and even his reading of eros and the family in 1961 entail interpretive choices, indebted to at least two significant hermeneutic themes: Heidegger’s interpretation of our pre-comprehension of existence and Franz Rosenzweig’s approach to Jewish life in The Star of Redemption (Rosenzweig 1921 [2005]).