 In this respect, and despite his debt to Heidegger, Levinas stands closer here to the French existentialists and to Charles Taylor, whose conception of the corporeal self is moral “through and through” (Morgan 2007: 169). However, unlike Taylor, Levinas does not endorse a plurality of strong values, because the encounter with the other is the primary condition for him. While Taylor’s philosophy is influenced by Christianity, a significant debate has been ongoing for over a decade about Levinas’ philosophy and its relationship to Judaism. It has been suggested that Levinas’ critique of Heidegger’s ontology as a “philosophy of the Neuter” (TI: 298) relies on decisive attention paid to the influence of “Jerusalem” over that of “Athens” in the Western philosophical tradition. Scholars like Shmuel Trigano have traced a number of crucial Levinasian “philosophemes” to Jewish positions, notably as expressed by Philo and Maimonides (Trigano 2002: 145–178). On the other hand, commentators like Leora Batnitzky have argued that, when compared with the thought of Leo Strauss, for whom Jewish philosophy still holds a place for “revelation”, Levinas’ work largely rehabilitates the tradition of Modern philosophy—and with it a secular, almost political, project (Batnitzky 2006: 4). Despite this, and in light of Totality and Infinity, she comes close to Trigano when she argues that Levinas tends to ignore important political questions, including that of the Jewish State, which has dire consequences for his thought, because 