Alexia Levy-Chekroun

Alexia Levy-Chekroun works as a Research Associate, under the supervision of Mr. Chiristian Wiese, for the LOEWE Center « Dynamics of Religion: Ambivalent Neighborhoods between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in Historical and Contemporary Constellations ».

Her doctoral project approaches physical hostility directed toward Jewish communities as the visible manifestation of a more insidious form of discrimination : which may be described, following Bernard Lazare, as “metaphysical antisemitism” (Lazare, 1894). This form of discrimination refers to the systematic epistemic disqualification of traditional (including the Tanakh, Talmud, and Kabbalah) and embodied forms of Jewish knowledge — within European academic, political, and social spaces. Such disqualification produces what Miranda Fricker terms “hermeneutical injustices” (Fricker, 2007) : processes through which subaltern communities are excluded from the production of meaning, discourse, and language (Lapidot, 2024), and consequently from participating in the shaping of public and political spaces.

The project investigates critiques of these mechanisms in the works of Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Martin Buber, and Gustav Landauer. More specifically, it examines how the epistemic rehabilitation of Jewish tradition may contribute to reconfiguring, or potentially challenging, the political epistemology that structures European social and politico-administrative life. Given its focus on the Jewish tradition’s “right to philosophy” (Derrida, 1990), the project seeks to pay attention to both Ashkenazi and Sephardic/Mizrahi critiques of secularization. Ultimately, the research seeks to explore alternative modes of interaction between non-Christian categories/conceptual frameworks, and European epistemo-political structures. In doing so, it aims to contribute to contemporary reflections on how the « global dialogue between philosophical traditions » (Dussel, 2009) might open the possibility to reduce both antisemitic and islamophobic forms of discrimination.