AMADO LÉVY-VALENSI, ELIANE

AMADO LÉVY-VALENSI, ELIANE (1919– ), French Jewish philosopher. Amado Lévy-Valensi was born in Marseilles, to an old Jewish family of Italian origin. Her studies were interrupted by World War II but were resumed in Paris in 1950. She was appointed to the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and later became a lecturer at the Sorbonne. The subject of her doctoral thesis (1963) already indicated the direction of her interest, the Jewish reply to the problems of the West, and she became increasingly a kind of Jewish counterpart to Henri bergson , as profoundly Jewish as Bergson was de-Judaized. She evolved a practical and theoretical system wherein the Jewish and the general human points of view were indissolubly linked. A psychoanalyst who opposed the closed nature of psychoanalytical societies, she founded in 1965, together with Dr. Veil and Professor Sivadon, an interdisciplinary center for psychoanalysis. Ever sensitive to the concept of Jewish existence she was, with André Neher , the moving spirit behind the Colloque des Intellectuels Juifs de langue française, whose proceedings, important contributions to French Jewish thought on contemporary problems, she edited, together with Neher and Jean Halpérin (La conscience Juive, 5 vols., 1963–1973). Amado Lévy-Valensi immigrated to Israel in 1968 and was appointed professor of Jewish and universal philosophy at Bar-Ilan University. After settling in Israel she published, in addition to fundamental works, articles on topical problems about which she felt intensely, seeking to reveal the psychoanalytical and Jewish substrata which could help in the search for concrete solutions to the important political problems facing Israel, particularly the Israeli-Arab dialogue. Among her important works are Les niveaux de l'Etre, la connaissance et le mal (1963); La racine et la source (essais sur le Judaisme) (1968); Isaac gardien de son frere? (1969); Les voies et les pieges de la psychanalyse (1971); Le grand désarroi (1973); La onzième épreuve d'Abraham ou De la Fraternité (1981); Le Moïse de Freud ou la Référence occultée (1984); A la gauche du Seigneur ou l'illusion idéologique (1987); Job, réponse à Jung (1991); La poétique du Zohar (1996); and Penser ou et rêver: mécanismes et objectifs de la pensée en Occident et dans le judaïsme (1997). (Andre Neher / Dror Franck Sullaper (2nd ed.)