Henri Nerson

Origins and early life

Henri Nerson was born at Strasbourg on 2 November 1902, into a French Orthodox Jewish family, son of Raphaël Nerson and Mina Bloch, and died in Jerusalem on 10 May 1980.

Work and career

He was a physician in Paris, a specialist in gynaecology and obstetrics, and served his community as a mohel, performing circumcisions — the two competences in one man, which is an old Jewish combination. In the war he worked with a mobile medical team based at Terrasson-Lavilledieu in the Dordogne, and afterwards he went to Bergen-Belsen, where among the survivors he opened a home for pregnant young women: women who had come out of the camps carrying children, in a place with no provision whatever for such a thing.

He studied for twenty years with Monsieur Chouchani, the vagabond Talmudic master whose real name nobody knew, and it was Nerson who introduced him to Emmanuel Levinas; Levinas became Chouchani's disciple, and the Talmudic readings that mark the whole of his later philosophy come from that teaching. A great deal of twentieth-century Jewish thought in French therefore passes through an introduction made by a Strasbourg gynaecologist.