He never wrote books but he took notes in small notebooks: “Monsieur Chouchani”. Died in 1968, he was one of the greatest Jewish thinkers of the 20th century. Among his students: Elie Wiesel or Emmanuel Levinas. And precisely one of his former disciples bequeathed 70 of these notebooks to the National Library of Israel.
School notebooks with pages browned by time, filled with blue writing in the form of flies, often in Hebrew.
“It takes a lot of time and energy to get used to reading his handwriting.”explain David Lang and Yoel Finkelman, specialists in Jewish thought. “Not only is it not clear, but it is not written with complete sentences. It is so dense, it would surely take weeks of work to reveal the questions that Mr. Chouchani asks”.
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Mr. Chouchani’s notebooks are now available online, allowing everyone to delve into the mysteries of his thought.
Born in 1895 in Belarus in the Russian Empire, whose real name is Hillel Perelmann, Chouchani has lived in Ottoman Palestine, Morocco, the United States, Berlin, Strasbourg, Paris, Switzerland, Israel and Uruguay. .. He spoke about thirty languages. VSand hypermnesiac knew by heart the Torah, the Talmud, the religious commentaries and mastered philosophy, physics, astronomy, medicine, optics and electronics.
He was the teacher and tutor of hundreds of young people like Michel Goldberg, a French Jew of Polish origin, a child in hiding during the war who now lives between Paris and Tel Aviv: “He was always in frumpy clothes, unshaven. A fascinating character”. In 1947, Mr. Chouchani was recruited to prepare his older brother’s bar mitzvah: “He did extended multiplications completely in his head. But I must admit that as far as I am concerned, his attitude has been absolutely deplorable.”
A biography has just come out, “Fascinating Chouchani” published by Hermann, signed Sandrine Szwarc, doctor of history and researcher at the Elie Wiesel Institute.