Oscar Ludwig Levy[1] (28[citation needed] March 1867 – 13 August 1946) was a German
Jewish physician and writer, now known as a scholar of
Friedrich Nietzsche, whose works he first saw translated systematically into
English. His was a paradoxical life, of self-exile and exile, and of writing on and (as often taken) against
Judaism. He was influenced by the
racialist theories of
Arthur de Gobineau. He also admired
Benjamin Disraeli, two of whose novels he translated into the
German language.
He apparently discovered, or was more thoroughly converted to, Nietzsche in 1905 or 1906 via a patient. The 18-volume Nietzsche translation he oversaw appeared from 1909 to 1913. His collaborators were Francis Bickley, Paul V. Cohn,
Thomas Common, William S. Haussman, J.M. Kennedy,
Anthony Ludovici, Maximilian A. Mugge,
Maude D. Petre, Horace B. Samuel,
Hermann Georg Scheffauer, G.T. Wrench and
Helen Zimmern. Ludovici became his most important follower. In general he found little British support, but
A.R. Orage was an enthusiast and Levy found an outlet in The New Age.
Subsequently, his life was complicated by having to leave the United Kingdom and his medical practice despite his support for the British side against the
Central Powers when
World War I broke out. He went back to the German Empire in 1915 and then to
Switzerland. Back in the United Kingdom in 1920, he incautiously wrote a preface for an inflammatory political pamphlet by
George Pitt-Rivers, The World Significance of the Russian Revolution. He was deported as an alien in 1921. He then lived in the
French Third Republic.
Eventually he returned to the
United Kingdom. He died in
Oxford. He was married to Frieda Brauer. His daughter Maud lived in Oxford, having married the bookseller Albi Rosenthal. His grandson is television sports presenter
Jim Rosenthal and his great-grandson is actor
Tom Rosenthal.
In 2004, his papers were deposited in the
Nietzsche-Haus in Sils Maria.
Works
Levy, Oscar (1904), Das neunzehnte Jahrhundert , translated into English by Leonard A. Magnus as The Revival of Aristocracy (Probsthain & Co., 1906)
Disraeli, Benjamin (1909), Contarini Fleming, ein psychologischer roman (in German), translated by Levy, Oscar, Berlin: Oesterheld
Levy, Oscar, ed. (1909–1913), The complete works of Friedrich Nietzsche. The first complete and authorized English translation, vol. 18 vols., Edinburgh and London:
T. N. Foulis
Stone, Dan (2002), "Oscar Levy: A Nietzschean Vision", In Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain, Liverpool University Press, pp. 12–32,
JSTORj.ctt5vjfgb
Stone, Dan (Apr 2001), "An 'Entirely Tactless Nietzschean Jew': Oscar Levy's Critique of Western Civilization", Journal of Contemporary History, 36 (2): 271–292,
doi:
10.1177/002200940103600203,
JSTOR261226,
S2CID153488904