Oscar Levy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Oscar Levy (March 28, 1867 – August 13, 1946) was a German-Jewish physician and writer, now known as a scholar of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose works he first saw translated systematically into the English language. 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 racist theories of Arthur de Gobineau. He also admired Benjamin Disraeli, two of whose novels he translated into the German language.
Born in Stargard in the Province of Pomerania, he studied medicine in Freiburg, qualifying in 1891. He left the German Empire in 1894, where his father was a banker in Wiesbaden, and lived in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
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. This large effort has later been criticised as less than scholarly. 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, Herman 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 for the eccentric George Pitt-Rivers in an inflammatory political pamphlet, and ended up being deported as an alien in 1921, in a high-profile case, under immigration technicalities. He then lived in the French Third Republic.
Eventually he returned to the United Kingdom; his daughter Maud lived in Oxford, having married the bookseller Albi Rosenthal. His grandson is television sports presenter Jim Rosenthal.
His papers were in 2004 deposited in the Nietzsche-Haus in Sils Maria.
[edit] Works
- The Revival of Aristocracy (1906) translation by L. Magnus
- My Battle for Nietzsche in England
- Nietzsche verstehen. Essays aus dem Exil 1913-1937
- The Idiocy of Idealism (1940)
