Oscar Ludwig Levy was a German Jewish physician and writer, now known as a scholar of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose works he first saw translated systematically into English.
Background
Levy was born in Stargard in the Province of Pomerania, the son of Ernestina (née Lewy) and Moritz Levy and the brother of Max Levy (*1869, Berlin - 1932) and Emil Elias Levy. 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.
Education
He studied medicine in Freiburg, qualifying in 1891.
Career
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 South. Haussman, J.M. Kennedy, Anthony Ludovici, Maximilian A. Mugge, Maude Doctorate. 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 Arkansas 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.
His papers were in 2004 deposited in the Nietzsche-Haus in Sils Maria.