Brothers [q. v.], and his pretended Mission to recall the Jews.’ In 1796 Levi wrote ‘A Defence of the Old Testament in a Series of Letters addressed to Thomas Paine,’ whose ‘Age of Reason’ had attacked the Bible with much acuteness. These letters were first published in New York in 1797.
Meanwhile Levi executed some useful literary work for his co-religionists by publishing English translations of the Hebrew ritual. In 1789 appeared his edition of Genesis in Hebrew and English, arranged on opposite pages. Notes by Lion Soesmans, who printed the works, were appended. The other books of the Pentateuch followed. Between 1789 and 1793 he completed in six volumes an English rendering of the festival prayers used by the London congregation of Spanish and Portuguese Jews, and he did similar service for the German and Polish congregation. In 1794 he translated ‘The Hagadah, or Service for the first two nights of the Passover;’ and he rendered into English the prayers written for use in the synagogues on special occasions, like that of the king's illness in 1788 and his recovery in 1789, or of the dedication of the Great Synagogue in Duke's Place in 1790. He also wrote a Hebrew ode on the king's escape from assassination in 1795.
In 1793 Levi published vol. i. of his ‘Dissertations of the Prophecies of the Old Testament,’ which had already occupied him twenty-five years (Pref.) Vol. ii. appeared in 1796, vol. iii. in 1800. An edition (in two vols.) revised by J. King was issued in 1817.
Levi, who was always in pecuniary difficulties, was attacked by paralysis in November 1798, and died on 11 July 1799, at his house in Green Street, Mile End New Town. He was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Mile End. An elegy by Henry Lemoine [q. v.] appeared in the ‘Gentleman's Magazine.’
A portrait was painted by Drummond. An engraving by Burnley appeared in the ‘European Magazine’ for May 1799.
[Lysons's Environs of London, Supplement, pp. 430–1; Picciotto's Sketches of Anglo-Jewish History, pp. 228–9; European Magazine, May 1799, pp. 291–4; J. T. Rutt's Life and Correspondence of Joseph Priestley, i. 404, 409–10, ii. 21–3.]
LEVI, LEONE (1821–1888), jurist and statistician, was born of Jewish parents at Ancona on 6 June 1821. His father, Isaac Levi, belonged to the middle class, and Leone, after receiving the ordinary commercial education of the day in his native town, was placed at the age of fifteen in the office of his elder brother, who carried on the business of commission agent and merchant there. The business prospered, and Levi in 1844 was sent to England to extend it. He settled at Liverpool, was naturalised, mastered the English language, and established a connection, but was unfortunate in some speculations, and after the commercial crisis of 1847 came back to Ancona to find his brother ruined. He returned to England, and found employment as a clerk in a mercantile house at Liverpool. Some letters to the ‘Liverpool Albion’ newspaper in 1849, advocating the establishment in our chief commercial centres of general representative chambers of commerce and permanent tribunals of commerce, constituted of a legally trained judge, with mercantile assessors, brought him before the public, and formed the basis of two pamphlets, one on ‘Chambers and Tribunals of Commerce, and proposed General Chamber of Commerce in Liverpool,’ London, 1849, 8vo, the other ‘On the State of the Law of Arbitrament, and proposed Tribunal of Commerce,’ London, 1850, 8vo. One half of Levi's scheme was at once carried into effect by the establishment of general and representative chambers of commerce at Liverpool, Leeds, Bradford, Hull, and other important centres of industry. Of the Liverpool chamber Levi became the honorary secretary. Levi's suggestions for the reform of the law of arbitration, then in a very defective condition, bore fruit in the arbitration clauses of the Common Law Procedure Act of 1854, which have only recently been superseded by the Arbitration Act of 1889. Levi was not slow to avail himself of his position at the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce to obtain through official channels exact information about foreign chambers of commerce and the laws applying to commercial transactions in their respective countries. Materials thus accumulated on his hands for a synopsis of the commercial law of Christendom similar to Anthoine de Joseph's ‘Concordance des Codes de Commerce,’ but on a larger scale, and such as might serve as a step towards an international code of commerce. He secured with difficulty a sufficient number of subscribers; gained admission to the Advocates' Library, Edinburgh, where he worked from sixteen to eighteen hours a day; interested the prince consort in his design, and ventilated it in a letter addressed to chambers of commerce and in lectures which he delivered in London, Edinburgh, Dublin, and elsewhere in 1851 and 1852, and afterwards printed. The work itself appeared under the title ‘Commercial Law: its Principles and Administration; or the Mercantile Law of Great Britain compared with the Codes and Laws of Commerce of the following Mercantile
