The discovery of a Jewish Negro League star forces a rewrite of Jewish baseball history

For more than a century, Oscar Levis was hiding in plain sight.

He pitched a no-hitter and dominated the Cuban Winter League. He tallied five straight seasons without losing a game against one of the Northeast’s toughest white semiprofessional clubs. He was so dominant that W. Rollo Wilson, the preeminent Black sportswriter of his era, held him up as a benchmark of pitching excellence – the kind of player a younger star would aspire to equal.

For all of that, Oscar Levis does not appear on any official roster of Jewish major leaguers.

The reason is straightforward and ugly: the Negro Leagues – the professional leagues Black players built and played in after being barred from the White major leagues – were not recognized as major leagues until 2020. For decades, that exclusion meant that players like Levis were not considered major leaguers at all.

And there was another reason: Levis was Black, and the prevailing assumption was that Blackness and Jewishness were identities that seldom, if ever, overlapped.

But months of archival research, family testimony, and genealogical detective work have now established what Levis’ contemporaries occasionally hinted at but never fully acknowledged: Oscar Levis was Jewish. The son of a Jewish father from Jamaica whose family roots stretched through the Caribbean back to Portugal, Levis carried a Jewish identity that his world did not know how to fully accommodate – and that baseball history, until now, did not know how to find.

A clue left in the digital margins

In 2018, Gary Ashwill, the foremost authority on Negro League statistics and co-creator of the comprehensive database Seamheads, published an article identifying Oscar Levis as Jamaican by birth – a fact that had itself been hidden for decades, since Levis routinely identified himself as Panamanian, the country where he grew up and learned to pitch. Ashwill noted that Levis’ father was a man named Amos DaCosta Levy, but that beyond the name, he had been unable to learn much more about him.

What happened next was the digital equivalent of a message in a bottle. Readers who recognized the Levy name began leaving comments on Ashwill’s webpage. One, who identified himself as Amos Levy’s great-great-nephew, wrote that Amos was Jewish. Another commenter was more specific. “I’ve never heard of [Oscar],” she wrote, “but just wanted to say that Amos DaCosta Levy is one of my ancestors. He was not a black man, he was a white, yes Jewish, man.”

Those comments caught my attention. My previous foray into Jewish baseball history had already produced one meaningful discovery – the posthumous identification of one-game major leaguer Monte Pfeiffer as Jewish. But where Pfeiffer had played a single game, Levis had played and been a star for more than a decade. 

The blog comments served as a starting point, not a conclusion. Tracking down their claims took months. I reviewed digitized editions of The Gleaner, Jamaica’s newspaper of record, which confirmed DaCosta Levy’s public prominence – his election to the Legislative Council, his Masonic leadership, his business dealings. Jamaican civil and ecclesiastical records, accessible through genealogical archives, corroborated the synagogue marriage record for DaCosta Levy’s parents. I contacted historians specializing in Caribbean Jewish history, including Stanley Mirvis, whose scholarship on Jamaican Jewry provided crucial context for understanding how Jewish identity operated in that world. 

I communicated directly with DaCosta Levy’s descendants, who were able to confirm, from within their own family history, what the blog commenters had suggested. And I called Shaare Shalom Synagogue in Kingston – the historic heart of Jamaica’s Sephardic Jewish community – where staff were able to confirm the existence of records connecting the Levy family to the congregation. The picture that emerged from these independent sources was consistent: DaCosta Levy was a member of Jamaica’s Jewish community, and Levis was his son.

When the evidence pointing to Levis’ Jewish identity began to solidify, I reached out to Rebecca Alpert, a professor of religion at Temple University who had spent years thinking about exactly this kind of story.

Her 2011 book, “Out of Left Field: Jews and Black Baseball,” examined the largely overlooked history of Jewish involvement in the Negro Leagues – and her expertise at the intersection of religion and sports made her the ideal partner for a discovery that sat squarely in both. Together, we reviewed the historical record, stress-tested the evidence and considered what Levis’ story means for our understanding of Jews in baseball – a conversation that only deepened my confidence in what the research had found.

DaCosta Levy was born in 1848 in Port St. Mary, Jamaica, to parents whose marriage is recorded in synagogue records. According to family history, DaCosta Levy’s family lineage traced to Portugal, where his ancestors had been mariners – almost certainly Sephardic Jews who scattered across the Atlantic world after the Inquisition. By the late 19th century, DaCosta Levy had built a prosperous mercantile firm, Levy Brothers & Company, that imported goods from the United States and England. He was elected to Jamaica’s Legislative Council for St. Mary’s Parish. He was also a Worshipful Master of the Caledonian Masonic Lodge, helped found Jamaica’s Masonic Benevolence Association, and served as a justice of the peace. A 1919 article in the Kingston Daily Gleaner, written when DaCosta Levy was living in Panama, called him “the oldest foreign Mason on the Isthmus” and praised him for “faithful services.” 

Levis’ mother, Theodosia Foreman, was a Black Jamaican woman who worked as a dressmaker. The union between DaCosta Levy and Foreman was not uncommon in the Caribbean Jewish world of the era. Mirvis has explained that relationships between Jewish men and women of color were relatively widespread in Jamaica and throughout the Caribbean, shaped by the power dynamics of the plantation economy. The children of such relationships occupied a complicated place – neither fully inside nor fully outside the Jewish community, a status scholars have described as “peripheral inclusion.” Contemporary observers, including one 20th-century American rabbi, noted that many Black Jamaicans bore Jewish surnames and took pride in their heritage. Levis was among them.

That identity, however, needs to be understood on its own historical terms – rooted in the Caribbean Sephardic world Levis was born into, not the standards prevalent elsewhere. Mirvis has explained that Jamaica’s Jewish community in this period was composed almost entirely of former Portuguese conversos and their descendants, a population that had never developed the same rigidity around matrilineal descent that characterizes Orthodox practice. Within this particular Sephardic tradition, patrilineal descent carried more communal weight than it did elsewhere – a distinction that shaped how men like Oscar were understood by those around them. In the Caribbean context specifically – where relationships between Jewish men and women of color were common, and children of those unions were frequently integrated into Jewish social and economic life, however conditionally – the boundaries of who belonged were porous in ways that defy easy categorization.

Levis appears to have understood himself within this tradition. His family has confirmed that he was proud of his Jewish heritage and aware of it throughout his life, though he rarely foregrounded it publicly – a pattern consistent with Black Jews of the period, who frequently navigated skepticism from both White Jewish communities and the broader Black community.  Jewish Baseball News – an independent organization that maintains the definitive roster of Jewish players in professional baseball – applies a deliberately inclusive standard. “We define the term ‘Jewish’ broadly,” the organization states. “If a player has at least one Jewish parent … does not practice another faith, and is content to be identified as a Jew, we include him.” Levis had a Jewish father, was publicly identified as Jewish by contemporaries, and his family confirms he was proud of that heritage throughout his life.

By the time Levis was a young man, his family had relocated to Panama, drawn by the economic opportunities opening up around the canal. It was a decision that shaped him as much as his father’s bloodline.

The US-controlled Panama Canal Zone was a masterclass in racial hierarchy. White American workers received higher wages, better housing, and superior facilities on what the system called the “gold roll.” Black workers – among them the tens of thousands drawn from Jamaica and Barbados to perform the most grueling excavation labor – were paid lower wages, housed in substandard quarters, and segregated at pay windows, hospitals, and schools. Levis, known locally as “Chick Levy,” would have understood the color line intimately before he ever set foot in the United States.

Despite those conditions, it was in Panama that he became a baseball star. He emerged as the premier pitcher on the isthmus, a “popular figure in the baseball world” celebrated for his dominance of the local clubs. Even after his American career took off, Levis returned in 1923 to pitch for a combined Panama–West Indian All-Star team before massive crowds at Balboa Stadium. Two years later, the Panamanian government awarded him a medal for his baseball achievements, and in the 1930s, he was offered – but declined – the opportunity to coach Panama’s national team for the Central American Olympics.

Levis arrived in New York in 1918. By 1921, Alex Pompez – the Cuban-American entrepreneur who owned the Cuban Stars and would eventually be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame – had recruited him to join the team. Levis became one of the first non-Cuban international players in the Negro leagues, and one of their most effective pitchers.

What followed was a career of genuine distinction. Levis pitched in the Negro leagues for the Cuban Stars (East) and the Hilldale Daisies across more than a decade, supplementing the short Negro League season with year-round appearances in exhibition games, barnstorming tours and the Cuban Winter League, where he pitched for the Almendares, the Habana Reds and the Marianao Grey Monks. On Oct. 11, 1924, he threw the first no-hitter in Cuban baseball history. He was voted to the All-Eastern Team in 1925 and led the Eastern Colored League in shutouts in 1927. He went five straight seasons without losing a game to a rival club which fielded white  players, the Brooklyn Bushwicks. Cuban sports editor Jose Massaguer calculated that Levis pitched in more than 500 games across his career, and Cuban pitching records attributed to him reportedly stood for decades beyond his retirement.

None of that success saved him from the color line that excluded Black players from what was known at the time as Major League Baseball. Ashwill, the statistician, has assessed Levis as a very good pitcher whose talent was more than sufficient for the white majors – a verdict echoed by sportswriter Rollo Wilson, who in 1929 called Levis one of the sharpest and most effective right-handers in the game.

In 2020, Major League Baseball officially recognized the Negro Leagues as major leagues, and in 2024 incorporated their statistics into its historical record. By that accounting, Levis pitched in 102 major league games and accumulated a career WAR (wins above replacement) of 12.9, which ranks eighth all-time among Jewish pitchers: Sandy Koufax (48.9), Max Fried (32.3), Ken Holtzman (27.3), Dave Roberts (23.6), Barney Pelty (19.2), Steve Stone (17.1) and Erskine Mayer (13.5).

Based on his officially recognized statistics alone, Levis had the most successful professional career of any Jewish player in the 1920s.

What makes Levis’ story even more compelling is that his Jewish identity was not entirely hidden – it surfaced in scattered notices buried in the newspaper record.

In 1926, after Max Rosner – the Jewish immigrant who owned the rival white semi-pro team the Brooklyn Bushwicks – signed Levis’ naturalization papers, a Brooklyn newspaper ran the headline: “Oscal, Cuban Pitcher, Is a Spanish Jew.” The following year, a New York sportswriter named Aloysious Palma made the point plainly. John McGraw, manager of the (baseball) Giants, had recently signed a Jewish infielder named Andy Cohen specifically to attract Jewish fans to the Polo Grounds. Palma wrote that Levis had the talent and ability to pitch for the New York Giants – that he should have been McGraw’s Jewish star. He was the right religion. He had the right arm. He was the wrong color.

A third article, published during his managerial tenure in the 1930s, again noted his Sephardic Jewish heritage. “Oscal Levis, pitcher and manager,” the Brooklyn Times Union reported, was “of Spanish-Jewish extraction.”

Taken together, the three articles form a quiet paper trail – Levis’ Jewish identity was occasionally noted, but never coherently recognized or integrated into the broader baseball record.

He was neither the mainstream white Jewish player typically celebrated in the New York press, nor the Black player whose Jewish identity was fully acknowledged and chronicled in the Black press. He belonged to both worlds, an identity for which mainstream America had no framework.

When Levis’ playing and managing days ended, he built a second life in Harlem, New York. He and his wife, Lovana, operated Chick’s Bar and Grill on Seventh Avenue – a short walk from the Apollo Theater – for 35 years, making it a mainstay of the neighborhood. He served as chairman of the Harlem Riverside Tavern Owners Association, raising money for hospitals, the YMCA, the Police Athletic League and the Boy Scouts. He organized interracial boxing events at the Golden Gate Arena to keep youth out of trouble. And he was a 33rd-degree Prince Hall Freemason – the highest rank of the Scottish Rite – following directly in the tradition of his father, who had served as Worshipful Master of a Masonic lodge in Jamaica.

But even in retirement, Levis never left the game of baseball. Friends recalled that he loved to “stick his finger in the baseball pie whenever he got a chance.” He returned to Cuba just to sit in the stands “day and night.”

He was also, in his own quiet way, a witness to the great transformation of the sport he had played under the cruelest constraints. As chairman of the Jackie Robinson Day Committee, Levis helped organize the celebration and personally presented the ceiling-shattering Black major leaguer with gifts from fans across the country. New York Amsterdam News reporter George Palmer captured what the day meant to him:

“He claims that one of his biggest thrills was Jackie Robinson Day – when he had the chance to see how the public took to Jackie. He, as a former ball player, knew the hardships and obstacles which Jackie had to overcome to reach the top. To him, Jackie Robinson’s Day was what every colored ball player dreams about – so much so that it was like a dream come true.”

In 1943, Rollo Wilson wrote a column pushing back against the habit of comparing Black ballplayers to white stars. The “Black Babe Ruth” formulation, he argued, was both lazy and diminishing – to the player being praised and to the tradition being ignored. Black baseball had produced its own immortals, and Wilson listed Oscar Levis among them. To be considered their equal, Wilson wrote, was a standard worth chasing for any young baseball star.

Just as Wilson named Levis among the immortals of Black baseball, this research names him among the greats of Jewish baseball. His inclusion changes the historical record – and adds a dimension to the story of Jewish contributions to the game that has long been hiding in plain sight.

He was one of the finest pitchers of his era. He was Black and he was Jewish. And for a century, baseball didn’t have the categories to say so.

It does now.