The discovery of a Jewish Negro League star forces a rewrite of Jewish baseball history
As the World Series kicks off, the revelation of Oscar
Levis’ heritage changes what we thought we knew about Jews in baseball.
Oscar
Levis, known early in his career as “Chick Levy,” and later as “Oscal,” was
celebrated as the premier pitcher in Panama before joining the Cuban Stars and
Hilldale Daisies in the Negro Leagues. (Courtesy of Zachary Kranc)
By Zachary Kranc
October 23, 2026 6:00 am
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.
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.
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.
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.
Growing up on the color line
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 U.S.-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.
Oscar Levis — known in Panama as “Chick Levy”
— returned to pitch for a combined Panama-West Indian All-Star Team. A sidearm
hurler with a devastating spitball, he was described as “unhittable” and “a
terror to all bat carriers who faced him.” (Courtesy Zachary Kranc)
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.
The Cuban stars and a career in the shadows
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
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.
Hidden in plain sight
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.
Figure 1 A 1926
newspaper excerpt identifying Levis as a “Spanish Jew.”
His
Jewish identity was occasionally acknowledged in the press but never became a
sustained part of his public story, as it might have if he had played in the
white major leagues. (Courtesy Zachary Kranc)
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.
New York sportswriter Aloysious Palma named
Oscal Levis “one of the greatest Hebrew players” in 1927 (Courtesy Zachary
Kranc)
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.
Oscar Levis in his managerial years, leading a
revived Cuban Stars squad from 1933 to 1937. Because he was fluent in both
English and Spanish, he served as a cultural bridge between his Latin American
players and the English-speaking world around them. (Courtesy of Zachary Kranc)
Harlem, and the life after
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.”
A name that belongs on the list
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.
