Who was Leone Levi?

Leone Levi (1824-1876) was born in the Jewish ghetto in a provincial Italian market town and was educated in segregated schools. Despite these handicaps, Levi set his sights on a university education after the king restored the Jews' civil rights in 1848. He enrolled in the University of Turin in 1851 to study law. While practicing law, he read voraciously and became a remarkable polymath. In 1866 he launched a parallel career as an author and public intellectual, writing five books, publishing numerous essays and stories in the popular press, and giving public lectures on a wide range of topics. In short, he was one of the last people to know nearly everything about nearly everything.

In 2018, I discovered two of his books in an academic library in New York. Organized as 600 maxims and 40 explanatory essays, these books addressed diverse topics ranging across law, government, history, philosophy, economics, politics, classics, religion, art, literature, science, and technology. Finding most of his ideas as relevant today as they were in the 1870s, I felt compelled to bring them to an English-speaking audience.