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.

An upbringing at the margins of Jamaica’s Jewish world

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.