(Vol. 63, #3, Chanukah 2008)
Dr. Schneir Levin, who passed away in Johannesburg on Yom Kippur at the age of 83, was a much beloved paediatrician who will be fondly remembered by several generations of parents whose children he tended with his expertise and trademark generosity. Less well known to the general public was the fact that he was also a redoubtable Judaic scholar, whose characteristically original, probing monographs on innumerable aspects on Jewish religion, literature, genealogy, folklore, history and language appeared in Jewish periodicals, newspapers and magazines throughout the world over more than four decades. He was a veteran contributor to Jewish Affairs for decades; his last contribution appeared in the Rosh Hashanah 2007 issue.
Schneir Levin was born in Posvel (Pasvalys), Lithuania, in 1925 and came to South Africa with his mother, Hana Rivel, brother Chaim and sister Esther in 1932; his father, Simcha, had preceded the family by three years. He grew up in the then heavily Jewish suburb of Bertrams, and qualified as a paediatrician at the University of the Witwatersrand. While he looked after several generations of children, many of them from the Jewish community, he himself never married. He was a stalwart member of the Berea shul until its eventual closure and, despite ill health in his final years, continued to write regularly for Jewish and other publications.
The origins of popular Jewish surnames, the ‘Jewish’ character of Superman, Biblical resonances in modern-day agricultural practices in the West Bank and exactly what was the Forbidden Fruit in the Genesis story were just a sample of the multiple byways into which Levin’s provocative, if sometimes eccentric, scholarship led him. Apart from Jewish Affairs, amongst the publications in which his work regularly appeared over the years were Jewish Affairs, Biblical Polemics, Midstream, Judaism and Jewish Bible Quarterly. For Biblical Polemics alone, he contributed more than a hundred articles.
All this was in addition to his frequent contributions to the Jewish press. Levin also found time to write on a range of scientific and medical topics, whether for serious publications as the SA Medical Journal or for more off-beat, tongue-in-cheek periodicals as the Journal of Irreproducible Results and Annals of Improbable Research.
