Sylvain Lévi (March 28, 1863 – October 30, 1935) was an orientalist and indologist. Born in Paris on March 28, 1863, his book Théâtre Indien is an important work on the subject. Lévi also conducted some of the earliest analysis of Tokharian fragments discovered in Western China.
Sylvain Levi passed the agregation examination in 1883. He studied under Abel Bergaigne in 1883-1884 in the Sanskrit course at the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes. Appointed a lecturer at the school of higher studies in Paris (1886), he taught Sanskrit at the Sorbonne (1889–94) and wrote his doctoral dissertation, Le Théâtre indien (1890; “The Indian Theatre”), which became a standard treatise on the subject. After his appointment as professor at the Collège de France (1894–1935), he toured India and Japan (1897 and 1898) and published La Doctrine du sacrifice dans les Brâhmanas (1898; “The Doctrine of Sacrifice in the Brāhmaṇas”).
In 1888 he wrote an open letter to the Ligue pour la defense des droits de l'homme in support of captain Dreyfus. At this time he joined the central committee of the Alliance israelite universelle in Paris.
Another book resulting from his travels was Le Népal: Étude historique d’un royaume hindou, 3 vol. (1905–08; “Nepal: Historical Study of a Hindu Kingdom”).
Soon before the First World War, in 1913, he travelled to St Petersburg to study Tokharian manuscripts. After the war he took part in missions to Egypt, Syria and Palestine. At the Versailles peace conference in 1919 he represented the Alliance israelite universelle and sat on the commission for the affairs of Palestine.
Subsequent travels to East Asia (1921–23) generated his major work, Hôbôgirin. Dictionnaire du Bouddhisme d’après les sources chinoises et japonaises (1929; “Hōbōgirin. Dictionary of Buddhism Based on Chinese and Japanese Sources”), produced in collaboration with the Japanese Buddhist scholar Takakusu Junjirō. In L’Inde et le monde (1926; “India and the World”), he discussed India’s role among nations. In 1929 he was elected president of the Societe asiatique.
Lévi also worked with the French linguist Antoine Meillet on pioneer studies of the Tocharian languages spoken in Chinese Turkistan in the 1st millennium AD. He determined the dates of texts in Tocharian B and published Fragments de textes koutchéens (1933; “Fragments of Texts from Kucha”).
He was also an early opponent of the traditionalist author René Guénon, citing the latter's uncritical belief in a "Perennial philosophy", that is, a primal truth revealed directly to primitive humanity, based on an extreme reductionist view of Hinduism, which was the subject of Guénon's first book, L'Introduction générale a l'étude des doctrines hindoues, in fact a thesis delivered to Lévi at the Sorbonne, and rejected.
After the accession of Adolf Hitler to power in 1933, Levi spoke publicly to protest at antisemitic persecutions. The following year he became vice president of the Institut d'etudes japonaises in Paris.
He died on October 30, 1935, at a meeting of the Alliance israelite universelle in Paris.
JA = Journal Asiatique