The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (1370 page)

 
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Levinsohn, Isaac Baer
,
or Ribal

(1788–1860).
Hebrew author. Levinsohn's literary output was mainly polemical. He was one of the founders of the
Haskalah
movement in Russia, and he was concerned with the position of the Jews in E. Europe. His best-known work,
Te’udah be-Yisrael
(Testimony in Israel, 1828), described the Hebrew language as ‘the bond of religion and national survival’, and he argued against the use of
Yiddish
. He also wrote
Beit Yehudah
(House of Judah, 1838) which was an attempt to answer Christian questions about Judaism, and
Efes Damim
(No Blood, 1837) which was written to refute the
blood-libel
.

 
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Levirate marriage
(
yibbum
)
.

A Jewish custom which obliges a childless widow to marry her dead husband's brother. The obligation of levirate marriage is laid down in Deuteronomy 25. 5–6.

 
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(b. 1908).
French anthropologist associated particularly with structuralism. Seeing himself as ‘neolithic’, Lévi-Strauss drew upon traditional societies, including their
myths
and classificatory systems (taboos, etc.), to put the human imagination in its place. Collective representations are the product of the human mind. They are ‘thought out’ in a way which reflects their virtual identity with fundamental mental structures of the mind, rather than their being autonomous creations. Although some have seen Lévi-Strauss as a ‘culture hero’, his emphasis on cognition to the virtual exclusion of emotion, his pessimistic view of imagination and progress, the excesses of his structuralism, and the apparently self-verifying nature of his approach, are drawbacks increasingly attended to by critics.
See also
MYTH
.

 
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Levitation
:

see
DARDURA-SIDDHI
;
LAGHIMAN
.

 
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Levite
:

see
LEVI
.

 
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