Maurice Levitas

Maurice Levitas (February 1, 1917 – February 14, 2001) was an Ireland-born British academic and communist. Levitas was involved with the Communist Party of Great Britain and was a Marxist-Lenininist throughout his political life. He was involved in military activity; first becoming involved with Comintern's International Brigades against the Nationalist insurgency during the Spanish Civil War and then during the Second World War, as a British citizen, he joined the British Army's Royal Army Medical Corps. After the War, he remained involved in Communist politics and also became a sociology lecturer at Durham University. In the 1980s, he relocated to the Eastern Bloc, teaching in East Germany, where he edited and translated a book on German politician Erich Honecker titled Erich Honecker Cross Examined.

Biography

Early life

Levitas was born at 8 Warren Street, in the Portobello district of south inner-city Dublin, an area popularly known as "Little Jerusalem", on 1 February 1917. He was known to his family and friends as "Morry", and was the second of four sons and two daughters born to Harry (Hillel) Levitas, a tailor and trade unionist, and his wife Leah (née Rick). His parents, having each emigrated to Ireland from Lithuania and Latvia around 1912 and 1913, were married in the Camden Street Synagogue in Dublin. Harry Levitas had been active in the Marxist-Zionist movement Poale Zion before leaving Lithuania, and in Dublin became a member of the International Tailors', Machinists' and Pressers' Trade Union, known locally as the "Jewish Union", having started out as a scrap-metal pedlar before working as a tailor's presser. Although he passed the Scottish qualifying examination and began his secondary education at Glasgow High School, this schooling went unrecognised when the family relocated again, by 1931, to London's East End. After only minimal training, his unit was sent to reinforce the collapsing Aragon front, and he saw action at the Battle of Belchite. Having quietly ignored an order for "Jews, socialists, communists and machine-gunners" to step forward, and having shaved off a beard that gave him what he called an "Old Testament" look, Levitas was sent to the prison camp at San Pedro de Cardeña, near Burgos. There, along with other International Brigade prisoners, he was beaten and stripped for examination by individuals he believed may have been Nazi German "race scientists" attempting to identify supposedly degenerate physical traits, an episode he later compared to the psychometric intelligence testing used by post-war educationalists to select children for higher education.

Teaching career and academic life On discharge, Levitas returned to construction work; in 1948, having resumed employment as a plumber, he was offered a place on a year-long emergency Teachers' Training College course, a scheme set up that September to address the post-war shortage of teachers. He subsequently taught English and drama in state schools in London (1949 to 1963) and Lincolnshire (1963 to 1966), work in which he stressed the value of dramatic productions in engaging reluctant pupils. His daughter from his first marriage is the sociologist Ruth Levitas, and his son from his second marriage is the theatre historian Ben Levitas.

Publications Marxist Perspectives in the Sociology of Education by Maurice Levitas (1974) Erich Honecker Cross Examined edited and translated by Maurice Levitas(1992)