J. LEONARD LEVY was born in London on 24 November 1865. He received his Jewish education at Jews’ College and his general education at University College, from which he received a BA in 1884. After four years at the Bristol Hebrew Congregation, he decided to emigrate to the United States. Serving first in Sacramento, California, in 1893 he came to the distinguished congregation Keneseth Israel of Philadelphia as the associate rabbi to Joseph Krauskopf. Despite the difference in their countries of origin the two seem to have worked closely together, sharing preaching responsibilities by delivering the Sunday discourse on alternate weeks. All these addresses were published in pamphlet form week by week and bound together in annual volumes. In 1901 Levy left Philadelphia for the much smaller Reform Congregation Rodef Shalom in Pittsburgh, where he remained until his death in 1917. There he continued the practice of the weekly Sunday morning discourse, transcribed, printed, and distributed the following Sunday, under the title ‘The Reform Pulpit’.

While still in Philadelphia, Levy voiced an enthusiastic defence of American policy on the Sunday immediately following the formal declaration of war with Spain (one week before Krauskopf 's address reproduced as Sermon 13 above). Soon after that he volunteered for service, becoming a chaplain with a volunteer brigade. That experience apparently changed him profoundly: in 1904 he was elected vice-president of the International Peace Union, and not long thereafter organized an international conference for peace held with considerable fanfare at his temple in Pittsburgh. In the autumn of 1914, speaking on ‘The War against War’, he said that since the Spanish–American War had ended he had been ‘an unfailing advocate of what is known as the pacifist policy. I am a converted man.’ The following week he spelled out the implications of this position: