Lewis Charles Levin (November 10, 1808 – March 14, 1860) was an American politician, newspaper editor and anti-Catholic social activist.

[3] Levin played a leading role in inciting the Philadelphia nativist riots which led to the killing of over 20 Irish Americans; the burning of many of their homes; and the destruction of three Catholic churches associated with their community.

[4] In 1842 he staged an immense public "bonfire of booze" to draw attention to his campaign against taverns and for local control of liquor licensing.

[7] Levin's anti-alcohol crusade proved to be excellent preparation for his next cause, a campaign against Catholic political power, which he carried on as editor of The Daily Sun.

[4] Initially, the main political issue was an 1843 public school ruling permitting Catholic children to be excused from Bible-reading class (because the Protestant King James Version was being used).

Levin proposed that these clubs were in fact beachheads for Catholic power and were being used to support an eventual papal takeover of the United States.

The ensuing fighting led to several people killed and injured, and hundreds more left homeless as most of the neighborhood homes were burned by rioters.

[9] New riots broke out in Southwark in July of that same year when a group of protesters threatened to destroy / St. Philip Neri Catholic Church.

[14][15] Levin and other Nativists helped tilt the 1852 Presidential election toward Democrat Franklin Pierce and away from the Whigs' candidate, the popular Mexican–American War leader General Winfield Scott.

[18] Levin was enraged and disgusted by the new Republican Party's nomination of John C. Frémont for president at the convention in Philadelphia in June 1856.

[31] The nature of his madness is unclear, but one newspaper, expanding on a wire-service story, speculated, "His insanity is supposed to have been brought about by an immoderate use of opium.

[34] It is a mark of his skill that he was able to equate "nativism" with anti-Catholicism, and to do so in Philadelphia, where sectarian animosity had historically been minimal, and where native-born Catholics had lived side-by-side with Anglicans, Quakers, and others since the Colonial period.

A "printer's devil" for Levin's Daily Sun newspaper, Nordhoff really wanted to be a cabin boy on a US Navy ship going to China.

Levin first warned the lad that he'd end up as a "dirty, drunken old sailor," but relented at last, and intervened with Philadelphia Navy Yard commander, Commodore Jesse Elliot to get the boy a billet.

[38] A brilliant adventurer named Lewis C. Levin, a native of Charleston, S.C., and a peripatetic law practitioner, first in South Carolina, next in Maryland, next in Louisiana, next in Kentucky and finally in Pennsylvania, was the acknowledged leader of the Native American element that had erupted during the summer of 1844 in what is remembered as the disgraceful riots of that year in which Catholic churches and institutions were burnt by the mob ...

He was elected by a good majority and was re-elected in 1846 and '48, thus serving six consecutive years as a representative from the city.In a book about the fraught history of religious freedom in the United States, the writer Steven Waldman recalled Levin and his role in the nativist anti-Catholic agitation in the 1840s and 1850s.

Referring to Levin's ostensible status as the first Jew elected to Congress, Waldman cited him for "proving that being part of a persecuted group does not necessarily bring sensitivity to the plight of other religious minorities.