Sylvain Lévi (French pronunciation: [silvɛ̃ levi]; March 28, 1863 – October 30, 1935) was an influential French orientalist and indologist who taught Sanskrit and Indian religion at the École pratique des hautes études.

Lévi exerted a significant influence on the life and thought of Marcel Mauss, the nephew of Émile Durkheim.

According to the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, Lévi was the (one of the) founder(s) of the École française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO) (French School of the Far East) in Hanoi.

[4] One of his students, Suzanne Karpelès, the first female member of EFEO, joined him there in 1922 and remained in French Indochina until 1941.

[5] He was also an early opponent of the traditionalist author René Guénon, citing the latter's uncritical belief in a "Perennial philosophy", that 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.