He fled Nazi Germany with his wife, Elsa, in the spring of 1939, taking a position at Durham University.
Like many Jewish refugees, he was interned as an "enemy alien" by the British government from June 21, 1940 until September 2, 1940.
[3] He delivered the Ford Lectures at the University of Oxford in 1943,[4] and they were published as England and the Continent in the Eighth Century.
[6] Conrad Leyser described Levison as "one of the giants of twentieth-century historical scholarship, his England and the Continent in the Eighth century one of its canonical texts";[7] Nicholas Howe, in 2004, called that book of "enduring" importance.
[7] Theodor Schieffer dedicated his Winfried - Bonifatius und die christliche Grundlegung Europas to Levison, who had been his doctoral advisor.