Ochs was born to a Jewish family in Cincinnati, Ohio, on March 12, 1858. His parents, Julius Ochs and Bertha Levy, were both German immigrants. His father had left Bavaria for the United States in 1846. Julius was a highly educated man and fluent in six languages that he taught at schools throughout the South, though he supported the Union during the Civil War. Ochs' mother Bertha, who had come to the United States in 1848 as a refugee from the revolution in Rhenish Bavaria, and had lived in the South before her 1853 marriage with Julius, sympathized with the South, though their differing sympathies didn't separate their household.