[FHSagora] BOOK REVIEW: Florida's Forgotten Visionary: Moses Elias Levy

[Nick Wynne]

C. S. Monaco. _Moses Levy of Florida: Jewish Utopian and Antebellum 
Reformer_. Southern Biography Series. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State 
University Press, 2005. xi + 240 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, 
index. $44.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8071-3095-8.
Reviewed for H-Florida by James M. Denham, Florida Southern College
Florida's Forgotten Visionary: Moses Elias Levy
Throughout its history, Florida has served as a place of refuge, renewal, 
and rebirth--a launching pad for unconventional ideas and schemes--a 
proving ground for utopian experiments. Ponce de Leon was the first 
European to discover Florida's exotic potential. Bartram came later. During 
the Second Spanish Period, the eccentric Zephaniah Kingsley founded 
prosperous plantations in North Florida, from which he wrote tracts 
defending slavery and miscegenation at the same time. In an excellent, 
probing study of Moses Elias Levy, Chris Monaco sheds light on another 
unconventional migrant who influenced his world. Understudied and 
misunderstood Jewish pioneer Moses Levy was the founder of Pilgrimage 
Plantation, near present-day Micanopy, Florida--which, according to Monaco, 
was the first Jewish communitarian settlement in the United States.
Knowledge of Moses E. Levy's activities in Florida, the Caribbean, and in 
Europe--especially his planting and utopian enterprises in the Alachua 
County region, has always been sketchy. The author argues persuasively that 
for a number of reasons--including an estranged son, and a reluctance on 
the part of the subject himself to be identified personally in many of his 
own writings and initiatives--Moses Elisa Levy's life has been 
misunderstood and shrouded in mystery.
Monaco's fine biography presents Levy as a man of the "Atlantic World." 
Born in Morocco, the son of an affluent Sephardic Jewish merchant and 
advisor to the sultan, Levy also lived in Gibraltar, the Danish West 
Indies, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and England before and after coming to the 
United States. As a successful West Indies shipper-merchant, Levy acquired 
sizable acreage in Florida from his Spanish business associates. Once 
Spanish Florida became American territory, Levy transferred his center of 
activities from Havana to the Territory of Florida with the goal of 
creating "an asylum ... for our fellow creatures" (p.39 ). In this work 
Levy collaborated with other leading Jewish business leaders and 
intellectuals in the U. S. and Europe, including Frederick Warburg, Moses 
Myers, and Mordecai Noah.
Levy labored long and hard to achieve his goal. But the project foundered 
because of financial panics, protracted legal battles over land titles, 
ill-suited participants, and Indian raids occasioned by the Second Seminole 
War. With his dream of establishing this utopian community ruined, Levy, 
broken in health and finances, moved to St. Augustine. But near the end of 
his life he was able to recover his fortune, in part. During these years in 
St. Augustine in the 1830s and 1840s Levy's estrangement from his son 
became complete. Monaco recreates and helps us understand this 
estrangement. He pieces together the public and private feud between father 
and son in the context of David Levy (Yulee's) rising political power and 
influence.
In an excellent discussion of the emerging political dynamics of East 
Florida and the father and son's place in them, Monaco argues that Levy's 
opposition to the onward march of individualism, a hallmark of Jacksonian 
Democracy created added friction between the father and son. Though Levy 
never cared much for politics, and seldom voted, he was more in line with 
the Whigs who denounced Democrat's "cult of the common man." Thus Levy 
gravitated naturally to cultivated planters, business and banking men who 
were his son's Whig opponents like Peter Sken Smith, Joseph Hernandez, and 
George Fairbanks.
As Monaco explains, the father and son "occupied opposing ends of the 
philosophical spectrum. Levy was a proto-Zionist, a social activist, and 
utopian theorist who questioned and rebelled against orthodoxy and the 
political status quo. His progressive ideas, especially in regard to 
slavery, were anathema in the South. In comparison, David Yulee 
disassociated himself from Judaism and yearned not only for acceptance by 
the southern elite but to become one of their stalwart leaders and 
defenders. While his father was attracted to the egalitarian theories of 
the Enlightenment, Yulee promoted the ideals of the Industrial Revolution 
and Manifest Destiny. On some level Moses Levy's liberal views seemed to 
generate opposing beliefs in his strong-willed son and certainly 
contributed to the unbending character of the antebellum states' rights 
champion known as the 'Florida Fire Eater'" (pp. 3-4).
Though Levy's vision of founding an agricultural refuge for persecuted Jews 
throughout the world was never realized, Monaco argues persuasively that 
Levy's life represents an important yet unknown part of Hebrew intellectual 
life in the Atlantic world. His contributions and connections to major 
Hebrew intellectual trends in the circum-Caribbean, European, and American 
worlds are clearly and distinctly drawn.
The author ably places Levy in the context of his time and place; and in 
doing so retraces Levy's steps throughout the Atlantic world. Monaco combed 
European archives in Seville, London, Paris, Hamburg, and Vienna. Monaco 
also exploited repositories in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, Williamsburg, 
Norfolk, and Cincinnati--as well as familiar holdings in St. Augustine, 
Tallahassee, and Gainesville. The result of this research is to reveal new 
and surprising revelations that will question previous assumptions and shed 
new light on Levy and his better-known son. Monaco argues that much of what 
we know about the life of Moses Elias Levy is either incorrect or unknown. 
Monaco scrapes away the myths and half-truths that have shrouded his 
subject's life. This was not an easy task because his subject himself 
eschewed publicity, and strove to remain in the shadows. Levy's estranged 
son also contributed to the confusion. Monaco persuasively argues that the 
politician, businessman, and aspiring politician purposefully obfuscated 
his father's past and many accomplishments in order not to embarrass him, 
and later to break his father's will that disinherited him.
While many historians have suspected for years that Levy's son, carefully 
manipulated facts about his father's life to ensure his own economic and 
political success, this is the strongest attempt yet to expose this 
manipulation. At best, one could say in summarizing the relationship of 
Moses Levy to his wife, sons, and daughters, that, as the late Samuel 
Proctor once explained to this writer, that, in the modern sense--the Levy 
family represented the nineteenth-century version of the "dysfunctional 
family." Monaco adeptly explores the complicated dynamics of his subject's 
family, using available primary and forgotten secondary sources and makes 
careful plausible conclusions about his subject's behavior. The exploration 
of the father and son's relationship, the confirmation of the father's 
authorship of the anonymous anti-slavery tract in London, "Plan for the 
Abolition of Slavery" (1828), and Monaco's uncovering of Levy's "eccentric 
views"--so out of accord with the prevailing political, economic, and 
social views of the antebellum South--make it all the more plausible for 
the aspiring son to obfuscate or recast his father's past to suit his own 
purposes. Monaco's research is exhaustive and his conclusions are sound.
Despite the obfuscation of the record, Monaco points out Levy's lasting 
accomplishments and contributions to territorial Florida. "[W]hile Levy's 
small Jewish colony survived just thirteen years," notes Monaco, "his 
impact in the Florida territory was substantial. Highly regarded by 
prominent officials, Levy reintroduced sugarcane as a viable crop; 
organized the first Florida development corporation; was instrumental in 
establishing the territory's earliest free public school; helped found the 
village Micanopy, the first distinct United States town in Florida; and 
served for many years as East Florida's most vocal and influential Jewish 
resident. In addition, his colonization venture brought much needed 
settlers into the sparsely populated interior, and his great expenditures 
in sugar mill technology inspired similar investments throughout the 
territory--a veritable 'sugar boom' that lasted until the Second Seminole 
War" (p. 9).
Monaco has accomplished some impressive detective work here. But I hasten 
to say that this is only one contribution of this work. Monaco has also 
uncovered and adeptly laid out the unfolding of an unknown and pioneering 
attempt to create a utopian community with a strong Hebrew component in an 
area on the outer fringes of the American frontier. Finally, Monaco's work 
on Levy marks a major contribution to our understanding of Hebrew 
intellectual thought in the Atlantic world.
Monaco's writing is clear, concise, and lacks jargon. Terms are explained 
well and concisely. His eloquent narrative style tells an interesting story 
while providing context for Levy's life and times. Monaco has presented a 
finely crafted full-scale biography of an important figure. In doing so he 
has made a substantial contribution to our knowledge of the man and his 
pursuits in the context in which they were achieved.
This is not an arcane academic tome we have here but a living, breathing 
biography that makes many interesting and original statements about a 
person, time, and place of which we know very little. For far too long 
Moses E. Levy has been the shadowy, ambivalent figure behind his famous 
son's image. Chris Monaco's fine book casts a bright light on this 
misunderstood and often maligned figure. This book will be of great 
interest to scholars of American, Circum-Caribbean, Southern and Florida 
history. It will also attract the attention of scholars of Hebraic 
traditions in the Atlantic world. Path breaking is perhaps an overused 
word, but I think this book fits the bill.
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