Moses Levy of Florida: Jewish Utopian and Antebellum Reformer

ISBN-13: 9780807130957 / Angielski / Twarda / 2005 / 264 str.

C. S. Monaco

Opis

It is only recently that the importance of Moses Elias Levy (1782-1854) as a Jewish social activist has come to be appreciated. C. S. Monaco's discovery of Levy's Plan for the Abolition of Slavery in the late 1990s began the transformation of historians' understanding of this man's life and work. Now, in the first full-scale biography of Levy, Monaco completes the picture of one of the antebellum South's most influential and interesting Jewish citizens. Long known only as the father of David L. Yulee, the first Jew elected to the U.S. Senate, Levy here comes into sharp relief as Monaco follows him from his affluent upbringing in a Sephardic Jewish house-hold in Morocco--where his father was a courtier to the sultan--through his career as a successful merchant shipper, to his radical reform activities in Florida. Levy had many residences abroad--in Morocco, Gibraltar, Danish Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Curacao, England--and Monaco escorts readers from country to country, considering his accomplishments in each. The sole Jewish voice during the British abolitionist crusade, Levy was so extraordinary in his activism in London that some Protestants believed he heralded the millennium. In his search for equilibrium between Enlightenment thinking and pre-modern religion, Levy founded the United States' first Jewish communitarian settlement in the wilds of the East Florida frontier. In addition, he significantly advanced agricultural development and public education in Florida. Monaco's radical reappraisal of this complex and formerly underappreciated figure brings to light for the first time the full and fascinating extent of Moses Levy's remarkable contributions to nineteenth-centuryAmerica.