Moses Levy of Florida: Jewish Utopian and Antebellum Reformer (review)

Recently American and American Jewish scholars have called for a reexamination in how they approach their subjects. Geographically, ethnically, and perhaps religiously narrow, both disciplines sometimes suffer from a "history emerges in a vacuum" approach. Independent scholar C. S. Monaco's recent work on utopian reformer Moses Elias Levy effectively challenges this approach. Monaco's carefully researched biography of the father of David Levy Yulee demonstrates that not only does an approach that follows the human subject rather than national or religious boundaries reveal a more complex history but also contests previous conclusions about Jewish religiosity, Jews' desire for assimilation, Jewish consensus, and the linear progressive narrative. To do so, Monaco eschews a neat biographical narrative and instead marvelously weaves the seemingly contradictory aspects of Levy's life.

Levy's birth on July 10, 1782, his youth in Monaco as the son of a courtier and royal merchant, as well as his own adult business and philanthropic activities in the Caribbean, Europe, and the United States, contributed to the development of his utopian ideals with respect to Judaism, assimilation, business, and slavery. Traditionally educated in the heder, Levy matured during a time of great religious and economic change. He made much of his fortune as a West Indies merchant. Throughout his life, Levy relied on his fortune and his contacts with other successful Jews and philo-Semites to promote his economic and religious agendas. Arguably, his travels, an estrangement from his family, and contact with American and British leaders encouraged the solidification of some orthodox and unorthodox ideals. It is here where Monaco is at his best, developing the context in which Levy's ideas emerged. Influenced by the Haskalah and the Jewish Reform movement, Levy rejected rabbinical Judaism suggesting that it had become too corrupt and too insular. Yet supporting ultra-Orthodox views, Monaco presents evidence countering Jacob Rader Marcus's initial conclusions about the overwhelming desire of most American Jews to assimilate. The author persuasively argues that there were individuals, like Levy, who rejected the desire or ability to fully assimilate and still retain a strong and useful Jewish identity. According to Levy, an individual could not maintain two national identities. Repeated in several treatises, he challenged why Jews should or want to assimilate into a world that degraded them. Levy believed that the continued persecution of Jews negatively affected Jewish opinion about their own capabilities and contributions.

To this end, Levy formulated a utopian colonization scheme that would provide "an asylum . . . for our fellow creatures" (39). Perhaps most influenced by his time spent on the U.S. eastern seaboard and influenced by evangelical Protestants, Reform Judaism, and Marx, Levy developed his utopian and colonization schemes for American Jews. The first step to this, in keeping with the evangelical and secular tendencies of the day, was to establish Jewish educational institutions to inculcate young Jewish boys and girls in manners, occupations, and philosophy. After a proper education, and again subscribing to the early nineteenth-century romanticization of the farmer, Jews would move to agrarian communities to live out their full religious, political, and economic potential. His purchasing of vast tracks of land in Florida culminated in the establishment of Pilgrimage—a project that ultimately failed because of problems with mismanagement, bankruptcy, and Indian and settler discontent.

The collapse of Pilgrimage further encouraged Levy to continue his Jewish activism. Influenced by antisemitic legislation in Britain and Russia and the perceived effects of generational violence against Jews, Levy moved to London to seek financial support for his efforts and to encourage a countermovement to the rising hatred of Jews. Employing millennial ideals, stressing the common ancestry of Jews and Christians and a more literal interpretation of the Bible, Levy wrote and spoke to Jews and Christians stressing that the animosity between the two groups must end in order to achieve the goals of perfectionism. He also called at least two "Public Meetings of the Jews" to address the problems...