Mr. Levy did not live at Monticello. Instead he leased it to a succession of farmers who brought Jefferson’s beautiful house close to ruin. They used the once-lovely drawing room to store grain. Refuse was allowed to collect on the portico steps until a horse and wagon could be driven up to the drawing room door. Unused outbuildings were torn down and no repairs were made anywhere on the estate.
Belatedly realizing that something should be done to save Monticello, Mr. Levy willed it to the government when he died in 1862. His heirs successfully contested the will, and one of them, Jefferson M. Levy, did make an effort to repair some of the damage that had been done to the historic house, but he lacked the resources to carry out such a tremendous task.
Over the years a number of prominent people recommended that the government buy and restore Monticello as a memorial to the third President. Nothing was done, however, and Monticello continued to deteriorate.
This account does a great disservice to both Uriah and his nephew. Jefferson Levy had no lack of “resources,” and was an extremely rich man who spent enormous sums restoring and refurbishing Monticello. He made repeated trips to Europe in search of the mansion’s original furniture, wallpapers, and rugs, and when the originals were unobtainable he had costly copies made from whatever sketches could be found. Under Jefferson Levy’s stewardship, Monticello became one of the great showplaces of the early twentieth century—it attained, in fact, the sort of elegance and grandeur that Thomas Jefferson had conceived for it, but had never lived to see. The house was the scene of many lavish parties and entertainments. Jeff Levy’s sister, Mrs. Amelia Von Mayhoff, acted as his hostess, a role she clearly relished, and a long list of dignitaries from official and diplomatic Washington, as well as titled folk from Europe, were frequent guests at Monticello. Levy nieces alive today remember being ushered into the great drawing room, where a typically opulent reception was going on, the guest list including the President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt. And yet, for some reason, no history book has yet taken note of any of this.
Today, most of the guides at Monticello look blank when any mention is made of Uriah Phillips Levy, and only a few have the vaguest knowledge of Monticello’s associations with the Levy name. None of the guides, on a recent visit, was aware that Uriah’s mother, Rachel Levy, is buried on the grounds. Her grave is in a small enclosed plot not far from the gift shop.
Several years ago, Harold Lewis, whose wife was one of Jefferson Levy’s nieces, was astonished and outraged on a visit to Monticello to discover a bronze plaque which stated simply that a certain Uriah Levy had at one point bought the estate for $2,500 and later sold it for $500,000. The implications of Jewish greed and sharp practice seemed quite clear. After a great deal of difficulty and much correspondence with Monticello’s trustees, Mr. Lewis was successful in having the plaque reworded.
Others have been equally dutiful to the past. In Manhattan in the late 1960’s, one of the historic areas threatened by real estate developers was a triangular piece of land between East Ninth and Eleventh streets and Second and Third avenues, through which narrow Stuyvesant Street passes diagonally. Within this area are the old Church of Saint Mark’s in-the-Bowery, dating from 1799, and thirty-three neighboring houses from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This is the site of the bouwerie—or farm—of Governor Peter Stuyvesant, and in the churchyard of Saint Mark’s are buried eight generations of Stuyvesants, along with the Dutch governor himself. Early in 1969, New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission announced that it had succeeded in having the district declared a historic one, meaning that no exterior changes to the church, the churchyard, or any of the buildings can be made without the approval of the commission. (There has since been a controversial decision to let the old graveyard, which was being desecrated by vandals, double as a children’s playground.)
The announcement of the designation of the area, which should in any case preserve it for some time to come, was made by Harmon Hendricks Goldstone, a New York architect, and chairman of the Landmarks Commission. The announcement made much of Peter Stuyvesant’s grave, but overlooked the fact that Mr. Goldstone is himself a direct descendant of Abraham de Lucena, one of the first Jews to arrive in Manhattan in the year of the Twenty-Three.
It gives Mr. Goldstone a certain amount of quiet pleasure, and a feeling of the right thing done, to know that he has been at least partly responsible for protecting the final resting place of the choleric little governor who gave his ancestors such a shabby welcome all those hundreds of years ago.
Mr. Goldstone’s mother, Mrs. Lafayette Goldstone, is, of course, as bewilderingly connected as her son to all the old families—Hendricks, Tobias, Levy, Seixas, Hart, Nathan, and the rest. It is she who was such a faithful correspondent, through the years, of Mr. Justice Cardozo, and she achieved considerable acclaim as a poet, writing under the name May Lewis, a combination of her middle and maiden names. (She is a sister of the above-mentioned Harold Lewis.) She became, at one point, an ardent Zionist, at a time when that was not a popular stance among upper-class Jews.
During the Hitler era, at the point when the Third Reich decreed that Jews must wear the badge of the yellow star, as their Inquisitional predecessors had done, Rabbi David de Sola Pool of Shearith Israel had a yellow star stitched to his vestments to symbolize what his people in Europe were suffering. The sight of the New York rabbi wearing the star stirred Mrs. Goldstone deeply, and moved her to write what she considers her most important poem:
O earliest morning stars that sang together,
And choruses of night that answered them,
The ancient stars, the sacred, the resplendent,
The shepherds’ star
That rose on Bethlehem;
And even those small emblems that men make,
The stars of knighthood, bright for honor’s sake;
The little service stars that shall burn through
Their hours of grief and pride,
And liberty’s white spangled stars that ride
Valiant forever on their field of blue.
Is this the symbol that the brutal hand,
The blundering will to harm, the vicious hate,
Has wrought into a badge, a mark to brand?
Wear it, O Jew, upon your helpless arm;
Your race is worthy such insignia;
Be proud, be grateful it is not your fate
To bear a swastika.
Mrs. Goldstone has already celebrated her ninety-second birthday. She lives comfortably in a large Park Avenue apartment with a view of Central Park, surrounded by fine old furniture, silver, china, and some splendid family portraits, several by her ancestor Jacob Hart Lazarus, the Astor family portraitist. She doesn’t get out as often as she used to but still entertains regularly at little teas, with a merry fire going in the fireplace, and she goes regularly to the synagogue. She has watched many of her relatives drift away from their ancient faith, and takes it philosophically, but was saddened that a relative who had married a non-Jew now considers herself—from a religious standpoint—“nothing.” In the family, both Jewish and Christian holidays are celebrated.
She is still an energetic lady. Not long ago, walking in the park, she avoided ruining a new pair of shoes by taking them off and running barefoot to the nearest exit to escape a downpour. A favorite taxi driver, who serves as a kind of chauffeur, taking her on errands and visits around the city, asked her the other day the secret of her good health, spirits, and great age. Stepping out of the cab, she answered, “I believe in God.”
* Despite all sorts of socially discriminatory measures, snubs and countersnubs. In New York, for instance, the elite German-Jewish men’s club, the Harmonie, would not admit Sephardic members. In retaliation, the Sephardic Beach Point Club in suburban Westchester would take no Germans. This condition persisted well into the twentieth century.
Image Gallery
Mr. Aaron Lopez, the affluent Newport Merchant.
&nb
sp; Judah Touro, philanthropist and “a strange man,” according to contemporaries.
Newport’s famed Touro Synagogue.
Phila Franks, who, to her mother’s pain, married General Oliver Delancey.
The beautiful and poetic Rebecca Gratz.
The house that Daniel Gomez built, as it stands today, near Newburgh, NY.
Chicago’s monument to Haym Salomon, Revolutionary financier.
Barnard College founder Annie Nathan Meyer.
Maude Nathan Nathan (she married a cousin).
SOURCES
Abrahams, Israel. Jewish Life in the Middle Ages. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1896.
Barrett, Walter. Old Merchants of New York City. New York: Carleton, 1870.
Baruch, Bernard M. Baruch: My Own Story. New York: Holt, 1957.
Byars, William Vincent. B. and M. Gratz, Merchants in Philadelphia, 1754–1798. Jefferson City, Mo.: Hugh Stephens Printing Co., 1916.
Dimont, Max I. Jews, God, and History. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962.
Dubin, Maxwell H. Jews in American History. Los Angeles: privately printed and circulated, 1930.
Elzas, Barnett A. The Jews of South Carolina. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1905.
Fein, Isaac M. “Baltimore Jews During the Civil War.” American Jewish Historical Quarterly. Vol. LI No. 2, December 1961.
Fitzpatrick, Donovan, and Saphire, Saul. Navy Maverick: Uriah Phillips Levy. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963.
Friedman, Lee M. Early American Jews. Cambridge: Harvard, 1934.
——. “Boston in American Jewish History.” Publication of the American Jewish Historical Society. Vol. XLII No. 4, June 1953.
Handlin, Oscar. Adventure in Freedom. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1954.
Hellman, Geoffrey T. “Collection.” The New Yorker, June 12, 1965.
Hellman, George S. Benjamin N. Cardozo. New York: Whittlesey House, 1940.
Herahkowitz, Leo, and Meyer, Isidore S., eds. The Lee Max Friedman Collection of American Jewish Colonial Correspondence. Waltham, Mass.: American Jewish Historical Society, 1968.
Hühner, Leon. Jews in America after the American Revolution. New York: Gertz Brothers, 1959.
——. The Life of Judah Touro. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1946.
Kayserling, Meyer. Christopher Columbus and the Participation of the Jews in the Spanish and Portuguese Discoveries. New York: Longmans, Green, 1894.
Korn, Bertram Wallace. The Early Jews of New Orleans. Waltham, Mass.: American Jewish Historical Society, 1969.
Kraus, Walter Max. “The Arrival of the Saint Charles.” The Saint Charles. Vol. I No. 1, January 1935.
Langdon-Davies, John. Carlos: The King Who Would Not Die. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963.
London, Hannah R. Portraits of Jews. New York: William Edwin Rudge, 1927.
——. Shades of My Forefathers. Springfield, Mass.: Pond-Ekberg, 1941.
Madariaga, Salvador De. Christopher Columbus. New York: Macmillan, 1940.
Maduro, J. M. L. “A Genealogical Note on the Pimentel, Lopez, Sasportas and Rivera Families.” Publication of the American Jewish Historical Society. Vol. XLII No. 3, March 1953.
Marcus, Jacob Eader. Early American Jewry. 2 Vol. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1953.
Mars, David. “Justice Benjamin Nathan Cardozo: His Life and Character.” Publication of the American Jewish Historical Society. Vol. XLIX No. 1, September 1959.
Meyer, Annie Nathan. Barnard Beginnings. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935.
——. It’s Been Fun. New York: Henry Schuman, 1951.
Michener, James A. Iberia. New York: Random House, 1968.
Nathan, Maud. Once Upon a Time and Today. New York: Q. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1933.
Pearson, Edmund L. Studies in Murder. New York: Macmillan, 1924.
Pool, David de Sola. An Old Faith in the New World: Portroit of Shearith Israel. New York: Colombia University Press, 1955.
——. Portraits Etched in Stone. New York: Columbia University Press, 1952.
Pritchett, V. S. The Spanish Temper. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954.
Roth, Cecil. A History of the Marranos. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1932.
——. “On Sephardic Jewry.” In the Dispersion. Spring 1966.
Sachar, Abram Leon. A History of the Jews. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930.
Stern, Malcolm H. Americans of Jewish Descent. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1960.
Van Doren, Carl. Secret History of the American Revolution. New York: Viking, 1941.
Wiznitzer, Arnold. “The Exodus from Brazil and Arrival in New Amsterdam of the Jewish Pilgrim Fathers, 1654.” Publication of the Jewish Historical Society. Vol. XLIV No. 2, December 1954.
Wouk, Herman. This Is My God. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959.
INDEX
Aaron (family), 2
Abdulrahman III, Caliph, 31
Abdy, Sir Robert Edward Henry, 176
Aberdare, Henry Campbell Bruce, Lord, 176
Abravanel (family), 47
Abravanel, Don Isaac, 45, 47
Adams, H. P., 46
Adams, Samuel, 147
Africa, northern: Sephardim, 50, 51, 331, 335, 336, 337
Alexander VI, Pope, 82
Alfonso X (Alfonso the Wise; Alfonso the Learned), King, 31
Alger, Horatio, 296–97
Algonquin Indians, 94–95
Alpert (family), 25
Alport (family), 25
Amador de los Kios, José Fernández, 25
American Jewish Historical Society, 17
Amsterdam: Sephardim, 19, 50, 51
Andalusia: Moors, 32
Sephardim, 32, 43, 87
André, Maj. John, 167–68
Andrews, Charles; 207
anti-Semitism, see Jews, anti-Semitism
Arnott, Nina Mapleson, see Nathan, Mrs. Washington
Ashkenazim, 8, 55n, 131, 229, 230
and Sephardim, 8, 131–32, 135, 138, 163, 228–31, 263, 295, 340, 344
see also Germany, Jews; Jews and Judaism
Astor, John Jacob, 94, 98
Astor, Mrs. William, 60, 266, 269, 70, 318
Auchincloss (family), 263
Audler, Solomon, 135–36, 136–37
Baiz, Decadie, 135
Bajazet II, Sultan, 45, 48
Balmain, Count Alexander, 166
Barbados: Sephardim, 65
slave trade, 104
Barclay (family), 263
Barclay, Cornelia, see De Lancey, Mrs. Stephen
Barclay, James, 237, 238
Bar Harbor: Sephardim, 264
Barnard, George S., 293
Barreto, Gen., 52–53
Baruch, Bernard, 329
Baruch, Bernhard, 329
Beekman (family), 101
Belgium: Sephardim, 20, 330
Belknap, Jeremy, 105
Belper, Algernon Henry Strutt, Baron, 176
Benjamin, Judah P., 271–72
Bent, Frank, 299
Bent, Mrs. Frank (Emily Cardozo), 299, 306
Black Plague, 34
Blair, Maj. Gen., 280, 281
Blake, James H., 251
“blue blood,” origin of term, 32
Boabdil, King, 43
Bogardus (family), 101
Bond, Lt., 212–13
Boston: Touro bequest, 143
Bourdeaux, Rose, 135
Bradford, Orlando Bridgeman, Earl of, 176
Brandon (family), 321; see also de Fonseca-Brandon (family)
Brandon, Frances Marion, 322–28
Brandon, Lyman, 322, 327, 328
Brazil: as Dutch colony, 51–52, 53, 62, 65, 66
as Portuguese colony, 51, 52
Sephardim, 51–52, 62, 65
Brewster (family), 181
Burden, Mrs. William A. M., 5
Bush, Mathias, 228
Butler, Benjamin, 247–51 passim
Cabral, Pedro Álvarez, 51
Capón, Ruy, 41
Cardozo (family), 60, 293, 298–99, 337, 344
Cardozo, Albert, 289, 292–96 passim, 299
Cardozo, Albert (Allie), 299
Cardozo, Mrs. Albert (Rebecca Nathan), 292, 299
Cardozo, Benjamin Nathan, 11, 12, 295–309 passim, 316, 351
Cardozo, Elizabeth, 299–300, 306
Cardozo, Ellen, 299, 300, 301, 303, 305, 308–09
Cardozo, Emily, see Bent, Mrs. Frank
Cardozo, Grace, 299
Cardozo, Michael Hart, 292
Cardozo & Nathan, 12
Carlos II, King, 89, 90
Castro, Archdeacon de, 85
Castro, Americo, 31–32
Catholicism, see Christianity
Catt, Carrie Chapman, 315
Cazenove, Pierre André Destrac, 144, 145
Cedarhurst (L.I.): Sephardim, 2
Charleston: Sephardim, 101, 337
Christianity: conversions to, by Jews, 8, 25, 231
conversions to, by Jews and Moors, see Converses
conversions to Judaism, 8
Crusades, 30, 34, 37
Inquisition, 52, 74–76 see also Spain, Inquisition
Churchill, Mrs. Randolph, 176
Clinton (family), 165
Clinton, Gov. George, 93, 165
Clinton, Sir Henry, 172
Cochrane, Sir Alexander, 203
Cohen, Abraham, 191–93
Cohen, Myer David, 188
Cohen, Mrs. Myer David (Judith Solis), 188
Columbus, Christopher, 31, 45–46, 47–48
Conrad, Barnaby, 5
Content, Rosa, see Seligman, Mrs. James
Conversos (Catholic converts; New Christians): Moors, 35–36, 38, 79
Sephardim, 35–36, 38, 40, 42, 43, 46, 76–79, 84, 86–87
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