Warburg family
Warburg
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Moses Elias Levy
Moses Elias Levy: Proto-Zionist; Abolitionist; Social, Religious and Educational Reformer; American Jewish pioneer; Florida frontier developer; Freemason, Author, Lecturer, Slave Holder. Note: This article depends almost exclusively on material garnered from C.S. Monaco's, Moses Levy of Florida: Jewish Utopian and Antebellum Reformer (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State university Press, 2005) but it does not properly credit this work. Needs proper citation throughout. Moses Elias Levy was born July 10, 1782 in Mogador, Morocco. He died September 7, 1854 in White Sulphur Springs, Virginia.[citation needed] Levy was the son of Eliahu Ha'Levi ibn Yuli, who was a Shab as-Sultan (court Jew) to Mohammed ben Abdallah, Sultan Sidi Muhammad III.[citation needed] The Levy family were considered outsiders, Jewish refugees from the Spanish Expulsion of 1492. Spanish Jews were deemed more learned and useful to the Moroccan Sultans than the native Berber Jews.Mohammed III died in 1790. A few years before, he survived an assassination plot by his own son.[citation needed] Levy’s father had revealed the plot and saved Mohammed III’s life. With Mohammed III’s death, Levy feared for his own life and that of his family.[citation needed] Mohammed’s successor fomented anti-Jewish riots. The Levys fled to British Gibraltar where there was a large Sephardic Jewish community. Levy was traditionally educated in a Sephardic Orthodox Jewish school on Gibraltar.[citation needed] However, Gibraltar also was a cross roads of new European ideas filtering from the French Revolution, different religious views and cultures, English, French, Spanish, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and Islamic. Undergoing a personal crisis of religious identity, Levy rejected Rabbinic and Talmudic Judaism. He centered his lifelong Jewish faith on the primacy of the Hebrew Bible alone.[citation needed] Levy was 18 years old, in 1800, when his father died.[citation needed] The family relocated to the Danish Virgin Islands where they had family, support and financial opportunity. They settled in St. Thomas. Levy matured in the small, tightly knit world of Spanish/Portuguese Caribbean Jewry, who like him, had their origins rooted in anti-Semitic dislocations, homelessness and insecurity.[citation needed] The Spanish-Portuguese Jews of the Caribbean called themselves - The Nation.[citation needed] They perceived themselves as a separate and distinct people in exile living among the peoples. In 1804, Levy married Hannah Abendanone, a girl from a well to do St. Thomas Jewish family. The Abendanone family were themselves recent refugees from the nearby Dutch Island of St., Sint Eustatius after it was captured and ransacked by the British under Admiral George Brydges Rodney, 1st Baron Rodney in 1781[citation needed]. The Island’s Jews were singled out for special treatment and exiled because of their strong support for the American Revolutionary cause.[citation needed] Admiral Rodney with anti-Semitic animus confiscated their significant wealth for himself and the Crown. Levy worked hard on St. Thomas, entering into a very lucrative business partnership, Levy, Benjamin and Robles.[citation needed] The business was very successful making Levy and his partners a small fortune. Levy opened his own international import and trading house becoming very wealthy.[citation needed] Moses and Hannah’s marriage produced four children, one of whom, David Levy, became very important in American Florida life. Moses traveled very frequently in search of economic opportunity. The marriage ended acrimoniously in divorce, 1816.[citation needed] Levy left St. Thomas for Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico was an unusual choice for a Jew to locate for business opportunity.[citation needed] Puerto Rico was Spanish controlled and the Inquisition was in force. Levy, fluent in Spanish and with significant business ties that benefited Spanish interests,[citation needed] and befriended the Intendant of Puerto Rico, Don Alejandro Ramirez. Their friendship, and mutually beneficial relationship, continued when Ramirez was relocated to Cuba as Supervisor of the Finances of the Crown. Ramirez arranged a special dispensation from the Inquisition for Levy to remain in Cuba.[citation needed] It was an extraordinary intercession. Jews would not be permitted to live openly as Jews on Cuba until the 20th century. Levy was the first openly professing Jew on Cuba to be permitted to own a sugar Plantation.[citation needed] He maintained good relations with the Catholic Planter class. It was a factor that reflected on his interpersonal skills.[citation needed] When revolutionary tensions rose in the Spanish Caribbean, Levy became one of the principle quartermaster merchants to the Spanish army. In 1819, it became clear that the Spanish Government’s ability, interest in and need for capital made the transfer of Florida to the United States a major possibility.[citation needed] Levy purchased 53,000 acres of land from his friend Alejandro Ramirez in a vaguely defined area of North-Central Florida.[citation needed] Levy understood the economic opportunity that American ownership of Florida would bring to Florida land values. He understood the economic necessity to develop industry and cultivate the land. He needed settlers. Settlers would be a specific condition of sale on one of Levy’s later Spanish land grant purchases.[citation needed]The main idea behind Levy’s purchase of the Florida land was proto-Zionism and Jewish educational reform.[citation needed] Levy formulated a utopian social solution to Jewish homelessness that incorporated Jewish educational reform and long term security. The United States was different from Europe. Jews did not need to be emancipated in the United States. They were citizens. Jews struggled into the 20th century to be emancipated in Europe. Jews could own land, worship freely and assemble peaceably in the United States.[citation needed] Levy wanted European Jews to voluntarily relocate to his lands to escape European anti-Semitism.[citation needed] They would be given small holdings which they would develop privately. They would live in a private Jewish environment – in some ways similar to the modern Moshav movement in Israel. Jewish immigrants would be educated, non-religiously, in free community schools teaching mathematics, science, literature, agriculture, animal husbandry and by necessity self-defense.[citation needed] Levy envisioned transforming Jewish education from the 8th century limitations of Rabbinic/Talmud learning to the much broader contemporary world of the 19th century. The children would be raised communally. Jews would be better equipped to compete in the Christian world as equals.[citation needed] Levy’s ideas on education, and later general free public education, were radical in 1821.[citation needed] Levy moved to Florida becoming a United States citizen when Florida was purchased by the United States Government. He put his plans into action by relocating to his frontier holdings in the interior of Florida.[citation needed] He helped found the town of Micanopy, Florida, 1822, named after a Seminole Indian Chief. Two miles north of Micanopy, Levy began a sugar plantation on his land he called, Pilgrimage Plantation, 1822.[citation needed] He assisted development of the general economy of Micanopy, Florida in the construction of a road to the St. John’s River, through a joint venture with the Florida Association of New York, a land speculation company.[citation needed]Levy had invested the majority of his personal capital in his lands, particularly the Pilgrimage Plantation effort promoted as a home for oppressed Jews. He hired Frederick Warburg, a young cousin to the Warburg family in Europe, to recruit Jewish settlers to his hoped for Jewish colony. Levy’s considerable personal capital proved insufficient for the project. He traveled to London, where he resided from 1825-1828.[citation needed] His initial objective was to raise more money from investors and to encourage additional settlement on his lands.[citation needed] While there, he injected himself into two different social movements, one Jewish and one not.[citation needed] With some success, he emerged as a leader in the nascent British Jewish emancipation movement He pursued activist, public relationships with Christians to advance Jewish emancipation.[citation needed] He wrote and publicly spoke to ever growing Jewish and Christian audiences. It was a radical departure from the reticent, Jewish low profile historically practiced in Christian lands.[citation needed] The Jewish emancipation movement he was associated with disbanded a few years later.[citation needed] Full British Jewish emancipation would not be achieved until 1867 when Jews were granted the right to vote. Levy departed Britain, late in 1828.[citation needed] The second social movement that Levy became associated with in London was allied with the developing Evangelical community.[citation needed] They were ardent abolitionists. Abolitionism in Britain was reaching the zenith of its political influence in the 1820s.[citation needed] Though a slave holder himself, for pragmatic economic reasons, he had a personal deep revulsion to the institution. He had witnessed the extremes of slavery in Puerto Rico and as a plantation owner in Cuba.[citation needed] With some success, he emerged as a leader in the nascent British Jewish emancipation movement. He pursued activist, public relationships with Christians to advance Jewish emancipation. He wrote and publicly spoke to ever growing Jewish and Christian audience.[citation needed] It was a radical departure from the reticent Jewish low profile historically practiced in Christian lands. The Jewish emancipation movement he was associated with disbanded a few years later. Full British Jewish emancipation would not be achieved until 1867 when Jews were granted the right to vote. Levy departed Britain, late in 1828.[citation needed] The second social movement that Levy became associated with was the developing Evangelical community, who were ardent abolitionists. Abolitionism in Britain was reaching the zenith of its political influence in the 1820s.[citation needed] Though a slave holder himself, for pragmatic economic reasons, he held a personal deep revulsion to the institution.[citation needed] He had witnessed the extremes of slavery in Puerto Rico and as a plantation owner in Cuba. Writing an anonymous tract, A Plan for the Abolition of Slavery, which was published and circulated in 1828 in Britain, Levy called for the gradual abolition of slavery. Children of slave unions were to be communally cared for and were not to be inheritable property but free.[citation needed] To ameliorate the inherent racial animus created by slavery, he proposed that white criminals being transported by Britain to Australia be settled in the slave areas to serve their time. They would be encouraged to intermarry with Blacks and create a mulatto community that would combine the best elements of both racial groups.[citation needed] The children would be educated in free public schools. Free public education for Blacks, slave or otherwise, was a radical idea in the 1820s. Levy had seen the intermixing of races work somewhat successfully in Cuba. He believed his gradual abolition plan would be socially just and potentially avoid dangerous, bloody insurrectional alternatives.[citation needed] Levy was feted by the British Abolition community as a major public speaker on the subject.[citation needed] He was the first Jew to publicly address the British public on the evils of slavery. However, in the United States, Levy presented himself very differently. Within the Florida slave planter community, Levy was already considered eccentric.[citation needed] Out of fear for his physical and economic survival, he kept his views on slavery very private.[citation needed] The societal and economic ambitions of his son David exacerbated Levy’s pragmatism.[citation needed] By 1828, only 21 Jews settled on Levy’s land.[citation needed] Warburg and Levy had been unsuccessful in attracting significant settlement interest or raising large amounts of capital needed for improvement[citation needed]. Levy recognized the economic need to encourage settlement by all people, Jewish and non-Jewish. Pilgrimage Plantation as an entirely Jewish communal ideal was put aside.[citation needed] The Second Seminole War, 1835, whom amongst the leadership was the famed Seminole war chief Osceola, destroyed Pilgrimage Plantation. It was burned. Levy was financially crushed.[citation needed] Because his title to the land was conflicted by the ill-defined Spanish Land grant sale and the multiple investor interests that Levy has sold, he was unable to sell any of his land.[citation needed]Levy moved to St. Augustine, Florida. He was embroiled for years with investor suits and litigation to establish his clear title to the land.[citation needed] The legal costs and struggles for title brought Levy to near impoverishment.[citation needed] Moses Levy’s financial troubles eased in 1849 when his attorney, George R. Fairbanks, was able to gain Levy clear title to his lands.[citation needed] During the long years of litigation, Levy had been reduced to near poverty. Immediately, Levy sold some of his lands to repay his debts.[citation needed] He retained sufficient assets to live very comfortably afterwards. He retained significant appreciated land holdings in Florida making him one of the wealthiest people in Florida.[citation needed] Levy’s health continued deteriorating. Spring of 1854, he traveled to the southern societal spa of The Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, Virginia (West Virginia) to “take the waters”.[citation needed] Levy died unexpectedly September 7, 1854 at Greenbrier. It is believed he was buried in White Sulphur Springs by his fellow planter class friends at Greenbrier in an Episcopalian family’s private cemetery. The cemetery today is on Greenbrier land. His gravesite is unmarked.[citation needed] Throughout his life Levy had maintained corresponding relationships, with leading American Jews. He focused on the need for Jewish education and projected his Masonic universalist, utopian views of the commonality of men. He practiced certain Jewish rituals, such as abstaining from eating pork and respecting the Sabbath on Saturday. Yet, he chose not to live his life in a Jewish community where communal prayer was necessary, and community even more. Keeping a Kosher diet, wearing of Jewish ritual Tefillin for daily prayer, or being near Jewish ritual baths, was not part of his active life.[citation needed] He was more comfortable as a minority in a Christian majority world.[citation needed] He believed, as did many Christians, the end of times was near[citation needed]. He turned to non-Jewish mysticism near the close of his life for a spiritual link to the world to come.[citation needed] The Messianic era, expected by many Americans about 1840, failed to materialize.[citation needed] Consistent with Jewish and Masonic tradition, Levy did not try to self-promote himself or his place in history. There are no paintings or photographs of Moses Levy. He was described as being of average height for the period, 5'6", rotund, with a pleasant face[citation needed] Levy’s will was contested by his sons wishing to gain a significant share of his estate. Levy had left his sons, David and Elias, only $100 each[citation needed]'. Litigation lasted for years. The family settled by dividing the estate between Levy’s two sons, two daughters and his sister in St. Thomas[citation needed]