June 2025

 

Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

The latest about the book, author events, and more

Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson

Volume XXII, Number 6                                                        June 2025

 

RELIGIOSITY: Saving Monticello, is, at its heart, as the title indicates, a story of historic preservation. But it also deals with Thomas Jefferson and his architectural prowess. And it includes a compelling story of not-widely-known Jewish-American history.

Said history begins with a group of Portuguese Sephardic Jews who fled their homeland during the Inquisition in the early eighteenth century. They made their way to England, and in the spring of 1733 crossed the Atlantic (along with some Ashkenazi Jews from Germany), landing in Savannah, Georgia, on July 11, not long after the colony of Georgia had been founded.

That group included a prominent physician Dr. Samuel Nunez, Uriah Levy’s great-great grandfather, along with his wife Gracia (who changed her name to Rebecca in England) and their six children. One of the first things the group of Sephardic Jews—who were forbidden under the punishment of death to practice their religion in Portugal—did after arriving in Savannah was establish a synagogue they called Kahal Kadosh Mickva Israel (Holy Congregation, the Hope of Israel). Known since 1790 as Congregation Mickve Israel, it is the third-oldest Jewish Congregation in the nation.

Without doubt, the Nunez family members were devout Jews. As for their descendants—including Uriah Levy and his nephew Jefferson M. Levy—we know through their words and deeds they were proud Jews. However, the historical evidence strongly suggests that Uriah and Jefferson Levy and other Nunez descendants were not particularly “religious,” as it’s clear that they did not regularly attend synagogue services nor took part in other aspects of Judaism such as holding Passover seders and celebrating bar and bat mitzvahs.

What follows is a concise rundown on some of that distinguished and accomplished family members’ religiosity.

As I wrote in Saving Monticello, Dr. Nunez (known in Portugal as Samuel Nunes Ribiero) became a close friend of John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church, when the English cleric lived in Savannah in the mid-1730s. And as we have seen, Dr. Nunez was one of the founders of Mickve Israel, which to this day uses the Torah that the Jewish settlers brought with them on their voyage to Georgia in 1733.

Soon after the Nunez family arrived in Savannah, 19-year-old Maria Caetana Nunez (known as Zipporah), Samuel and Rebecca’s oldest daughter, married David Mendes Machado, 38, another Sephardic Jew who had sailed from London, although he may have arrived several years before the Nunez Family and the other 1733 settlers did.

David Machado was a member of another well-to-do Portuguese crypto-Jewish family. He was a theologian and a scholar who was an expert in Hebrew and Jewish traditions, even though he had been forced to live as a Catholic in Portugal.

Less than a year after the wedding, David and Zipporah Machado moved to New York City. They came north after he was appointed hazzan at Congregation Shearith Israel, the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, the first Jewish congregation established in North America. Shearith Israel was founded in 1654.

Jonas Phillips (below), Uriah Levy’s German-born Ashkenazi Jewish maternal grandfather, born Jonah Phaibush, arrived in Charleston. South Carolina, in 1756 to seek his fortune at age 21. A few years later, Jonas Phillips moved to Albany, New York, where he became a Freemason and opened a store in which he sold food and spirits.

After leaving Albany, he married Rebecca Machado (a daughter of David and Zipporah) in 1761, and settled in New York City where he operated a retail store. He also served the Jewish community as a shohet (ritual slaughterer) and bodek (meat examiner). Jonas became a naturalized citizen in April 1771. A few years later he moved his family to Philadelphia where he opened another retail store.

His most famous public religious act was the September 7, 1787, letter Jonas Phillips wrote to the Constitutional Convention, which was debating what would become the U.S. Constitution. Identifying himself as “one of the people called Jews of the City of Philadelphia,” he called on the body to provide “all men” in the Constitution the “natural and unalienable Right to worship almighty God according to their own Conscience and understanding.”

Jonas Phillips was instrumental in raising funds to purchase a new building for Mikveh Israel Synagogue in Philadelphia in 1782, and was elected the president of that Spanish and Portuguese Congregation, which had been established in 1740. As the head of the congregation, he invited George Washington to attend the dedication ceremonies of its new building.

Uriah Levy’s second cousin, Mordecai Manuel Noah (1785-1851), a well-known American diplomat and journalist, was the recipient of a famous letter from Thomas Jefferson in which the Sage of Monticello expressed his views on freedom of religion and Judaism. 

In 1818, Mordecai Noah (below)—one of the best-known American Jews in the Early Republic—had given a speech at Shearith Israel in New York, a copy of which made its way to Monticello. Jefferson wrote to Noah on May 28, saying he had read the speech “with pleasure and instruction, having learnt from it some valuable facts about Jewish history which I did not know before.” 

Jefferson went on to denounce “religious intolerance,” which he called “a vice.” He concluded that the only “antidote” to religious intolerance would be federal laws that protected “our religious as they do our civil rights by putting all on an equal footing.” 

As for Uriah Levy, a late 20th century magazine article about him bore the headline, “When Monticello had a Mezuzah.” Even though the words were not meant to be taken literally, a careful search in recent years for signs that one or more mezuzahs adorned door frames at Monticello during the long (1834-1923) Levy Family ownership came up empty.

That absence is another reason that historians believe that—though Uriah Levy was an outspoken and proud Jew; was the victim of vicious anti-Semitism during his 50-year Navy career; and an ardent admirer of Thomas Jefferson because of his dedication to religious freedom—there is little evidence that he formally practiced the religion of his ancestors.

Levy likely limited his Judaic practice to being a member of Shearith Israel in New York where his great grandfather David Machado had served as hazzan a century before. And by becoming the first president of Washington Hebrew Congregation, which formed in 1852.

One other thing: As I noted in Saving Monticello, in 1855, Uriah Levy, along with many other naval officers, had been dropped from the Navy's active-duty lists. He fought his removal and based his defense on anti-Semitism. During a lengthy trial, Levy made a long passionate speech in which he trumpeted his Judaism.

“My case,” he said, “is the case of every Israelite in the Union.” He then asked rhetorically: “Are the thousands of [Jewish people], in their dispersion throughout the earth, who look to America as a land bright with promise, are they now to learn, to their sorrow and dismay, that we too have sunk into the mire of religious intolerance and bigotry?”

Elected to the Jewish American Hall of Fame in 1988, UPL was honored by the U.S. Navy with the naming of a World War II destroyer escort the U.S.S. Levy. And the first permanent Jewish Chapel built by American armed forces, the Commodore Levy Chapel at the Naval Station in Norfolk, Virginia, was dedicated in his name in 1959.

Not to mention the U.S. Naval Academy’s imposing Commodore Uriah P. Levy Jewish Center and Chapel (in photo, above), which opened its doors in 2005.

And there’s this: The tombstone Uriah Levy later erected on his mother’s grave at Monticello (below) includes the Hebrew month and year of her death. It is inscribed: “To the memory of Rachel Phillips Levy, Born in New York, 23 of May 1769, Married 1787. Died 7, of IYAR, (May) 5591, A.B. (1839) at Monticello, Va.”

One of Uriah Levy’s brothers, the peripatetic sea captain Jonas Phillips Levy, like his brother Uriah, took part in religious affairs in the mid-nineteenth century, and seems to have taken a bigger role in practicing his religion. At least he did when he and his family were living in the Nation’s Capital in 1862 and he became an active member of Washington Hebrew Congregation and is credited with making the first monetary contribution to that synagogue after its founding that year.

As for Jonas’ son, Jefferson Levy, the globe-trotting Gilded Age millionaire real estate and stock speculator and three-term member of Congress from New York City, seems not to have been particularly religious.

He likely was a member of Shearith Israel, since he is buried in Beth Olam Cemetery in Queens, near his Uncle Uirah, in a section associated with Shearith Israel. His gravestone contains no Hebrew words, though. JML’s brother and business partner, L. Napoleon Levy (1854-1921), on the other hand, was a mover and shaker at Shearith Israel.

 As I noted in this newsletter two years ago, L.N. Levy served as the congregation’s president for much of the time between 1895 and 1921, the year of his death 1921.  

EVENTS AND COMMERCE:  I have a growing number of events scheduled later this summer and into the fall, most of them for my new book, The Unlikely War Hero, a slice-of-life biography of the extraordinary Vietnam War story of Doug Hegdahl, the youngest and lowest ranking American prisoner held in Hanoi during the war.

I’m also lining up talks, podcasts and other events for the new paperback version of Lafayette: Idealist General.

Many of my upcoming events are speaking engagements for historic preservation and other groups. Some are open to the public. For details, go to this page on my website: marcleepson.com/events

If you’d like to arrange a talk on The Unlikely War Hero, Saving Monticello, Lafayette, or any of my other books, please email me at marcleepson@gmail.com  

To order signed copies of my books, go to https://bit.ly/BookOrdering 

This issue is dedicated in loving memory to my brother, Evan Leepson (July 18, 1947 – June 12, 2025), a man of deep religious faith.