In 1790, a Savannah gentleman named De Leon Norden, of Sephardic stock, had written in his will that “None of the Sheftalls need be present” at his funeral. The Sheftalls were German. Even before that—in 1763, across the sea in France—the Spanish and Portuguese Jews of Bordeaux had succeeded in persuading the king to sign an edict expelling all German and Avignonese Jews from Bordeaux. In America, many of the new arrivals had names containing combinations of the word “schine” or “schien,” and so the label “sheeny” was attached to them—an epithet of Sephardic origin. The word was picked up and used generally in the press, and when a fight broke out right in the synagogue in Montreal—with top-hatted gentlemen having at each other with walking sticks and furniture—between old and new Jews, a Montreal newspaper headlined an account of the battle with the words “Bad Sheenies!”
Three things were happening, all interconnected, and all at the same time. The Ashkenazim were beginning to outnumber the older Sephardim, and it was only a matter of time before majority rule would mean that Ashkenazic ritual would have to prevail in synagogues in most American cities—while the Sephardim who insisted on retaining the old would withdraw into their own tight groups, with doors closed to the Germans. Also the first stirrings of the Reform movement were being felt in the land. Reform—with rebuke for existing forms inherent in the very word—was by its nature incompatible with traditional Sephardic orthodoxy. Reform, an attempt to bring Judaism “up to date,” to make Judaism appear to be at home with existing American religious patterns, was attacked by traditionalists as a subversive attempt to “Christianize” Judaism. Under Reform, women would come down from their secluded balconies in synagogues, and worship side by side with their husbands. Men would take off their tall silk hats. Synagogues would look more like churches. English would replace Hebrew.
And while all this was happening, the oldest Jewish families were watching with dismay as their children and grandchildren seemed to be slipping away from the faith. It is an ironic fact that the heirs and assigns of men and women who had made such an arduous journey to America in order to preserve their faith should have begun to abandon it once they were here. But that was happening. Grandchildren of old Sephardic families had begun, by the early 1800’s, to marry into the Ashkenazic group, but some of them were doing something even worse than that. They were marrying Christians, and converting to Christianity.
The granddaughter of a wealthy Jewish businessman was suing to break her grandfather’s will, which provided that she could not partake of a large family trust if she married a non-Jew. She wanted her share of her grandfather’s money, none of the clumsy entanglements of his religion, and her Christian fiancé. It might have happened yesterday in Manhattan. It happened in Charleston in 1820. She won her case.
And was something else happening to the Sephardim? Were the long inbred centuries exacting a quirky genetic toll? Certainly, by the nineteenth century, eccentrics were no rarity among the Old Guard, and few families were without their “strange” members. More and more, moving down the laddered generations in Malcolm Stern’s huge book, the notation “Insane” appears next to various names, as does the comment “Unmarried.” Spinster aunts and bachelor uncles were becoming the rule now, rather than the exception. The families, once so prolific, seemed on the verge of becoming extinct.
15
THE U.S. NAVY SURRENDERS AT LAST!
Uriah P. Levy, in the meantime, had been continuing with his crusade to have Jews treated as the equals of Christians. He had gone on with his lecturing and scolding of fellow Jews who took insults lying down, who responded to slurs by turning the other cheek. He was a frequent writer of peppery letters to the editor, and was otherwise securing his reputation as a firebrand. He had also decided—since he no longer had Navy duties to occupy him—that it was time for him to make some money.
New York in the early nineteenth century had become a more important seaport than either Newport or Philadelphia. The completion of the Erie Canal, “linking East to West,” in 1825, secured New York’s position as the maritime—hence commercial, and hence money—capital of the United States. In that year alone, five hundred new businesses were started in the city, and twelve banks and thirteen marine insurance companies opened their doors. The population topped 150,000, and—an unheard-of thing in America—one of the city newspapers announced that it would publish on Sundays. The Park Theatre declared that it would present grand opera, and number 7 Cherry Street became the first private house in America to be lit by gas.
Maiden Lane, four blocks north of Wall Street, had been the division between the commercial and residential sections of the city. South of Maiden Lane, the city was abustle with business; to the north lay houses with gardens, estates, and farms. Greenwich Village had been a separate village, approached by crossing a stone bridge at Canal Street, but, by 1825, the commercial part of the city had encroached so far north that it was pointed out that no more than “the width of one block” separated the city from the suburban Village, and the most daring of the speculators prophesied that Broadway would one day extend as far north as Tenth Street. Today, of course, it continues on through the length of Manhattan, through the Bronx, Yonkers, and into Tarrytown. Washington Square, at the northern edge of Greenwich Village, had been the city’s potter’s field until 1823, when its development into a park was begun and the tall red-brick mansions were built on its perimeter. This helped establish Fifth Avenue—which sprouted from the northern side of the park—as the fashionable residential address it was to become. When Washington Square Park was completed in 1827, it was felt that the city would never reasonably be expected to grow north of Fourteenth Street. Within a year or so, even a Fourteenth Street boundary seemed too constricting. It did not take especial real estate shrewdness to see that Manhattan island, shaped like an elongated footprint and growing upward from the toe, had no way to expand except to the north. It was in this northern real estate that Uriah Levy decided to invest his Navy savings. He bought, in 1828, three rooming houses, two on Duane Street and one on Greenwich Street.
It was quickly clear that his unofficial discharge from Navy duty had put him in the right place at the right time. Within a few months, he was able to sell one of his Duane Street houses for nearly twice what he had paid for it. He bought more real estate, sold it, and bought more, parlaying each deal into something bigger than the last. Such was the booming state of Manhattan real estate that, within just four years, Uriah Levy was a rich man. He began to cut a considerable figure in New York’s fledgling society—which had never been the “set thing” it had been in Philadelphia—and was able to afford to turn his affairs over to a staff of assistants and to take off for Europe, where he acquired, among other things, a Savile Row tailor and “a broadcloth frock coat with velvet collar; white satin stock shaped with whalebone; pantaloons of wool and silk jersey; two linen suits; white pleated shirts with gold buttons; light colored fawn gloves, a walking stick with ivory knob,” according to his tailor’s bill.
Rich almost overnight, still a bachelor—and, it began to seem, a confirmed one—Uriah was now able to indulge himself in personal whims and fancies, and, after his rejection from the Navy, this must have given him a certain amount of personal satisfaction. One of his enthusiasms was Thomas Jefferson, whom he regarded as “one of the greatest men in history.… He did much to mold our Republic in a form in which a man’s religion does not make him ineligible for political or governmental life.” In the summer of 1833, he conceived the idea of personally commissioning a statue of Jefferson and presenting it to the United States government. It was a totally new concept. Individuals had never before given statues of American heroes to the public. Perhaps Uriah felt that by celebrating Jefferson—the champion of tolerance—in this public way he could get back at the United States Navy for its snubs. In any case, in Paris Uriah gave the assignment to Pierre Jean David d’Angers, considered one of the greatest sculptors of his day, who used a Sully portrait of Jefferson
, which Uriah borrowed from General Lafayette, as a likeness. It took d’Angers nearly a year to complete the sculpture, a massive bronze which depicts Jefferson standing astride two books, a quill pen poised in his right hand and, in his left, a scroll on which the Declaration of Independence is inscribed in its entirety. Uriah arranged for the statue’s shipment to Washington, and wrote a formal letter of presentation to Congress.
In its customary fashion, Congress did a certain amount of hemming and hawing over the unusual gift, and there was a good deal of debate over whether it should be accepted or not. What sort of “precedent” would be set by accepting a gift like this? Congress wondered. And from an expected quarter—the Navy Department—came disgruntled noises to the effect that it was “presumptuous” for a “mere lieutenant” to present a statue of a great President. Once more, Uriah was being called pushy and overassertive. But at last, when Representative Amos Lane of Indiana said bluntly that he saw no reason why the statue should be turned down simply “because it had been presented by a lieutenant instead of a commander,” the Congress seemed to recognize the silliness of its behavior, and the Jefferson statue was accepted by a substantial majority. It was placed in the Capitol Rotunda. Several years later, it was moved to the north front lawn of the White House, where it stood for thirty years. Then it was returned to the Capitol, where it presently stands, to the right of Washington’s statue, the only statue in the Rotunda ever donated by a private citizen.*
Uriah Levy may, in a way, have begun to identify himself with his hero at this point in his life. Like Jefferson, Uriah possessed a certain genius and had experienced command. But now the great moments of his life must have seemed past. Like Uriah, Jefferson had been rich, but, Uriah may have remembered, he died penniless and heavily in debt. Uriah’s thoughts turned next to Monticello, the extraordinary manor house Jefferson had designed and built for himself on a mountaintop near Charlottesville, Virginia.
When Jefferson died, Monticello went to his daughter, Martha Jefferson Randolph, along with 409 acres, all that remained of what had been a 10,000-acre estate. By 1828, she could no longer afford to run the great house, and she advertised it for sale at $71,000. But Monticello proved itself something of a white elephant. In design, it was revolutionary for its day, built like a temple and lopped with a huge octagonal tower and dome. Guests had complained that for all the aesthetic pleasure the place provided, it was not really comfortable. Inside, it contained innovative oddities. There were no bedrooms in the conventional sense. Sleepers used platforms in curtained-off cubicles. In 1830, Mrs. Randolph’s asking price had dropped to $11,000. A year later, she announced she would accept $7,000. At that price, Monticello was bought by a Charlottesville man named James Barclay, an eccentric who cared nothing about Thomas Jefferson’s house; the house did not figure in his plans at all. Barclay had a grandiose scheme to plant the mountaintop with mulberry trees and grow silkworms, in order to corner the world’s silk market. By the time Uriah Levy made what he described as a “pilgrimage” to Monticello in 1836, the silkworm program had been abandoned. The house, left empty, had been attacked by vandals and the weather. Uriah rode on horseback up a rutted roadway that had once been a gracious drive and found the house almost in a state of ruin. He bought the house and land for $2,700, from a grateful Barclay.
Because he did indeed get Monticello at a bargain price, and because he was regarded somewhat coolly by his new neighbors—who resented him more for being a Yankee than a Jew—rumors began, in Charlottesville, about Uriah’s obtaining Monticello through some sort of chicanery, and these stories persisted and have been perpetuated in history texts. In one tale, Uriah, having learned that a wealthy Bostonian had decided to buy Monticello for a considerably higher figure, hurried to Charlottesville and put in his low bid before the Bostonian’s bid arrived by mail. Another story, even more unlikely, is that Uriah—who never drank—engaged a prospective buyer (from Philadelphia) in “a drinking bout,” and then bought Monticello while the Philadelphian was recovering from a hangover. None of these stories is remotely true, and the purchase was carried out in a perfectly straightforward and orderly manner. Uriah immediately began a long and costly program of renovation and restoration, paying particular attention to the cherry and walnut parquet floors, the room that Jefferson had used for his study, the area he had used as a sleeping room, and the place where President Madison had slept. He tried to recover, wherever he could, Monticello’s original furnishings, most of which had been sold and scattered about the country, and he hired gardeners to restore the grounds in accordance with the elaborate plans drawn up by Jefferson. In 1837, Uriah bought 960 adjoining acres to protect the property, and a few months later he added 1,542 acres more. In the middle of this happy—if at times lonely—activity, a surprising thing happened. Suddenly, in a commission signed by President Andrew Jackson, Uriah learned that he had been promoted—after twenty years as a lieutenant—to the rank of commander. All at once things were looking up again.
Though Uriah certainly didn’t need the Navy pay, he immediately applied for sea duty and—again—was delighted and surprised to receive orders assigning him to proceed “with as little delay as possible” to Pensacola, Florida, where he was to report to the war sloop Vandalia as its commanding officer. When he arrived in Pensacola, however, and went aboard the Vandalia, he must have wondered whether his old enemies in the Navy Establishment weren’t after him again and giving him this assignment as a cruel joke. The Vandalia was barely afloat. Her hull was rotting, her decks were collapsing, and her guns and metalwork were thick with rust. Her rats had not yet left her, though, and were in evidence everywhere. The Vandalia’s crew was, if anything, in even sorrier shape. It seemed to be composed of the ragtag and bobtail of the Navy—drunkards, thieves, and misfits of every variety. The incorrigibles of every command seemed to have filtered, at last, down to the Vandalia. When Uriah came aboard, only one junior officer bothered to salute him. A number of the crew were missing and, after a tour of Pensacola taverns had rounded up most of them—protesting that they saw no reason why they should not be permitted to drink during duty hours—many were in such an alcoholic state that they had to be lashed into hammocks on the deck. But Uriah was unfazed. With his customary self-assurance, he wrote to his mother that: “I am certainly one of the most capable of putting the corvette in seaworthy condition.” On September 7, 1838, he set about refurbishing his ship. By February the following year she was ready to sail.
As the Vandalia moved out of the harbor into the Gulf of Mexico, there was a certain amount of comment on shore as a decorative detail of Uriah was noticed. He had whimsically ordered the Vandalia’s guns painted a bright blue. It was his way of giving the ship his personal stamp. It was also very un-Navy. It was, again, his insistence on being his own man, stating his own terms.
The Vandalia’s mission was to call on various Mexican ports along the Gulf Coast and to offer support—moral or, if needed, physical—to American consuls who were the butts of waves of anti-American feeling during a period of revolutionary upheaval. In one port after another, the appearance of the now snappy Vandalia with her sparkling bright blue guns was enough to quell Mexican tempers and reassure United States consulates. And Uriah, in full-dress uniform, clearly relished being rowed ashore to be escorted to consular dinner parties, where he inevitably was first to raise a toast “To the flag!”
On board his ship, too, he was held in a curious kind of awe. The first day out he announced that he was making a few innovations in regard to disciplinary measures. There would, for example, be no floggings carried out on his ship while he was in command of it. To his junior officers, this was an astounding announcement. How could discipline possibly be carried out, they wanted to know, without the threat of the cat, particularly with a crew that contained the dregs of the naval service? One officer, Lieutenant Hooe, asked Uriah whether he had lost his reason. Flogging was a Navy tradition. To promise that there would be no flogging was an open inv
itation to mutiny. But Uriah was firm.
On the third night out, one of the most regular offenders in the crew, who had smuggled whiskey aboard, fell over the railing in a drunken stupor and was lost, which left the Vandalia in slightly better shape. But the men who remained were better behaved only in a matter of degree. Drunkenness and petty thievery were diseases endemic to the Navy, and Uriah devised unique punishments for these offenses. A man found guilty of stealing would have hung from his neck a wooden sign painted with the word THIEF. A sailor found drunk on duty would wear a sign, cut in the shape of a bottle, marked A DRUNKARD’S PUNISHMENT. Lieutenant Hooe pronounced these measures not only futile but ridiculous. But after a few weeks at sea, an odd fact had to be admitted: they seemed to be working.
Uriah’s theory was that to make a man look absurd in the eyes of his companions had a much more lasting effect on his behavior than to torture him physically. And he was an early endorser of the notion that a punishment ought to fit the crime. Sometimes this required him to exercise an unusual amount of imagination. One day, for example, a young sailor named John Thompson was brought to Uriah and accused of mocking—by imitating his voice—an officer. Uriah considered the charge, and then, to a mystified crew member, ordered that a few handfuls of seagulls’ feathers be collected. When the feathers arrived, Uriah ordered Thompson to drop his trousers. A small dab of tar was applied to each buttock, and the feathers were then affixed to the tar. The young man was told to stand on deck in this condition for five minutes, to the great amusement of the crew. “If you are going to act like a parrot, you should look like one,” Uriah said.
The Jews in America Trilogy Page 74
