A new documentary, The Levys of Monticello, the fascinating story of a Jewish family that owned Thomas Jefferson’s historic Virginia residence, Monticello, is being released on November 24 on VOD and digital platforms throughout the US, including Apple TV, Amazon, Vudu, Google Play YouTube Movies, and ChaiFlicks.
The movie, directed by Steven Pressman, tells a unique story that touches on many critical and sometimes contradictory aspects of the American Jewish experience, particularly antisemitism.
“You have to tell the whole story, the good, the bad, and the ugly, or else it doesn’t have credibility. We need to engage, we need to learn from it,” said Daniel P. Jordan, director of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, one of many historians who is interviewed in the film.
The film details how a very unusual and distinguished Jewish family who purchased Monticello in the 19th century later came under fire from antisemites who felt that a site important to American history should not be owned by Jews.
The film sketches a brief portrait of Jefferson, America’s third president and one of the authors of the Declaration of Independence, who is credited with insisting on the separation between church and state. A brilliant thinker, he was a mass of contradictions. Jefferson owned slaves and enjoyed the high life, such as ordering expensive wines, and designed Monticello to reflect his love for Italian Renaissance architecture.
Bad with money, he got into debt, so after his death, his beloved Monticello had to be sold to pay his creditors. It was briefly owned by a businessman, who sold the then-decrepit plantation to Uriah Phillips Levy. Born in 1792 in Philadelphia to a family of Portuguese immigrants who had fled persecution in Europe in the 1750s, Uriah became the first Jewish commodore in the US Navy, the equivalent of a rear admiral. He faced many court martials on trumped-up charges, and waged a successful campaign to ban flogging as a punishment in the Navy.
Understanding the importance of Monticello long before historical preservation was a developed concept, Uriah also spent a fortune in restoring the home and grounds to their former glory. He used Monticello mainly as a vacation home. Notably, his mother, Rachel Levy, was buried on the grounds.
Levy died during the Civil War and left Monticello to the US government to be used as a school for agriculture for the orphans of naval officers, but the Union government would not accept it as a donation and the Confederate government seized it. After the war, his nephew, Jefferson Monroe Levy, managed to take it back and bought out the other heirs. He spruced Monticello up once again, and the details of how he ran it are very entertaining. Jefferson, who eventually became a congressman, was a tireless entertainer who loved showing the property to guests and hosted several presidents there.
But not everyone was charmed by him. He had to fight antisemitism. For example, a wealthy woman, who did not approve of his lavish interior decoration and was hostile towards him because he was Jewish, mounted a sophisticated campaign to have Monticello taken away from him. She called him an “alien,” an “outsider,” and an “oriental potentate,” insisting that the government should own the estate. “If the White House is for sale, then I will consider an offer for the sale of Monticello but not before,” he wrote in response.
The home becomes a museum
Eventually, he, too, like the home’s original owner, was in dire financial straits and sold it in the early 1920s to a group of financiers who created the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, turning the house into a museum. Reportedly, he wept when the sale became final.
Monticello is located in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a violent white supremacist rally shocked the world in 2017 with crowds bearing torches and chanting antisemitic slogans. Several of the historians interviewed for the film commented on this confluence and pointed out that Charlottesville was one of the early centers of Ku Klux Klan activity.
As antisemitism flares up in the US on a scale not seen in decades following the current Israel-Hamas War, some of the comments from historians in the film about an American Jewish family fighting antisemitism seem especially prescient.
Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University, said in the film: “Even among my own students assume that antisemitism is something of a historical subject, something that existed in the past, and then comes Charlottesville.
“‘The Jews will not replace us!’ A lot of Jews didn’t even understand what that was about, not realizing that in white nationalist circles; the idea that the white community was being replaced by Jews and displaced by them had been growing... It never goes away and it’s never restricted only to Jews. It may start with the Jews, but it never ends with the Jews,” he added.