Credit...Richard Drew/Associated Press

By Jonathan D. Sarna

Mr. Sarna is a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis and the author, most recently, of “Coming to Terms With America: Essays on Jewish History, Religion and Culture.”

Last week the New York City Council voted unanimously to remove a statue of Thomas Jefferson from the Council chamber in City Hall. The decision was not a surprise; Black and Latino lawmakers have long lobbied for its removal, given Jefferson’s tarnished history as the owner of some 600 humans. Amid the debate over race, history and the statue, it is important to understand the reason Jefferson was placed there in the first place. Uriah P. Levy, the Jewish naval hero who donated the statue, by Pierre-Jean David d’Angers, in 1834, intended it to serve as a symbol of religious liberty.

Jefferson, for all of his blindness concerning the evils of slavery, championed religious liberty in Virginia and in the nation as a whole. “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others,” he wrote in “Notes on the State of Virginia” in 1781. “But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god.” And he specifically championed the rights of Jews. He expressed pride that the University of Virginia, whose founding he considered one of his supreme achievements, both accepted Jews and “set the example of ceasing to violate the rights of conscience by any injunctions on the different sects respecting their religion.”

Even as he denied his enslaved people their liberty, Jefferson espoused high-minded views concerning religious liberty as well as the “inalienable rights” that he detailed in the Declaration of Independence. Mr. Levy, like many Jews, honored him for that.

Born in 1792 into one of America’s leading Jewish families, Mr. Levy ran away from home as a boy of 10; a decade later he entered the U.S. Navy, hoping to serve in the War of 1812. He briefly fell into British hands. When freed, he was awarded an independent naval command. His unorthodox path to power was resented by his fellow officers. They thought that a naval commander should be better bred.

They also resented him for being a Jew. Indeed his faith cost him, again and again. In 1816 one such dispute with a fellow officer escalated from epithets to fisticuffs and then, finally a duel. Only Mr. Levy walked away. Over the next 30 years, Mr. Levy would be court martialed six times, each for responding to antisemitic slights.

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Pierre-Jean David d’Angers bronze of American naval officer Uriah P. Levy.Credit...Getty Images

“My parents were Israelites,” he explained in 1857. “I was forced to encounter a large share of the prejudice and hostility by which, for so many ages, the Jew has been pursued.” Not more than one in 1,000 Americans were Jews at that time, but anti-Jewish prejudice was common. When Mr. Levy’s second cousin, Mordecai M. Noah, ran for the position of New York sheriff in 1822, his defeat was produced, according to The New Jersey Eagle, “by a violent, covetous and persecuting spirit of religious intolerance.”

Prejudice over his religion, which he faced in the Navy, didn’t affect his business. Across New York’s Greenwich Village, Mr. Levy purchased real estate that appreciated rapidly. His fortune in hand, he set his mind toward two major efforts: to end flogging in the Navy and to elevate the memory of Thomas Jefferson. The former campaign achieved success in 1850, when corporal punishment in the Navy was abolished.

In 1834, Mr. Levy contracted, paid for and shipped two likenesses of Jefferson to America — one for Congress, cast in bronze, and the other, its painted plaster model, for New York. The former now stands in the Capitol rotunda, after a roundabout journey that included a stint on the White House grounds while politicians argued over which great statesmen deserved such honors.

But statues were just a piece of Mr. Levy’s efforts. Upon learning that Monticello had fallen into terrible disrepair, Mr. Levy arranged to purchase and rehabilitate the property. “The homes of great men,” he argued, “should be protected and preserved as monuments to their glory.” His family held the property into the 20th century.

And yet, for all of his noble intentions, Mr. Levy also kept enslaved persons at Monticello. The contradiction at the heart of Jefferson’s life — between high-minded ideals of freedom and the base horrors of slavery — continued.

Today visitors to Monticello learn about the Levy family and about the enslaved people who worked there. For a long time in the 20th century, both subjects were taboo.

In erecting the statues and preserving Monticello, Mr. Levy hoped to promote appreciation of Thomas Jefferson, particularly his stance on religious liberty. As a Jew who suffered so much persecution on account of his own religion, he appreciated Jefferson’s role in creating and advancing what is today known as the Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom (1786). Its ringing declaration that “all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities” justified Mr. Levy’s own lifelong battle to serve, as a Jew, in the Navy.

Those who now seek to remove the statue that Mr. Levy gifted to the people of New York view the gift as “a constant reminder of the injustices that have plagued communities of color since the inception of our country,” as a letter to the mayor from members of the Black and Latino Caucus explained. Through this lens, the statue symbolizes the horrors of slavery, which Jefferson was indeed guilty of perpetrating. But history, like Jefferson himself, is layered and complex. To Mr. Levy, who donated it, the very same statue served as a symbol of religious liberty. Mr. Levy considered it a tribute to the man who, he wrote, “did much to mould our Republic in a form in which a man’s religion does not make him ineligible for political or governmental life.”

Statues can convey multiple messages, as can historical memory. Rather than choosing between the memory of racial injustice and the embrace of religious liberty, let the d’Angers statue serve as a reminder that Jefferson embodied both at once — as did Mr. Levy. Pondering the many complexities and contradictions inherent in their lives may offer valuable lessons concerning our own.

Jonathan D. Sarna is a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University. He is the author, most recently, of “Coming to Terms With America: Essays on Jewish History, Religion and Culture.”

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