Moses Elias Levy
Born in Morocco in 1781, Moses Elias Levy established himself as a merchant in the Danish West Indies (today's Virgin Islands) in the early 1800s. From Saint Thomas, he traded with the nearby Spanish island of Puerto Rico, and supplied arms to the Spanish army fighting revolutionary forces in Venezuela. Levy moved to Cuba and tried his hand at sugarcane planting before buying 53,000 acres in Florida, shortly before that territory was transferred from Spain to the United States in 1821. He settled in Florida where he planted sugarcane and hoped to colonize his lands with persecuted Jews from Europe. It was on a trip to recruit colonists that he published "A Plan for the Abolition of Slavery" in London in 1828. His dreams of colonization ended with the devastation of his properties in the Seminole War of 1835-42. Moses Levy died in 1853. His son, David Levy Yulee, was the first Jew to serve in the United States Senate.