Philadelphia, 1802.

A ten-year-old boy named Uriah Phillips Levy walked out of his house, went down to the docks, and signed on as a cabin boy on a trading ship.

His family was Sephardic Jewish, descended from Jews who had fled the Spanish Inquisition centuries earlier. His grandfather Jonas Phillips had come to America from Germany in 1756 and fought against the British in the Revolution. His great-great-grandfather on his mother’s side had been one of the original Jewish settlers of Savannah, Georgia in 1733. The family had been in America before America was America.

None of that stopped Uriah from wanting to be at sea.

He came home three years later for one reason. He had a bar mitzvah to attend. His own. He celebrated it at Congregation Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia in 1805, the oldest Jewish congregation in America. Then he went straight back to sea.

By his early twenties he had worked his way up from cabin boy to master and owner of his own vessels in the merchant marine. In 1812, when Britain and America went to war again, he joined the United States Navy as a sailing master. He fought in the Barbary Wars. He fought in the War of 1812 aboard the USS Argus. He was captured by the British and held as a prisoner of war for sixteen months.

He came back and kept going.

What followed was one of the most remarkable and punishing careers in the history of the United States Navy. Levy rose steadily through the ranks. He was also court-martialed six times.

Six.

The charges ranged from legitimate disciplinary disputes to accusations so transparently antisemitic that even his contemporaries noted the pattern. His fellow officers called him a Jew to his face. They questioned whether a man of his religion had any business commanding American sailors. They used every procedural mechanism available to them to push him out. He was dismissed from the Navy twice.

Both times he fought back. He appeared before every board, filed every appeal, hired lawyers, wrote letters, documented everything. He believed, and said so plainly, that he was fighting not just for himself but for every Jewish American who might want to serve their country after him.

He also fought a duel. He killed his opponent.

He kept serving.

In 1855, the Navy convened a special court of inquiry to review the cases of officers who had been dismissed. Levy appeared and delivered a speech defending his record that became one of the most celebrated statements on religious freedom and military service in American history.

“I am an American, a sailor, and a Jew,” he told the court. “My parents were Israelites, and I was nurtured in the faith of my ancestors. In deciding to adhere to it, I have but exercised a right guaranteed to me by the Constitution of my native State, and of the United States, a right given to all men by their Maker. I place before you the sacrifices I have made and the struggles I have maintained, not for the purpose of gaining your sympathy, but to show that I have not been an idler or a coward.”

He was reinstated. Within four months he was promoted to Commodore, the highest rank in the Navy at the time, and placed in command of the entire Mediterranean fleet.

The Navy later appointed him to head its Court Martial Board.

Uriah Levy, court-martialed six times, now presided over the court that had tried to destroy him.

He had also been doing something else with his time and his money.

Thomas Jefferson had died in 1826 drowning in debt. Monticello, his beloved estate in Virginia, had been sold off to pay his creditors and had fallen into serious disrepair. Levy, who admired Jefferson specifically for his championing of religious liberty, including the freedom of Jews to participate fully in American life, found this intolerable.

In 1834 he bought Monticello.

He spent his own money restoring it. He opened it to the public. He commissioned a full-length statue of Jefferson and donated it to the United States government. It stands today in the rotunda of the Capitol building in Washington.

He also spent years campaigning against flogging in the United States Navy. He considered it barbaric, said so repeatedly in official correspondence, and pushed for its abolition until Congress finally banned it. The law passed the year he died.

He died on March 22, 1862, and received a traditional Jewish funeral with full military honors. He had no children. He left Monticello to the United States government in his will, with instructions that if the government wouldn’t take it, it should go to the Commonwealth of Virginia, and if Virginia refused, it should go to the three Sephardic synagogues of Philadelphia, New York, and Newport, to be used as a school for children of all faiths.

Monticello passed to his nephew Jefferson Monroe Levy, who held it until 1923, when the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation finally purchased it for $500,000.  The house that Jefferson built, that America forgot, that a Jewish Navy commodore saved, is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site visited by half a million people a year.

A World War II destroyer escort was named the USS Levy in his honor. It earned five battle stars in the Pacific.

The Jewish chapel at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis is named for him too.

The boy who left home at ten and came back at thirteen for his bar mitzvah. The officer court-martialed six times who ended up running the court. The man who saved Jefferson’s house because Jefferson believed that a man’s religion shouldn’t disqualify him from anything.

Uriah Phillips Levy agreed.

He spent his whole life proving it.