The late nineteenth-century Jewish American sculptor Moses Ezekiel (1844 – 1917) was a firm believer in American and Confederate exceptionalism. As Samantha Baskind argues in her new monograph, his thinking and craft were shaped by an outsized historical imagination and a retrospective aesthetic. “More than Judaism,” Baskind writes, “Ezekiel worshipped the past: the artistic past, military past, and Southern past.” Had he been less of a traditionalist, both in his thinking and in his artistic sensibility, he might have made a permanent mark on the history of American sculpture.
At the age of nineteen, while a student at the Virginia Military Academy, Ezekiel experienced combat in the Battle of New Market (May 15, 1864), when his small cadet corps was deployed as a part of a Confederate effort to drive the Union Army out of the Shenandoah Valley. Ezekiel never got over the exhilaration and trauma of that experience, and it informed his art at every turn. Ezekiel was technically skilled, prolific, and passionate. Through his long career, he prepared commemorative sculptures that highlighted several disparate themes, including the glories of American republicanism, religious freedom, military courage, Jewish tradition, and the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. If the themes themselves hadn’t necessarily gone out of fashion by the time he reached his prime, Ezekiel’s approach to articulating them had. His ponderous reliance on symbolism, ornamentation, and mimesis endeared him to the sentimentalists who commissioned his works, but also consigned him to artistic oblivion.
Baskind’s book is biographical in its scope, but because its organization is thematic as opposed to strictly chronological, readers who want to know its subject’s life story from start to finish must be willing to read between its lines. Knowing the basic facts and trajectory of his life is important, however, especially because he led such a complicated and often contradictory existence. A proud son of Virginia, he spent his most productive years living and working in Rome. Outspoken in his advocacy for unfettered religious expression, Ezekiel never stopped being an apologist for the Confederacy. Though he was renowned for his skill and versatility as an artist, he often struggled financially and rarely received the accolades he craved. Many of his most important pieces ended up being discarded, destroyed, abandoned, or lost to time.
Baskind offers a succinct summary of Ezekiel’s career in her assessment of his 1895 monument to the memory of the Jewish American philanthropist Jesse Seligman. The piece disappeared sometime in the 1940s or 1950s. As she writes, the fact of its demise reminds us of “the many errors of Ezekiel’s career: too much allegory, too much classicism, too much storytelling, too many recycled themes.”
Michael Hoberman is a professor of English Studies at Fitchburg State University. He is the author of A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History and New Israel/New England: Jews and Puritans in Early America and co-editor of Jews in the Americas, 1776 – 1826, among other titles. His writings appear in Tablet Magazine and other popular and scholarly venues.
