Jeptha
Moses Jacob Ezekiel (Richmond, VA 1844–1917 Rome, Italy)
Bronze relief, 1898
Inscribed: J E P T H A; He loved his neighbor as himself; ME Rome 1898
Cincinnati Skirball Museum, gift of Cecil L. Striker
In his memoirs, renowned Jewish sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel describes at some length the summer of 1896, when he visited the American West with his sister, Sallie (Sarah Israel Ezekiel), and nephew and niece, Jeptha and Grace Workum, children of another sister, Hannah Ezekiel Workum. Ezekiel recounts the group’s adventures at Mammoth Hot Springs in Montana; “the great wonder of wonders called Old Faithful” in Yellowstone Park; and fishing expeditions including one in which “Jeptha was in a perfect glow of delight and found a hole out of which he hauled sixteen magnificent trout.” Soon after the group’s arrival back in Cincinnati, Jeptha became ill. Following a diagnosis of typhoid fever and subsequent surgery for a liver problem, Jeptha continued to decline, and on September 15, Ezekiel watched his favorite nephew pass away. “The doctor held his pulse, and I saw that beautiful pure life ebbing away until the last, when his Uncle Julius Freiberg and I said prayers for the dead.” Jeptha was thirty-six years old.
Two years later, back in Rome, Ezekiel described Jeptha in bronze as he had in words: “My nephew was a man of mental force and physical perfection…he was of undying loyalty and in everyday existence relieved every distress that came under his notice. None of us knew until after his death how many widows and orphans he had always supported.” In his bronze tribute to his nephew, Ezekiel depicts Jeptha with a fishing rod on his shoulder.
Jeptha Workum was the son of Levi Workum and Hannah Ezekiel Workum. In 1855 Levi Workum and Julius Freiberg founded the wholesale liquor business Freiberg & Workum, which eventually became the largest producers and merchandisers of whiskey in Ohio and Kentucky. After Levi Workum died in 1883, Julius Freiberg reorganized the firm and took as directors his two sons, J. Walter and Maurice J. Freiberg, as well as Levi’s two sons, Jeptha L. and Ezekiel L. Workum. Just a year before Jeptha’s death, in 1895, the company moved to East Front Street in Cincinnati, described in the company’s Golden Anniversary publication as “a commodious building fifty-two feet front, two hundred feet deep, and five stories high…It has a private siding where cars can be loaded and unloaded, this saving the time necessary to cart goods to and from the railroad depots.”
The sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel was a Richmond-born American patriot and expatriate who lived in Rome for more than forty years; a Confederate soldier who fought in the Battle of Newmarket; a host to the rich and famous in his home and studio in the ancient Baths of Diocletian, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Franz Liszt, Mark Twain, Kaiser Wilhelm II, J.P. Morgan, as well as kings, presidents, and heads of state. He achieved many firsts—the first cadet of Jewish descent to attend Virginia Military Institute; the first Jewish sculptor to create a bust of a living rabbi (see marble of Isaac Mayer Wise in this exhibition); the first Jewish sculptor to be commissioned by an American Jewish society (B’nai B’rith for Religious Liberty in Philadelphia); likely the first non-German to win the Michael Beer Prix de Rome in 1873 from the Berlin Royal Academy of Fine Arts, an award specifically earmarked for Jewish artists to study in Italy for one year; and the first Jewish-American artist to achieve international stature.
Ezekiel moved from Richmond to Cincinnati with his family in 1868 where he came under the influence of sculptor Thomas Dow Jones (1811–1881) before leaving for Europe, where he entered the Berlin Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Ezekiel’s father, Jacob, served as Secretary of the Board of Hebrew Union College and was a charter member of B’nai B’rith, a Jewish service organization founded in 1843.
