[3] He was a cadet at the Virginia Military Institute and served in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War, including at the Battle of New Market.

[10]: 3  His father was a cotton merchant[9] and bookbinder, "a good writer and a well-read man, who possessed the complete works of Maimonides".

[16] He was Corporal of the Guard that accompanied the coffin of Stonewall Jackson (a Virginia Military Institute instructor) at his burial in Lexington in 1863.

[10]: 43 [13] He and other cadets from VMI marched eighty miles north and fought at the Battle of New Market, providing crucially needed reinforcements against the army of Union General Franz Sigel.

Wounded in the fight, he recovered and was reassigned with other surviving cadets to serve as drill instructors for new Confederate recruits.

Shortly before the end of the war, he joined a last-ditch effort to defend Lexington during Grant's Richmond-Petersburg campaign.

[19] In Cincinnati he began the study of sculpture[4] at the Art School of J. Insco Williams and in the studio of Thomas Dow Jones.

[8] He was admitted into the Society of Artists, Berlin, and at age 29 was the first foreigner to win the Michael Beer Prix de Rome, for a bas relief entitled Israel.

[20]: 24 Among the visitors to his studio were: Here also he made the acquaintance of Franz Liszt and Cardinal Gustave von Hohenlohe, the Papal representative of Austria.

On leaving there he was given by the municipal authorities the Tower of Belisarius on the Pincian Hill overlooking the Borghese Gardens, which furnished him a home for the rest of his years, while he took a studio and work rooms in the Via Fausta and just off the Piazza del Popolo.

[24]: 148  After graduating from Howard University, Alice became a schoolteacher and married Daniel Hale Williams in 1898, who was also mixed race.

In 1872, in Berlin, he met Fedor Encke (1851–1926), the "illegitimate grandson of King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia.

[10]: i  The pair "traveled together often and socialized with Europe's elites, including Hungarian composer Franz Liszt, French actress Sarah Bernhardt and Queen Margherita of Italy.

"[9] About this relationship, Ezekiel was always circumspect in his letters and memoirs, referring to Encke only as his "traveling companion" and "my dear friend.

Ezekiel translated his Italian title into the English "Sir" on his visiting cards, resulting in the honorific by which he became known in English-speaking countries.

The inscription on his grave reads "Moses J. Ezekiel Sergeant of Company C Battalion of Cadets of the Virginia Military Institute."

But he failed to realize, like other 19th-century artists, that noble thoughts alone do not guarantee that the works they inspire will be great art… he frequently sacrificed his design to accurate depiction and photographic truth.

[5] Ezekiel's sculptures of Confederate heroes are the most visible manifestation of, and a significant factor in the legitimacy of, the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, which he espoused.

"But no monument exemplifies the Lost Cause narrative better than Ezekiel's Confederate Memorial in Arlington, where the woman representing the South appears to be protecting the black figures below.

"[5] On August 20, 2017, in the aftermath of the Unite the right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia — members of Ezekiel's extended family sent a letter to the Washington Post, asking for the Arlington monument's removal: Like most such monuments, this statue intended to rewrite history to justify the Confederacy and the subsequent racist Jim Crow laws.

Lists of Ezekiel's works are found in the introduction to his Memoirs,[11]: 70–73  in an obituary in Art and Archaeology,[21] and in the New York Times.

67 items); the typed manuscript of Ezekiel's autobiography, Memoirs from the Baths of Diocletian, and miscellaneous printed material.

"[17] Ezekiel's Memoirs, a fundamental source, were unknown until they were rediscovered in the Hebrew Union Archives by the two rabbis, who after much editorial work, prepared them for publication in 1975.

[1] Some additional material is in the archives of Congregation Beth Ahabah, of Richmond,[13] which contains the archive of Jacob Ezekiel's synagogue, Kahal Kadosh Beth Shalome, the Hebrew Union College of Cincinnati, on whose board of directors Jacob was secretary, and the organizations such as B'nai Brith and United Daughters of the Confederacy that commissioned sculptures. '

Ezekiel was portrayed by Josh Zuckerman in the 2014 film Field of Lost Shoes, which depicted the Battle of New Market.