It has long been known that Alexander Hamilton was briefly enrolled in a Jewish school in his early years, which were spent on the Caribbean island of Nevis, and that his mother was likely married to a Jewish man. But Andrew Porwancher’s research has led him to the conclusion that Hamilton’s connection to the Jews runs much deeper and influenced his relations with Jews and his attitudes toward religious freedom. In an interview with Arielle Gordon, he explains:

In the 18th century, Christian children were not educated at Jewish schools. [But Hamilton] attended a Jewish school where we know he began a rudimentary study of the Torah in the original Hebrew.

One myth is that Hamilton’s [mother’s first husband]—Johann Michael Levine [often spelled Lavien]—was not Jewish because he does not appear in the Danish records as a Jew. I have gone through . . . thousands of pages of Danish records and found that Jews are almost never identified as Jews in these records. . . . Hamilton’s mother, Rachel Faucette, was born a Gentile. . . . At the time Rachel married Levine, in the Danish Caribbean colony of St. Croix, the convention under Danish marriage law was to ban Jewish-Christian marriages. So ostensibly, if she had converted [to Judaism] prior to the wedding, that would have allowed her to circumvent any sort of legal prohibition to their having an interfaith marriage.

All of Rachel’s nieces and nephews were baptized in St. Croix as infants. We know Levine did not have the son that Rachel bore him baptized. Additionally, Hamilton’s own grandson identified Levine as a Jew. We know that Levine had been involved in business with other Jews at a time when Jews were disproportionately likely to conduct commerce among themselves. . . .

In terms of researching Hamilton’s adult relationships with American Jewry . . . : almost every major figure at Shearith Israel, which was the one synagogue in New York in his day, was represented by Hamilton in court at some point in their life.

I think it is [also] striking that Hamilton was a champion of religious freedom. For instance, Hamilton worked with John Jay to revise the charter for their shared alma mater, Columbia University. One of the changes they made was to open the office of the college presidency to people of all faiths; what is particularly striking about this reform is that other colleges that date back to that era did not make comparable reforms . . . until the 20th century.

Reviewing Stranger Than Fiction, a new history of the 20th-century novel, Joseph Epstein draws attention to what’s missing:

A novelist and short-story writer who gets no mention whatsoever in Stranger Than Fiction is Isaac Bashevis Singer. When from time to time I am asked who among the writers of the past half century is likely to be read 50 years from now, Singer’s is the first name that comes to mind. His novels and stories can be sexy, but sex, unlike in many of the novels of Norman Mailer, William Styron, or Philip Roth, is never chiefly about sex. His stories are about that much larger subject, the argument of human beings with God. What Willa Cather and Isaac Bashevis Singer have that too few of the other novelists discussed in Stranger Than Fiction possess are central, important, great subjects.