While historians and biographers have long been aware of that Alexander Hamilton attended a Jewish school in the island of Saint Nevis as a child, and of the possibility that his mother’s first husband, Johan Levine, was a Jew, Andrew Porwancher argues that they have misread or underplayed key pieces of evidence. Based on a mass of admittedly circumstantial evidence, Porwancher maintains that there is no reason to doubt that Levine was Jewish, that Hamilton’s mother likely converted to Judaism to marry him, and that Hamilton was at the very least not considered a Christian by the people of Nevis. Porwancher further asserts that this founding father’s upbringing left him sympathetic to Jews as an adult. Adam Kirsch write in his review:

[T]he book’s real subject is not what Jewishness tells us about Hamilton but what Hamilton’s story can tell us about the experience of Jews in his era. In tracing Hamilton’s Jewish connections, Porwancher shows how Jews negotiated the unprecedented freedom of the New World while dealing with lingering religious prejudice, economic rivalry, and legal disabilities. The very fact that there was a Jewish school, or at least a “Jewess,” to teach the young Hamilton is a sign of the surprising ubiquity of Jews in the 18th-century Caribbean.

Hamilton . . . was responsible for what Porwancher calls “the most impassioned denunciation of anti-Semitism in the annals of any founder.” It came during a long-running legal battle in which . . . Hamilton found himself squaring off in New York’s highest court against opposing counsel Gouverneur Morris, a leading politician and one of the drafters of the Constitution. Morris argued that two of [the] key witnesses shouldn’t be trusted because they were Jewish, and “Jews are not to be believed upon oath.”

This prompted an eloquent and successful rebuttal by Hamilton, who declared that Judaism, the religion of the biblical Israelites, was a “pure and holy, happy and Heaven-approved faith.” More, he insisted that justice should be blind to “all differences of faiths or births, of passions or of prejudices—all are called to acknowledge and revere her supremacy.”

If Morris’s appeal to bigotry could fail so dramatically, was prejudice against Jews really as significant a force in early America as Porwancher often suggests? While he finds examples of anti-Jewish language from contemporary letters and newspapers, his frequent use of the term “anti-Semitism” feels anachronistic. Americans in Hamilton’s era did not think about Jews in terms of ideological hatred. Those who did harbor negative feelings were often driven by religious and philosophical ideas about Judaism that had little to do with actual Jews, whom most Americans never encountered.

Established in 2012 and maintaining branches in Europe, North America, and Iran, the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Network claims its goal is merely to show “solidarity” for imprisoned Palestinians. The organization’s leader, however, has admitted to being a representative of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a notorious terrorist group whose most recent accomplishments include murdering a seventeen-year-old girl. As Arsen Ostrovsky and Patricia Teitelbaum point out, Samidoun is just one example of how the European Union allows Iran-backed terrorists to operate in its midst:

The PFLP is a proxy of the Iranian regime, which provides the terror group with money, training, and weapons. Samidoun . . . has a branch in Tehran. It has even held events there, under the pretext of “cultural activity,” to elicit support for operations in Europe. Its leader, Khaled Barakat, is a regular on Iran’s state [channel] PressTV, calling for violence and lauding Iran’s involvement in the region. It is utterly incomprehensible, therefore, that the EU has not yet designated Samidoun a terror group.

According to the Council of the European Union, groups and/or individuals can be added to the EU terror list on the basis of “proposals submitted by member states based on a decision by a competent authority of a member state or a third country.” In this regard, there is already a standing designation by Israel of Samidoun as a terror group and a decision of a German court finding Barakat to be a senior PFLP operative.

Given the irrefutable axis-of-terror between Samidoun, PFLP, and the Iranian regime, the EU has a duty to put Samidoun and senior Samidoun leaders on the EU terror list. It should do this not as some favor to Israel, but because otherwise it continues to turn a blind eye to a group that presents a clear and present security threat to the European Union and EU citizens.