How Jewish Was Alexander Hamilton? And How Anti-Semitic Were His Contemporaries?

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.

Read more at Jewish Review of Books

More about: Alexander Hamilton, American founding, American Jewish History, Anti-Semitism, West Indies

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF