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 on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/american-jewry/11581/ten-duel-commandments/