Alexander Hamilton was one of the founding fathers of the United States. He fought in the Revolutionary War, served as the US secretary of the Treasury and helped create the American system of government and ratify the Constitution. He has been immortalized on the $10 bill and in the widely acclaimed musical Hamilton.
And he may have also been Jewish.
That is the argument put forward by University of Oklahoma historian Prof. Andrew Porwancher in his new book, The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton.
The claim of Hamilton being Jewish may seem startling, as while many of the founding fathers had positive or at least neutral views towards the Jewish people, and Jews enjoyed freedoms in the 13 Colonies unavailable to them in many other places, it was widely thought that Jews were absent from the founding fathers – and certainly from the elite that helped put together the US Constitution.
And yet, Hamilton's history isn't so clear-cut as many of his contemporaries.
Unlike a large majority of the US founding fathers, who held governing posts under the colonial government or were part of the upper-middle class landowning elite, Hamilton was born in differing circumstances. Not a native to the 13 Colonies, America's first Treasury secretary had originally hailed from Nevis, a British colony in the Caribbean.
It is known that Hamilton's father was a Scotsman named James Hamilton. His mother was named Rachel Faucette, a woman identified as half British and half French Huguenot.
But as it is crucial to understand, Alexander Hamilton was born out of wedlock, and as has been popularized by the musical, was a "Son of a whore."
Indeed, his mother is thought to have been a prostitute, though more likely, she may have had an extramarital affair while she was still with her original husband, a man named Johann Michael Lavien.
The couple originally lived in the Danish colony of St. Croix in the Caribbean, where Lavien worked as a merchant. However, she was later convicted of adultery.
This was not with James Hamilton, and in fact historian Michael E. Newton identified the man she had an affair with as master map maker Johan Jacob Cronenberg after translating Danish court records in St. Croix. The two were jailed for months and later, Rachel Faucett left the island. It was then that she met James Hamilton and had a son with him.
So where does Judaism come into play here? The answer lies in Johann Michael Lavien, who may have been Jewish.
This is important, as Danish law at the time banned intermarriages. As such, for Lavien and Faucette to have married, she would have had to convert to Judaism.
This may seem unlikely at first. After all, Lavien was never registered in Danish records as a Jew. However, this may not be a factor.
"I have gone through literally thousands of pages of Danish records and found that Jews are almost never identified as Jews in these records," Porwancher said in an interview with Moment Magazine in 2018.
So while he may not have been labeled a Jew on paper, several other pieces of evidence exist to further support this theory.
For one thing, records show that despite Faucette's nieces and nephews all being baptized, Peter Lavien, the son she had with her husband, was not. Second, we know that Hamilton's own grandson referred to Lavien as Jewish.
And third, and arguably most famously, Hamilton had a Jewish education while growing up on Nevis, which at the time was 25% Jewish.
“There was a Jewish school that Hamilton later told his children that he attended, where we know he began at least rudimentary study of the Torah because he recalls how his teacher would put him on a table so it would be eye level, and he would recite to her the Ten Commandments in Hebrew,” Porwancher told Bloomberg.
The co-author of the Federalist Papers also notably kept a distance from church most of his life, unlike most of his contemporaries, and never accepted communion.
And in his career in the 13 Colonies, and the United States, Hamilton had a close acquaintance with the Jewish community. He had known close ties with the Mendes Seixas family of New York's Shareith Israel congregation, arguably the largest and most notable Jewish community in the 13 Colonies at the time.
Court records from New York State Archives show that nearly every major member of the congregation had been represented by Hamilton at some point.
"Hamilton shares so much in common with New York’s Jewish community," Porwancher said to Bloomberg.
"They are in many respects outsiders, they develop acumen in finance and in languages. They are urban rather than rural. They are entrepreneurial and commercial rather than agrarian. Hamilton is the visionary for America’s future, and Jews, by virtue of their marginality, were effectively forced to become modernizers in order to survive."
Antisemitism was also something Hamilton experienced, when opposing lawyer Gouverneur Morris, who was a prominent statesman at the time, argued that Hamilton's witnesses were not trustworthy on account of being Jewish.
"Morris’s attack lays the predicate for Hamilton to offer the most full-throated denunciation of antisemitism to come from the lips of any American founder," Porwancher explained. "In his closing remarks he lampoons Morris for resorting to antisemitism and he calls on the court to live up to the American creed that justice must be blind to religion.
Hamilton was one of many founding fathers who had positive feelings about the Jewish community. Benjamin Franklin helped fund the construction of the Mikveh Israel synagogue in Philadelphia, for example, and it was with the help of a prominent Jew named Haym Salomon that the continental army was able to stay funded in the tail-end of the war.
But the most famous relationship between the founding fathers and the Jews was with George Washington, who famously wrote a letter to the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, which remains the oldest synagogue building in the US – though the oldest congregation is Shareith Israel in New York City.
In it, Washington promised a separation between church and state, as well as freedom of religion, stating that the US government will give “to bigotry no sanction [and] to persecution no assistance.
“May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants," he wrote: "while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”