The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton by Andrew Porwancher

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton by Andrew Porwancher Dana Y. Rabin (bio) The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton. By Andrew Porwancher. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. ix + 254 pp. In The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Porwancher promises to reveal the place of Judaism in the life of Alexander Hamilton and to show the influence of Judaism on Hamilton's values, his politics, his economic policies, and his religious toleration. Porwancher claims that "the Hamiltonian-Jewish connections offer us an enriched perspective on the early republic, one that suggests the egalitarian rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence was not an empty promise, even if progress was halting" (9). Unfortunately, the author does not deliver on this promise. The book considers Hamilton's life and the founding fathers and their attitudes about both individual Jewish people and Judaism as a religion. It introduces real Jews in a peripatetic survey of events well known to Jewish historians of the period, featuring prominent Jewish men in the era and their interactions with political and economic affairs including each and every Jewish client that Hamilton represented or advised. The connection between Hamilton and Judaism is traced to his mother Rachel Faucette's marriage to Johan Levine in St. Croix. Porwancher posits that Rachel converted to Judaism in order to marry Levine and that she retained her ties to a Jewish identity even after the union with Levine dissolved, while she had a relationship with Alexander's father James Hamilton, and in the years that she raised Alexander and his brother Peter on Nevis before her death in 1768. The two documented [End Page 316] facts are that Rachel never gave up her married name and that Alexander Hamilton attended a Jewish school on Nevis. Having provided the details of Hamilton's precarious relationship with Jews during his short time in the Caribbean, the book's subsequent chapters take us through Hamilton's life from his move to New York at age 18, his matriculation at King's College (later Columbia University), his involvement in the American Revolution, his work ensuring the passage of the Constitution, his service to the new United States as Secretary of the Treasury, his profession as a lawyer, and his death in a duel with Aaron Burr in 1804. The penultimate chapter on church and state revisits the much-known story of George Washington's letter to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island. Wherever possible, the author introduces Hamilton's relationship with Jews, whether in his practice of law or in his establishment of the Bank of America. The book demonstrates the virulent and widespread antisemitism so common in the American colonies and the early republic. The dismissive and hateful rhetoric of other founding fathers—John Adams, James Madison, John Jay, and particularly Benjamin Franklin—is quoted at length. Porwancher rehearses the conflicts between Federalists and Anti-Federalists and between those colonists who wished to embed a religious test in the Constitution and those who did not, those who believed that religion had a place in the governing structure of the United States and those who did not. The attempt to demonstrate the promise of the Declaration of Independence is belied by its entanglement with histories of racism, slavery, and the extermination of Native Americans. These atrocities formed the bedrock of colonial America and the United States and accompanied the dehumanization of the enslaved, the appropriation of Native American land, and the prejudices that withheld rights from the enslaved and circumscribed those of free people of color. The relationship of any rights bestowed on Jews in the early republic certainly is related to whiteness and an understanding of religious and ethnic groups that might come to be included or partially included in this shifting category. Religious hatred, which had always excluded Jews and Catholics from certain rights of English men, seemed to change in the context of the American colonies where the divides and hierarchies were oriented differently. Throughout the author seems determined to prove that Hamilton believed in the rule of law and its corollary, equality before the law. It is certainly possible that Hamilton was not antisemitic. But the law and its inequalities were...