Could Alexander Hamilton have been Jewish?
An interesting discussion I came across.
The evidence? Well from Andrew Porwancher, a legal historian and associate professor at the University of Oklahoma who is writing The Jewish Life of Alexander Hamilton….
It depends on if you take the Talmud as a valid reference as to who is Jewish and who is not.
...Hamilton’s mother, Rachel Faucett, a French Huguenot, converted to Judaism when she married Danish merchant Johann Michael Lavien (a variant of Levine) on the island of St. Croix in 1745. At the time, marriage was prohibited between Christians and Jews.
She soon left him and began living with James Hamilton, bearing him two illegitimate sons. Alexander, the youngest, was born in 1755, before Lavien divorced her.
And this is where it can get interesting.
“according to the Talmud, if a gentile woman converts to Judaism and goes back to her gentile ways, she is still considered Jewish in the eyes of Jewish law.”
What we do know is that Hamilton went to a Jewish school where he studied Torah from a Jewess by learning the Ten Commandants in the original Hebrew,
Now did he go because of his Jewish background or because he was illegitimate and thus not allowed in a Christian school?
“Hamilton became an advocate in court for nearly every leading Jewish citizen in New York City,” he notes. “In one case, he had a couple of Jewish witnesses, and the opposing counsel attacked them purely on the basis of their religion.
“Hamilton issued a scathing denunciation of anti-Semitism in his closing remarks before the highest court in the state of New York. It was a legal performance that his admirers considered to be one of the most powerful and forceful of his entire illustrious legal career.”
As an alumnus of what is now Columbia University, Hamilton helped institute the principle that non-Christians would be eligible for the college presidency. He was behind the appointment of Gershom Seixas, the first Jew appointed to the board of an American college.
“He also found Jewish merchants to be key partners in his plan to invigorate the American financial system and make the U.S. a major center of global finance,” Porwancher says
Hamilton himself identified as a Christian… was this because of the times when Jewish people who identified as Jewish were considered as second class citizens or because he really considered himself Christian.
I am not trying to bring up any CT...just pointing out information about Hamilton that might be of interest to some. For one, I never knew about his backing up the Jewish people during his life.
In any event, it serves as an interesting discussion point about a famous historical figure.