February 28 • 2019 35
jn

A 

preponderance of research 
indicates that Hamilton was a 
Jew,
” says Andrew Porwancher, 
a legal historian and associate professor 
at the University of Oklahoma who is 
writing The Jewish Life of Alexander 
Hamilton, a working title under con-
tract with the Harvard University Press 
to be published as early as January 2020. 
Porwancher, who earned a Ph.D. 
at Cambridge and a fellowship at 
Yeshiva University in New York, 
points to evidence that 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 pro-
hibited between Christians and Jews. 
She soon left him and began living 
with James Hamilton, bearing him two 
illegitimate sons. Alexander, the young-
est, was born in 1755, before Lavien 
divorced her. 

While some biographers question 
Lavien’
s Jewish heritage, “his name 
appears in a variety of spellings consis-
tent with the way Jews were permitted 
to spell their surnames in the 18th-cen-
tury Caribbean,
” Porwancher says. “
And 
Hamilton’
s own grandson referred to 
Lavien as a ‘
rich Danish Jew.
’
” 
Porwancher asserts Rachel was 
legally still Jewish after her separation 
from Lavien because “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.
” 
When Hamilton was a young boy 
on Nevis, his mother enrolled him in a 
Jewish school, where he studied Torah 
from a Jewess by learning the Ten 
Commandants in the original Hebrew, 
Porwancher says. 
Some skeptics maintain Hamilton 
went to a Jewish school because he was 
illegitimate and thus not allowed in a 
Christian school, but, says Porwancher, 
“there’
s a talmudic prohibition against 
Jews teaching non-Jews the Torah.
” 
Porwancher, raised in a Conservative 
Jewish home, began investigating 

Hamilton’
s religious affiliations in 2014, 
and traveled abroad for his research 
to Nevis, St. Croix, London and 
Copenhagen. “I explored sources in a 
wide array of languages and reviewed 
thousands of documents from the 
Danish West Indies.
”
What particularly struck Porwancher 
was that after Hamilton arrived in New 
York City, he became an outspoken sup-
porter of the Jews. 
“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 denun-
ciation of anti-Semitism in his closing 
remarks before the highest court in the 
state of New York. It was a legal perfor-
mance that his admirers considered to 
be one of the most powerful and force-
ful of his entire illustrious legal career.
” 

As an alumnus of what is now 
Columbia University, Hamilton helped 
institute the principle that non-Chris-
tians would be eligible for the col-
lege 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 invigo-
rate the American financial system and 
make the U.S. a major center of global 
finance,” Porwancher says.
By the time Hamilton came to 
America, he identified himself as a 
Christian. “I suspect he abandons his 
Jewish identity because Jews had sec-
ond-class religious status,” Porwancher 
says.
“But, in nearly every realm of his 
adult professional life, we can see 
echoes from his exposure to Judaism 
in childhood. One thing is for sure: 
Hamilton had closer ties with the 
Jewish community than any other 
Founding Father.” ■

— Alice Burdick Schweiger

Hamilton 
and the Jews

With the success 
of Hamilton comes 
speculation the Founding 
Father may have been 
Jewish.
Alexander Hamilton portrait 

by John Trumbull

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