Was Alexander Hamilton Jewish? A Cambridge-Educated Historian Is Making the Case. [View all]

[Recursion]

http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/218475/was-alexander-hamilton-jewish-a-cambridge-educated-historian-is-making-the-case

Interesting. I'm not sold quite yet, but very interesting.

Long before he—or most people—were familiar with the name Lin-Manuel Miranda, a young Cambridge-educated scholar decided to focus his research on the persistent, but long-discredited, rumor that Founding Father, and now Broadway smash, Alexander Hamilton was Jewish. He signed with the Harvard University Press to write a book on the topic, “The Jewish Founding Father: Alexander Hamilton’s Hidden Life,” and last night, for the first time, Dr. Andrew Porwancher, a professor of legal history at the University of Oklahoma, publicly revealed the basis for his conclusion that our nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury was a Jew.

Engaging in a conversation with Yeshiva University’s Rabbi Dr. Meir Soloveichik, under the auspices of YU’s Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought, Dr. Porwancher claimed that an examination of registries in St. Croix and Nevis, where Hamilton spent the first seventeen years of his life, proves that many of the “inconvenient facts” about Alexander Hamilton, such as his attendance at a Jewish primary school, are explained by the fact that he was, indeed, Jewish.

Porwancher’s proof for that assertion is multi-pronged. First, he claims that Hamilton’s mother, Rachel Faucitt, converted to Judaism in 1745 when she married Johann Michael Levine. Levine (most historians spell it “Lavien”) is not assumed to be Jewish by Hamilton scholars on the grounds that Danish records from St. Croix do not identify him as such. The Cambridge-educated Ph.D, who mastered the Danish language to be able to read the original documents in St. Croix, noted that none of St. Croix’s Jews were necessarily identified in these records as Jews, citing the 1752 “matrikler,” or land register, featuring two Jews, Moses Aboab, and Isaac Melhado, without any reference to their religious identity.

Additionally, Porwancher’s research reveals that it was not until 1798 that a decree was issued by the King of Denmark authorizing the first Jewish-Christian marriage in the absence of a conversion. This would mean that in 1745, when Hamilton’s mother married Levine on the Danish island of St. Croix, Danish law would have required her conversion to Judaism before the wedding.