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DESCRIPTION] Touro Talks intro displaying photos of students and faculty across the university, fading into the Touro University logo.

[TEXT] Was Hamilton Jewish?, February 23, 2022, Tour Talks is sponsored by Robert and Arlene Rosenberg

[DESCRIPTION] Dr. Alan Kadish speaks to the camera from a library setting, with a Touro University logo on the bottom right of the screen.

[ALAN KADISH] It's an absolute pleasure to have Andrew Porwancher here tonight. He's the Ernest May Fellow at Harvard University and the Wick Cary Associate Professor at the University of Oklahoma.

He was educated at Northwestern, Brown, and Cambridge, and has had a number of research fellowships. He's the author of three books, including the Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton, published by Princeton University Press, which is the topic of tonight's discussion. So I want to start, Andrew, by asking you, did you come up with the idea of writing about Hamilton before or after the play was popular?

[DESCRIPTION] Andrew Porwancher joins and speaks to the camera, with a blank background. The Touro University logo is on the bottom right of the screen.

[ANDREW PORWANCHER] Well, thanks for that question, and let me first just say, Dr. Kadish, thank you so much for this invitation. I'm grateful to you, to Mr. Twersky, to everyone who's tuning in. It's really an honor to be here.

To your question, I had this idea before the musical, believe it or not. I started teaching constitutional history back in 2011. I'm sort of dating myself, but I've been a professor for 10 years now. And in teaching constitutional history, I love to bring in biographical details of the historical figures who I write about.

And I started researching Alexander Hamilton, and it turned out that he had a mother named Rachel Levine, who enrolled him in a Jewish school. And even before the musical started, I began investigating whether these facts were indicative of some larger truth about this esoteric Founder.

And it was a surprise to me, in the course of doing this research, that Hamilton went from being the forgotten Founder to the most iconic figure in American history.

[ALAN KADISH] So why was Hamilton the forgotten Founder in some ways?

[ANDREW PORWANCHER] That's a great question. I think Hamilton was the forgotten Founder because he dies young. All the other founders, including his principal rivals, most notably Jefferson, outlive him. They live into their golden years. Hamilton is felled by Aaron Burr's bullet when he's still in his prime.

And this allowed Jefferson and others to malign Hamilton without having to endure Hamilton's forceful rebuttal. And I think that discrepancy, these sorts of unaddressed attacks on Hamilton's character in those early years of the republic reverberated in later generations of American history until Lin-Manuel Miranda put a summery stop to all of that Hamilton bashing.

[ALAN KADISH] In the book, you talk a little bit about the conflict that you just talked about. For those of us who aren't historians, can you just briefly talk about what the fundamental disagreements between Hamilton and perhaps, say, to some extent, Washington with him and the others were?

[ANDREW PORWANCHER] Burr is such an interesting figure because a lot of people really like Burr and others didn't trust him at all. And Hamilton and Washington were in the camp that didn't really trust him. Burr served on Washington's military staff early in the American Revolution, but there was something about Burr that irritated Washington, and he remained forever at a remove from George Washington in a way that I think later hindered Burr's ascendancy in American politics.

Hamilton didn't like Burr because he saw burr as beholden to nothing but his own ego. As motivated by nothing but his own aggrandizement. And as much as Hamilton disliked Jefferson, he was willing to concede that at least Jefferson was motivated by principles, even if those principles were, to Hamilton's mind, deeply wrongheaded. But Burr, he saw, as fundamentally self-serving.

And ultimately, Hamilton maligned Burr, and news that he had maligned him at this dinner was leaked to the press. And Burr questioned Hamilton about it, and Hamilton had an opportunity to disavow these allegations, but Hamilton could not bring himself-- deign himself to offer any concessions to someone like Burr, who he had so little respect for. And ultimately, the consequences of Hamilton's decision was fatal.

[ALAN KADISH] So those principal disagreements between Jefferson and Hamilton, maybe you could just outline those for the audience?

[ANDREW PORWANCHER] Sure. Hamilton and Jefferson are really useful figures to talk through political and ideological differences because in so many respects, they personify an ongoing debate in American politics that endures to the present generation. Hamilton believed in an urban, commercial, industrializing, trade-oriented society, and Jefferson had a vision of America as a fundamentally decentralized agrarian society.

And they held onto different visions of their preferred kind of government power because they were haunted by different fears. Jefferson's great fear was that a overly strong government would encroach on individual liberty. Hamilton's great fear was that the impotent government would lead to anarchy.

And so they both pursued different visions for American governance based on what they saw as the prophylactic against their worst nightmares.

[ALAN KADISH] With that background, let's talk about the Jews. So the book is The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton. So before we begin to talk about Hamilton, tell us a little bit about the American Jewish community in the 1780s and 1790s, which serves as a backdrop for a lot of what you write about in the book.

[ANDREW PORWANCHER] Absolutely. So I'll begin with just a brief word, dialing the clock back to the 17th century, to talk about how Jews even got here. There was an exodus out of Spain and Portugal of Jews, or crypto-Jews, who found their way to places that were more tolerant, like Holland, where they could openly be Jews.

And when the Dutch controlled Brazil, huge numbers of Jews moved there, some scholars believe that as much as 50% of Brazil's free population in the mid-17th century was Jewish. But when the Portuguese take over Brazil, they Institute the Inquisition in the New World.

And so this huge Jewish community in Brazil is forced to go into exile, and they fan out, in part, across different Caribbean Islands, but 23 of them wind up in what was then New Amsterdam, or what would soon be renamed New York City. And this marks the first foothold of communal Jewish life in North America.

By the time Hamilton gets to New York in the 1770s, the Jewish community is a relatively flourishing community of some 250 souls, about 1% of New York City's population, which is about, percentage-wise, 20 times as much as the population of the country at large because Jews are concentrated in just a handful of port cities on the East Coast-- Newport, Philadelphia, Charleston, Savannah.

Jewish life was, in many respects, dominated by a Sephardic model. The Sephardim were seen as the elite Jews. And so even though in New York City, there are more Ashkenazi Jews than there are Sephardic Jews, by Hamilton's day, the synagogue Shearith Israel, which still exists today, as I'm sure many of your listeners know, conducted services according to the Sephardic style, with Sephardic incantation.

The Jewish community in that era had divisions within it. Some were class divisions. There was a Jewish mercantile elite, the most prominent traders and brokers who enjoyed good working relationships with their Christian counterparts. There were a middling class of artisans and shopkeepers. There were also Jews who were more destitute, who were at risk of being in debtor's prison, who sometimes had to live off of the charity of others.

And there are also divisions between the Sephardic and Ashkenazi populations. In a place like London, which had a much bigger Jewish community, the Sephardic and the Sephardim and the Ashkenazim could have separate synagogues; but in New York, the Jewish community was too small for that.

So sometimes there were tensions between the groups. Sometimes there was tension between established newcomers and-- I'm sorry, between established Jews and the newcomers who may have spoken in broken English and were not as affluent.

But for all of these different divisions in the Jewish community, they were united by a shared opposition to anti-Semitism. When they faced discrimination from a Christian majority, the Jews banded together. And what's so fascinating to look at the Jewish community in the 1770s and 1780s is that this is a community that is in a newly conceived republic dedicated to the promise of equality. This is world historical. This is unknown in the history-- the modern history of Jews to live in a country that says that everyone is going to stand upon an equality.

And yet, in reality, Old World discrimination continues to endure. Many of the states, when they turn from colonies into states with the advent of the Revolution, have to draft constitutions for themselves, and these constitutions often restrict the rights of Jews.

And the Jewish community, although it was relatively small-- some historians suggest as small as 1/20 of 1%, the role of the Jew in America took on outsized significance. If you have just a single Jew in a society, it matters because the presence of even a lone Jew forces that society to address the fundamental question of whether Jew and Gentile will stand upon an equality.

And in the early years of the American Republic, that question took on special salience because it was a litmus test for America's self-definition. It was a test of whether America would live out its founding creed of equality or whether the animating rationale of the Revolution was simply a facade masking enduring discrimination. And it is in the midst of that tension, it is against that backdrop that Hamilton forges a closer relationship with the American Jewish community than any other Founder.

[ALAN KADISH] Before we get to Hamilton's relationship with the Jewish community, let's begin with the controversial and sexy idea that you raise in the first chapter, which you alluded to earlier, which is, what's the evidence that Hamilton was Jewish, that he wasn't, and will we ever know? So why don't you talk a little bit about that.

[ANDREW PORWANCHER] I'll begin by saying that my case for Hamilton's Jewish identity is necessarily probabilistic. When we study the 18th century Caribbean, we have to have a lot of humility. Records have been lost to fires. They've been eaten by bugs. They've been destroyed by hurricanes. And so the claims that we can make about that record often fall short of certainty.

But with that caveat in mind, looking at the evidence we do have, I believe that the balance of evidence in the historical record suggests that Hamilton was, in fact, born and raised Jewish in his Caribbean youth. We'll begin, as Jewish identity so often does, with his mother.

Hamilton's mother, Rachel, was not born a Christian. I'm sorry, she was not born a Jew, she was born Christian. She was born Rachel Faucett. So to make the case that Hamilton may have had a Jewish identity, I have to demonstrate the likelihood that Rachel converts to Judaism prior to his birth. And my case for that is rooted in Hamilton's stepfather, Johann Michael Lavien. This is a merchant living in the Danish West Indies whom Hamilton's mother meets and marries when she's still a teenager.

And there's a strong presumption that we can make that Johan Lavien was Jewish based on a variety of factors. The different spellings of his surname in the historical record. His trade as a merchant. The fact that he had come from an island with a Jewish community, his business practices. And, perhaps most compellingly, the fact that Hamilton's own grandson explicitly identified Lavien, quote, "rich Danish Jew."

Now Rachel, after marrying Johan, bears him a son, Peter Lavien, who's not infant-baptized, who undergoes an adult baptism later in life under circumstances that only make sense if he's converting to Christianity. And then she has this other son, Alexander, for whom we also have no baptismal record, and who she enrolls in a Jewish school at a time when, to the best of our knowledge, Jewish schools exclusively educated Jewish children for a host of political and theological reasons.

And so all of these facts together suggest that Hamilton, in all likelihood, had a Jewish identity in his youth. And the case is a lot more in depth, as those of you who have had a chance to read the book will know, I've tried to boil seven years of research down into about 30 seconds, but that is a crisis of the evidence for Hamilton's Jewish identity in his youth.

[ALAN KADISH] So how long was Hamilton in Jewish school? Do we know how long that was and what the school was like at all?

[ANDREW PORWANCHER] Both great questions. We don't know for sure when Hamilton was going to the school. We know that he tells his children that when he was small enough to be placed on a table, he would be eye level with his teacher, and he would recite to her the Ten Commandments in the original Hebrew. So if he's small enough to be eye level with an adult on a table, I have to imagine, he may have been as young as perhaps three or four years old. And he continues to leave to live on Nevis until the age of 11.

And so my best guess is that Hamilton went to school beginning around perhaps four years old, and possibly up until age 11, but no later, because at that point, Alexander Hamilton moves to the Danish Caribbean, which did not have a Jewish school on his island. And I'm sorry, what was your other question?

[ALAN KADISH] Do we know anything about what the education was like in the school--

[ANDREW PORWANCHER] Oh yeah, this is another good question. So unfortunately, the Jewish records from that community that was living on Nevis, which, by the way, 25% of the free population on Hamilton's island was Jewish, pretty significant-- maybe not quite Boca Raton numbers, but a respectable number of Jews.

Hamilton's school, to the best of our knowledge, we can hazard some claims about it based on what we know about other schools in that time period. Jewish schools were religious instruments. They existed to turn Jewish children into observant Jewish adults, to cultivate in these children a strong sense of Jewish identity, to instill in them a shared sense of Jewish peoplehood with their fellow Jews spread out across the diaspora. And there's a Talmudic prohibition that many have interpreted through the years to prohibit Jews from teaching non-Jews the Torah.

And so for a variety of reasons, we have good cause to think that the Jewish school would not have educated Alexander Hamilton unless they considered him one of their own.

[ALAN KADISH] Is there any evidence that that education appears later in his life or career?

[ANDREW PORWANCHER] That's a really good question, too. We find notes that Hamilton writes later in his teenage years, when he's about 18-- he's now moved to America, and he goes through the Book of Genesis, and he has these two columns. And in one column, he writes the actual words from Genesis, and then in the other, Hamilton writes his own exegesis on the text, his own particular take on what he thinks the significance of any given passage is.

And so Hamilton clearly maintains some interest in the Hebrew Bible. And given his extraordinary proclivity for foreign languages-- he was a real master with foreign tongues, I wouldn't be surprised if he's reading the Hebrew Bible in the original Hebrew that he had learned as a child. So that's one indication.

Another would be, later in life as an adult, Hamilton writes a piece in which he-- he's writing a piece in defense of the judiciary, which is in the hands of the Federalists, which was the Hamilton party, and he's concerned about Congress, which is in the hand of Republicans, his opponents, and he says that Congress is the Aaron's rod most likely to swallow up the judiciary.

And so he makes this allusion to the story of Aaron that turns into a serpent. So that's, perhaps, another they're reverberating effect of Hamilton's early Jewish education.

[ALAN KADISH] So before we talk a little bit about-- so the bottom line is, I would say, you're arguing that the weight of evidence suggests that he actually was Jewish, and at some point, became Christian, officially or unofficially, to try to fit in with society, basically.

You do make the point in the book that-- except perhaps at the very end, he wasn't particularly an observant Christian or someone who-- tell us a little bit about that. What did it seem like his religious life, if we take the fact that he, quote, "converted" officially or unofficially, what was his religious life like as an adult?

[ANDREW PORWANCHER] Sure. I suspect that Hamilton abandons any Jewish identity in his teenage years while he's living on St. Croix. He's no longer part of the Jewish community on Nevis because he's left the island. His mother has passed away. With his communal and familial ties to Judaism severed, it's not hard to imagine that a penniless orphan like Hamilton would cast off a second-class religious identity.

And so while Hamilton unquestionably identifies as a Christian throughout his adulthood, it is striking that he maintains an arm's length from Christian life. And this despite the fact that he marries a devoutly pious Christian in Elizabeth Schuyler. He even gets a pew for her at Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan, and yet, Hamilton doesn't join the church-- he doesn't join any church.

Once he's called to give testimony in a trial, and he's actually forbidden from giving sworn testimony because he's never taken communion, which would be a real oddity if he was actually born and raised Christian, he is, in the eyes of some of his contemporaries, not Christian at all because he's not a member of the church. If you look at the communion records from Trinity Church, you can see his wife's name, but his name doesn't appear next to hers.

There are a couple different ways that we can interpret his relative disaffiliation from Christian life. One way to interpret it, which some historians have, is, oh, well, he must have been a deist. So he is part of this almost secular faith that believes in God as a clockmaker. And there were a number of deists at the time who weren't that engaged in Christian life, but I think this is a case of mistaken pattern recognition.

Because if you look at what Hamilton actually has to say about God, his description of God is not like the deistic conception of a God that stands back and lets human events unfold. Hamilton's conception of God is actually much closer to the Jewish conception of God, as depicted in the Hebrew Bible, a God that is actively intervening in human affairs.

So it may be the case that Hamilton wasn't that engaged in organized Christian life, possibly because he's apathetic, like some nominal Christians were, but possibly because a Jewish upbringing made him resistant to little more than a nominal pretense to a Christian identity.

[ALAN KADISH] So you talked earlier a little bit about discrimination in the late 18th century. So one thing you just mentioned was Hamilton's ability to testify was called into question because he hadn't taken communion. Were Jews allowed to testify? In other words, were they not expected to do that, and therefore, allowed to testify? How did that work?

[ANDREW PORWANCHER] So Jews-- it depends on the court. The witness stand was a critical site in the battle for religious equality. There are moments both in colonial history and in post-1776 American history where the competency of Jews to give testimony was under question, and sometimes courts accepted it-- often they did, but sometimes the competency of a Jewish witness to give testimony came under fire.

And in fact, in New York State, the matter of whether Jews could testify is not definitively settled until the 1840s, when a new state constitution is ratified that expressly disallows someone's religion to be a basis for deeming them incompetent to give testimony. So it's very much a mixed picture, and I actually think this is one of the more understudied topics, testimonial qualifications.

So if there's any enterprising PhD student looking for a good topic, delve into the history of testimonial qualification, because it will be an extraordinary window onto this age-old struggle for religious equality in America.

[ALAN KADISH] So before we talk about Hamilton's interactions with Jews and the rest of his life and how he sometimes ended up on the same side of controversial issues, maybe you could just spend a couple of minutes, for those who haven't seen the musical, telling us about his career, or maybe correcting some of the historical inaccuracies.

[ANDREW PORWANCHER] Yeah. I think the musical's brilliant, and in some respects, it's actually more accurate than some biographies of Hamilton because the musical, in a way that so many biographies are not, is really attuned to how his childhood informed his later adulthood. And if you look at Lin-Manuel Miranda's lyrics, he's often alluding back to his Caribbean past and thinking critically about the echo of those early years in Hamilton's American life.

Hamilton's career begins really in earnest during the American Revolution. War breaks out between the Patriots and the Loyalists and the British soldiers. And Hamilton-- basically, he drops out of college-- I mean, the college has to shut down, everybody drops out, and he throws his lot in with the Patriot cause. And his talents are soon recognized. He's made George Washington's aide de camp. And this is a critical role wherein Hamilton becomes Washington's ghostwriter. And he is effectively helping General Washington with critical decisions at every step.

Hamilton is able to ride Washington's coattails to power. Later, Washington garners a universal esteem in the United States that is almost difficult for modern people like us to comprehend in our polarized political system. But it was clear that Washington would become President after the Constitution was ratified, and Washington gives Hamilton, who's a young man, only in his mid-30s, the opportunity to become the Treasury Secretary.

Both before and after Hamilton's famous stint as Treasury Secretary, in which he institutes a very forward-looking financial agenda, Hamilton is arguably the premier litigator of the New York Bar. As brilliant as he was with his financial ingenuity, as much as we remember and honor him for his creation of the American financial system, he was just as good an orator in the courtroom. And it is actually through Hamilton's legal practice that he forges most of his relationships with the New York Jewish community.

[ALAN KADISH] So just tell us a little bit about when you say he founded the American financial system, what exactly does that mean?

[ANDREW PORWANCHER] We often make a mistake about history that is subconscious. We don't even realize we're making it. We think that historical figures somehow knew how their history would play out. That when the delegates convene in Philadelphia in 1787, they believe that they're drafting a document that will endure for centuries to come.

But the truth is, from their perspective, it looked like America's experiment in self-government might die in its infancy. And the key reason that the American Republic could implode in on itself was because its financial house was in total disarray. It didn't have stable currency. It was mired in debt. The national government was in debt. The state governments were steeped in debt.

And Hamilton steps forward with a set of financial programs that involve consolidating the state debt into a singular national debt, that involves instituting new forms of American currency, that involves creating a national mint, which involves creating a system of credit and a national bank.

And Hamilton's financial programs were like a shot in the arm. And it invigorates the American economy. And the United States has an economic boom in the 1790s that creates at this critical, tenuous moment, creates the economic foundations on which America's political prosperity could be built.

[ALAN KADISH] So let's talk about some of those interactions with the Jewish community in the course of the career which you described. First of all, you do have a couple of chapters, really, that talk about the Constitution and what the controversies were regarding ratification of the Constitution, and how Hamilton and the Jewish community seem to often be on the same side of some of those issues. So tell us a little bit about that.

[ANDREW PORWANCHER] In 1787, when the delegates come to Philadelphia, Jews would have every reason to believe that they would draft a Constitution that would discriminate against Jews because the majority of state constitutions, as I mentioned, had clauses barring Jews from the state legislature. Most states barred Jews from practicing law. Jews could not become college professors. Jews were, in many respects, limited economically and politically.

And yet, these delegates write a clause into the Constitution that bars religious tests for political office. This was radical. This was granting Jews substantive equality in a critical realm of American life.

We often think of the Free Exercise Clause as the most important clause for protecting minority faith groups like Jews, but I think that's actually a misinterpretation because the First Amendment doesn't get ratified until the 1790s. It doesn't come right on the heels of the Constitution, but in the main original text of the Constitution, we have this incredible step forward towards religious equality.

And for that reason, it shouldn't come as a surprise to us that Jews, by and large, are Federalists, which is to say, they support ratification of the Constitution. They are on the same side as Hamilton, who is the preeminent advocate for ratification of the US Constitution in New York City.

Opponents of the Constitution, seeing that it opens the door for Jews to become members of Congress, senators, even the President could be Jewish, they exploit anti-Semitism. They wield anti-Semitism as a political cudgel. They say to the American public, "You cannot ratify the Constitution or you will be ruled by a class of Jews that will seize the reins of state power and turn the government against you."

And of course, this was total paranoia and total totally histrionic, but it is striking the extent, during these heated ratification debates over whether or not to approve the Constitution, the forces that oppose Hamilton are the very same that oppose Jews. And so Hamilton and the American Jewish community find themselves aligned on the momentous question of ratification, and ultimately, they triumph over the forces of anti-Semitism.

[ALAN KADISH] So how bad was anti-Semitism at the time? I mean, in the book, you talk about a number of successful Jews. You've talked about how they were able to form congregations, advocate. How bad was anti-Semitism?

[ANDREW PORWANCHER] America, in the years of the early republic, is very much torn between New World promises and Old World prejudices. On the one hand, Jews are granted substantive equality by the US Constitution. They are largely free to pursue careers in trade and finance free of molestation.

And yet, it's also the case that every single cemetery, Jewish cemetery in North America, is vandalized in these years. On the very day that the delegates finished drafting the US Constitution, the Jewish cemetery in Charleston, South Carolina is desecrated. It was not at all uncommon to see anti-Semitism peddled by the very people who claim to espouse liberty for all.

And so we have very much a mixed picture. On the one hand, unprecedented political and, in many respects, commercial opportunity. On the other hand, residual Old World bigotry that was stubbornly defiant in the New World. And it is ultimately that tension that we see endure throughout American history, and the conflict that we see today between those who articulate a more inclusive vision of America and those who march on the streets chanting "Jews will not replace us," that tension dates back to the very dawn of the republic.

[ALAN KADISH] And it unfortunately continues today, as you point out. Let's talk a little bit about the interaction of Hamilton with Jews, and how you see that playing out, and what the importance of it is. Because you detail a number of interactions, but what I'm really interested in hearing from you is what was important about it? So let's first talk about his time as Treasury Secretary.

The Constitution is ratified, he becomes the first Treasury Secretary. He's setting up the central banking system. What were his interactions with Jews there and what are the implications?

[ANDREW PORWANCHER] Hamilton hires a Jew to work at the bank. He is collaborating with Jewish merchants and financiers. And indeed, precisely because he's working with Jews, he is maligned by his adversaries. He is routinely accused of pursuing particular financial policies to enrich rapacious Jews who are allegedly bilking ordinary Americans.

Hamilton, though he does not identify as Jewish in his American adulthood, confronts more anti-Semitism, has more Jew hatred directed at him than any other self-professed Christian because he is so routinely accused of selling out Americans to deceptive Jewish bankers. So it is, in many respects, a testament to Hamilton's alliance with American Jews that he is so regularly maligned for working with them. And that's just one dimension.

I might also mention, Dr. Kadish, his role at Columbia, since we are speaking in a university setting, Hamilton implements Jewish-friendly reforms that, in many respects, are over a century ahead of their time.

Hamilton is instrumental in putting the first Jew on the Board of Columbia. There wouldn't be another Jew on the Columbia Board until Benjamin Cardozo in the 20th century. He does away with mandatory forms of Christian worship for undergraduates. He changes the eligibility for the college presidency so that it's open to Jews and Gentiles alike. There was no other-- if you look at other colleges with colonial-era roots, you have to go to the 20th century before Jews were allowed to become college presidents.

So there are striking reforms that he takes in his role at Columbia. And maybe I'll close this answer just by mentioning that in his legal practice, Hamilton is a vigorous champion of American Jews who are accused of lying under oath purely because they're Jews. There was an ugly anti-Semitic stereotype that the Jewish faith actually encouraged its adherents to lie under oath in court. And Hamilton's Jewish witnesses whom it is alleged are lying purely because of their religious profession.

And Hamilton, in this famous courtroom address, issues the most fervent denunciation of anti-Semitism to pass the lips of any American Founder, and he asked the court of his anti-Semitic opposing counsel, he says, "Has he forgotten what this race once were when, under the immediate government of God himself, they were selected as the witnesses of His miracles and charged with the spirit of prophecy?" And Hamilton goes on to exalt the Jews as the chosen people. It's an extraordinary moment in Hamilton's life. It's an extraordinary moment in the history of the Jewish struggle for civic equality.

[ALAN KADISH] In his legal practice, tell us, other than the one incident you talked about here, do you think he went out of his way to seek Jewish clients out of some-- thought about opposing anti-Semitism? Or was it just that they sought him out because of the way he felt about Jews and what they knew about his talent?

[ANDREW PORWANCHER] It's a good question, and I wish I had a richer answer. I think the historical record is too spotty to be able to answer this definitively, but based on what we do know, I think it's a reasonable inference that Jews certainly knew that Hamilton was friendlier to the Jewish community than so many other leading figures in New York and particularly in other parts of the country. So it's unsurprising they would have sought him out.

And it's equally unsurprising that Hamilton would have proved to be a congenial representative of Jews in the courts. Jews were, like him, often immigrants. They were, like him, drawn to trade and finance. They were, like him, often engaged in maritime trade in port cities around the Atlantic world. Like him, they are outsiders who are living by their wits.

And so this amity between Hamilton and the Jewish community isn't terribly surprising, even taken on its own merits when we consider Hamilton's likely upbringing as a Jew, these ties to Jews in the New York legal world take on even greater salience.

[ALAN KADISH] So, what you're suggesting is regardless of whether he was, in fact, Jewish or raised as a Jew, a lot of his sentiments and feelings were in confluence with the Jewish community, and he did a lot to support the early American Jewish community.

[ANDREW PORWANCHER] Absolutely. And I should say as a caveat, that it's not the case that Hamilton woke up every day and carried the banner for the Jews. It's not the case that Hamilton's central principle of his entire life was supporting this tiny American Jewish community. It is absolutely the case that Hamilton, compared to every other American Founder, was a champion of civic equality for American Jews, and that he hazarded his own political capital to help make the promise of equality real for the Jewish community here.

[ALAN KADISH] So I want to leave some time for questions from the audience, so I'll just leave you with one last question. Obviously, this is a broad topic, and so I'm just looking for an example. Give us an example of another Founder-- because we know the Founders, after all, were flawed in many ways.

Although they had great principles of democracy and equality, they also supported a profoundly racist start to the United States. So, give us an example of a Founder who was unsympathetic to Jews, or even directly anti-Semitic, who otherwise we might think of as a great champion of equality and human rights.

[ANDREW PORWANCHER] That's a great question. John Adams comes to mind, partly because John Adams is often praised for the kind things that he said about Jews-- and indeed, he did say many complimentary things about Jews. And yet, Adams also used the word "Jew" as a slur. Adams also writes a constitution for the state of Massachusetts that bars Jews from serving in political office.

Adams suggests that-- he actually conflates his hatred of Hamilton with his suspicions of Jews, and says that Hamilton's supporters were like Jews who always follow false messiahs. And so he is just one example of many Founders who might praise Jews and the Jewish faith in one breath, and then condemns both in the next. Hamilton stands apart for his unmitigated support for the people and faith of Judaism.

[ALAN KADISH] OK. So going to some questions from the audience, there are a number of questions about where Hamilton got his name, who his father was, et cetera.

[ANDREW PORWANCHER] Hamilton's father was named James Hamilton. Hamilton's mother leaves her husband, Johan Lavien. She absconds from the island of St. Croix, where they're living. She ends up on the British Caribbean island of Nevis where she Bears Alexander out of wedlock to the Scottish colonist.

Now James Hamilton unquestionably was a Gentile, but it's not at all clear that he has much involvement in Alexander's life. And the fact that Alexander is enrolled in this Jewish school, the fact that Hamilton's mother and father were never married, all lends support to this probabilistic theory that Hamilton had a Jewish identity in his upbringing.

Had Hamilton's father been more involved, had Hamilton's mother even been married to his mother, I think it would be less plausible. But these gaps around his father may well explain why the Jewish community could have found it easier to accept Alexander into their ranks.

[ALAN KADISH] OK. Another question, one of our listeners notes, correctly, that in the play, after his son is killed, Hamilton is depicted as going to church. Is that creative license on Miranda's part or is there actual evidence that he did that, and perhaps this was a phase in his life where he had more embraced Christianity?

[ANDREW PORWANCHER] This is a really good question because historians disagree. And specifically, they disagree with me. Many historians suggest that Hamilton came to finally embrace the Christian faith in his last years of life. This is based on writing from family members that appeared many decades after Hamilton's death. This is what we call, in the historical profession, retrospective evidence.

The contemporaneous evidence from Hamilton's actual life lends some doubt to this picture of religiosity. Hamilton, on his deathbed, had still never taken communion, and he finally is able to convince the rector of Trinity Church, who had been resistant, to giving him communion before he takes his final breath. I suspect he did this because his wife is, as I mentioned, quite pious and would offer her some measure of solace before the grief enveloped her.

What's so striking about Hamilton's communion is that both his admirers and detractors noted, at the time, that this was a departure from his usual detachment from Christian practice.

And so we don't necessarily automatically discount retrospective evidence that is written decades later, but when it conflicts with contemporaneous evidence, most historians will lend greater credence to the evidence from the actual time period you're writing about, and on that basis, I think there are significant doubts to be had about this conventional wisdom that we see on display in the musical.

[ALAN KADISH] That's great. So another question is, what was Hamilton's relationship to slavery? Did he own slaves? Did he oppose slavery? How did he view slavery?

[ANDREW PORWANCHER] Hamilton, like so many others, is implicated in the institution of slavery. Exactly to what degree is not entirely clear. We know that he marries into this prosperous, slave-owning family. It's clear that he hired out slaves from other people to do work for him. Whether or not he actually owns slaves is not at all clear from the historical record. There are some who have argued that he had. There are some who suggest it's unlikely.

I think the broader point that Hamilton, to some degree, is necessarily implicated in the institution of slavery, by virtue of being a person of some stature at that time, is an important one. Hamilton is a founding member of the New York Manumission Mission Society. He is among the more pronounced abolitionists of the American founding generation.

And if it were the case that he was an abolitionist and he owned slaves, that would actually not make him that unusual. A number of members of the New York Manumission Society were actually slave-owners. It is one of the great contradictions of the American Republic that is built into the DNA of the country. From America's very inception, we have struggled with this tension between liberty and slavery, between religious freedom and religious bigotry.

And whether it is in the religious landscape at the time and the Jewish experience, or whether it is the place of slavery in the early republic, we find a republic torn between its noblest hopes, articulated in the Declaration of Independence, and the reality of enduring hierarchies.

[ALAN KADISH] Another questioner was very interested in your discussion of Hamilton's biblical commentaries. Are those available online anywhere to review? Or is that something you found independently in your search that's never really been documented, that's been promulgated?

[ANDREW PORWANCHER] That's a good question. I believe that it is available online. If that person wants to send me an email-- it's porwancher@ou.edu, if anyone wants to send me an email, you're welcome to pose any questions if I don't get a chance to get to them, and I'm happy to send you a link to that document if you want to read more.

I'll just add the caveat that it's not the case that Hamilton, in his everyday life, was a Talmudic scholar, but is there some evidence of his continued engagement with the Hebrew Bible? Yes. So thank you for that question.

[ALAN KADISH] What were the sources that you used to investigate his time in the Caribbean, which is where you did a lot of your original research, where did you find those sources?

[ANDREW PORWANCHER] Yeah, so the sources are from the Caribbean-- some are in the Caribbean. Many of them are actually in the European capitals that colonized the Caribbean and then brought those documents back. So it was-- I had to suffer through transatlantic trips to the Caribbean and Europe, but I somehow managed to come out the other end OK.

And the documents, a lot of them are from the Danish Caribbean where Hamilton's mother meets and marries Johan Lavien, where Hamilton lives as a teenager. A lot of them are land records, census registers. I'm also looking at material from Nevis, some legal records there. Anything I could get my hands on.

And as mentioned, the record is scarce, and yet, even now, there are still documents that are being uncovered about Hamilton's childhood. Hamilton's childhood is the least-studied aspect, not just of Hamilton, but of any American Founder. And there remains good archival work to be done. And I think we can look forward to future discoveries about Hamilton's Caribbean roots in the years to come.

[ALAN KADISH] There's a question about Benjamin Franklin and the Jews. You talked a little bit about John Adams in the book. You say some somewhat disturbing things, potentially, about Franklin. Can you just talk a little bit about that? He's obviously a hero in many ways.

[ANDREW PORWANCHER] Ben Franklin, I'll say as a caveat, to his credit, donated money anytime a house of worship broke ground in Philadelphia, including for the synagogue, he made a donation. But Franklin had a pretty terrible tendency to engage in deeply anti-Semitic tropes about Jews as swindlers, Jews as nefarious money-Lenders who are trying to take advantage of innocent Christians.

He often will attribute his perception of someone's malfeasance in their business dealings as attributable to a Jewish identity. He will sometimes compare Jews to animals, often vicious animals, like sharks or lions.

So Franklin does not come out of the book looking quite like the dignified statesman that we often remember him to be. And I'll just say that my goal here is not to take down any of the other Founders in a bid to lift Hamilton up. My only goal is to be candid with readers about the historical record. And when other Founders had positive relationships and commentaries with Jews, you will find that in the book. When they made anti-Semitic comments, I did not shy away from including that as well.

[ALAN KADISH] All right. One last question. When we talked earlier, you mentioned that the book was, in some ways, controversial in certain circles. Tell us a little bit about that controversy and what you think the origins of it are.

[ANDREW PORWANCHER] I appreciate that question, Dr. Kadish. The book has been far more controversial than I imagined. It's actually fascinating, as an author, to put a book out into the world and see-- not most people, but some sizable faction of people see the book almost as a Rorschach test, that people project some of their greatest anxieties onto.

And so while I've been grateful to have a lot of support from a number of scholars for the book-- I understand Jonathan Sarna was part of your speaker series. I was very grateful to have a blurb from him on the back cover, among others. There have been a number of scholars that are deeply concerned about what you might call the political implications of the book.

One concern people have is around gatekeeping Jewish identity. A number of people have strong feelings about who gets to count as a Jew and who doesn't. And these may be rooted in theological concerns.

And I'm not here to comment on the merit or lack of merit of anyone's particular viewpoint, but what I can tell you is that in this book, I suggest not a simple binary of someone being Jewish or not Jewish according to some kind of halachic code, but rather, an eight-part definition of Jewish identity that sees Jews along ethnic, legal, communal, devotional lines, and others.

And I suggest that when we approach the question of Jewish identity historically, we can see, especially in the 18th century, a number of people who were Jewish in some senses and not others. I want a more textured, more nuanced definition of what it means to be a Jew in order to better ably address the question of whether Hamilton was Jewish in some sense of that term for some stretch of his life.

So if someone has a stricter notion of what Jewish identity should be, they are sometimes threatened by the implications of this research. The second concern people have is that-- and I've been told this to my face by some Jewish studies scholars, they suggest I'm turning the clock back a century on Jewish studies. That 100 years ago, people were engaged in Jew Who-ing, and trying to find out, OK, who was Jewish in American history? Who may have had Jewish ancestry that we can point to as a way of legitimizing Jewish belonging in America?

And so I think people see a book about Hamilton's Jewish ancestry, and they're engaging in some kind of pattern recognition and saying, oh, that's passé, that's undermining the field of Jewish studies, that's engaging in a political project, not an intellectual endeavor.

Now, my response to that would be that I'm making this argument as a professional historian trying to offer the most comprehensive argument I can for the evidence I have. And I don't shy away from any conclusions because of any implications that might have for misperceptions others could entertain about the field of Jewish studies. My only obligation is to be faithful to the historical record, and I issue no apologies for doing so.

And the final concern people have is that they fear that this book will provide fodder to conspiratorial thinking to anti-Semitic theories. A lot of people don't like Wall Street, they don't like financiers, they don't like Jews. It's all one package. They think Jews are a bunch of international, clandestine figures who are pulling the strings of global finance at the expense of ordinary people. They made those allegations in Hamilton's day, they make them in our own.

And now I come along with a book that suggests that the Patron Saint of Wall Street, Alexander Hamilton, may have actually harbored a secret Jewish identity. And they fear that this will play right into the hands of anti-Semites. And my response is that if bigots are going to use this book as a distorted echo chamber for their own prejudicial views, we cannot let that stop us from engaging, from reckoning in an honest and comprehensive way with the evidence in the historical record.

I will never hide facts or obscure historical evidence because I'm afraid that someone else will use it and weaponize it as a tool because once we, in the universities, stop engaging in truth-seeking, the whole game is lost. And so the only path forward is to be truthful and then fight those anti-Semitic conspiracy theories with more truth.

It has been surprising to me to see, to be candid, how deeply unnerved many people in the Jewish community have been by this book. A number of people tried to get my funding defunded so I couldn't do the research. There were people who tried to ensure that the book would never be published, and now that it's published, there are a number of people who have tried to get me disinvited from speaking invitations because they don't want you, the public, to see this evidence. They don't want you to have the opportunity to make up your mind for yourself.

And I would encourage those who are interested to look at the book yourself, get it from your local library, or purchase a copy if you're feeling generous, you can look at the evidence and you can do what these detractors wouldn't have you do, which is make up your own mind about whether I've treated that evidence dispassionately.

Every subclaim that I make that adds up to my larger claim is footnoted. And it cites to a source, and all of the source material that was originally from the Caribbean has been digitized. And anyone can fact-check me on any claim, and indeed, I would welcome that scrutiny.

[ALAN KADISH] So it's encouraging for me to hear you say that because in today's hyperpolarized society, much of academic endeavors has become politicized and unobjective. And in particular, history is an area where a lot of people have tried to modify their view of history and constitutional law to focus on their own political beliefs.

So on that sobering note, I want to say that I'm happy that we invited you, despite the fact that you've been disinvited from other places. It was really great to hear you. And I look forward to hopefully hearing about your next book.

So thanks for joining us, and thanks to our audience, our record audience, at Touro University for joining us tonight for a really stimulating conversation. And, I flew back overnight so that I could do this, and so I'm happy we got a chance to talk. Take care.

[ANDREW PORWANCHER] Thank you, thank you so much, Dr. Kadish.

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[TEXT] Touro Talks, Touro University, touro.edu/tourotalks

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