Who else but Alexander Hamilton could have inspired the most successful Broadway musical ever produced about the Founding? The penniless kid who would become a political superstar was the ideal protagonist for a show whose infectious vitality rekindles enthusiasm for the American experiment, a potent antidote to today’s culture of grievance. Born out of wedlock on an island in the British West Indies, a strong believer in Providence who never joined a church, Hamilton’s role in advancing the cause of civil and religious liberty is worth revisiting in a new light.
University of Oklahoma Professor Andrew Porwancher does just that, masterfully. In The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton, he addresses the paradox of a nation “conceived in the name of equality yet defined by hereditary hierarchy—free over slave, white over Native, propertied over landless, man over woman, Christian over Jew.” American Jewry was the one minority that balked, “challenging the country to confront this paradox directly,” invoking the Declaration of Independence to demand civil and religious rights. Hamilton knew this, which is why Porwancher directed the scholar’s stage lights on him, offering “a unique window onto the early American republic writ large.”
While “Hamilton sought an economic and legal order where his Jewish compatriots would stand equal to their Christian neighbors,” it wasn’t just about the Jews. Hamilton understood that standing up for one minority would “illustrate the democratic possibilities of the new nation.” Like his fellow Founders, his commitment to liberty was based on philosophical principles. But it helped that Hamilton had also witnessed the evils of racism and antisemitism while growing up poor on the periphery of civilization.
True, philosophical principles are paramount. It is no small irony that of all the Founders, the greatest animosity toward Jews and Judaism was displayed, albeit privately, by none other than the author of the Declaration. “The whole religion of the Jews,” Thomas Jefferson told a Christian protégé, was based on “the fumes of the most disordered imaginations” masquerading as “special communications of the Deity.” John Adams described Jews as “avaricious,” as did Benjamin Franklin, who thought greed to be entrenched in the Jewish psyche.
Yet they both expressed great admiration for the Hebrews. Adams declared them to have influenced the affairs of mankind more, and more happily, than any other nation, ancient or modern, going even so far as to describe them as “the most glorious Nation that ever inhabited the earth.” Franklin also exhibited an “inconsistent mix of bias and tolerance toward Jews and their faith.” (He always included synagogues among the beneficiaries of his donations to the building of houses of worship.) Franklin’s ambivalence, writes Porwancher, “made him typical of several other Founders.” Only George Washington’s utter “lack of prejudice against Jews was of a piece with Hamilton’s, although the former never developed the extensive ties to Jews that the latter would.”