How Jewish Was Alexander Hamilton? And How Anti-Semitic Were His Contemporaries?

While historians and biographers have long been aware of that Alexander Hamilton attended a Jewish school in the island of Saint Nevis as a child, and of the possibility that his mother’s first husband, Johan Levine, was a Jew, Andrew Porwancher argues that they have misread or underplayed key pieces of evidence. Based on a mass of admittedly circumstantial evidence, Porwancher maintains that there is no reason to doubt that Levine was Jewish, that Hamilton’s mother likely converted to Judaism to marry him, and that Hamilton was at the very least not considered a Christian by the people of Nevis. Porwancher further asserts that this founding father’s upbringing left him sympathetic to Jews as an adult. Adam Kirsch write in his review: