Was Alexander Hamilton Jewish? A Cambridge-Educated Historian is Making the Case.
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.