The Broadway play Hamilton is in the news, as the cast addressed Mike Pence the other night when he attended a performance of the show. Alexander Hamilton had a little-known connection to Jews. What was it?
Alexander Hamilton - bust x by Marion Doss is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
A. Hamilton and his wife Elizabeth Schuyler had eight children, including their daughter Eliza. Eliza married a Jewish physician and converted to Judaism. Because Hamilton was killed by Aaron Burr when Eliza was only four years old, he was not around to see his daughter grow up; however, Hamilton’s wife Elizabeth attended Eliza’s wedding and later attended the bar mitzvah of Eliza’s son Alexander, at Congregation Shearith Israel on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
B. While little is known about Hamilton’s mother, she was known to be of French Hugenot and British ancestry. There is some evidence that she was the illegitimate daughter of a member of the Rothschild banking family. While this has not been proven, one piece of evidence for this story is that when Hamilton founded the Bank of New York, among the original members of the bank’s board of governors was Jakob Mayer Rothschild, who was part of the French branch of the family and was one of the two Jewish financiers (the other being Haym Solomon) of the American Revolution.
C. Because Hamilton’s mother had never divorced her first husband, Alexander was considered illegitimate in the eyes of the Anglican church. As a result, he was not allowed to attend the local Anglican school, but instead attended a Jewish Day School where he learned to recite the Ten Commandments in Hebrew.
D. Charlestown, where Hamilton grew up on the island of Nevis, had a large Jewish population as a result of immigration from Spain and Portugal at the time of the Inquisition. Hamilton’s best friend growing up was a Jewish boy named Moises de Leon. Hamilton later wrote that he first learned about what freedom meant by going to a Passover seder at his friend Moises’ house, and this influenced his views on liberty and religious freedom in the newly independent United States.
E. A number of Jewish newspapers published under Orthodox or Chassidic auspices, such as Hamodia and Di Tzeitung, do not print pictures of women, believing that this violates the custom of tznius, or modesty, and would be offensive to readers. Some papers have even removed women from photographs that they published (for example when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was airbrushed out of the iconic picture at the White House Situation Room as she and others watched the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound by Navy Seals). In a similar vein, one Jewish newspaper covered last week’s incident in which Mike Pence attended the Hamilton performance and was addressed by the cast, but rather than print the name of the show, they referred to the show as “Beefilton.” Editors explained that using the actual name of the show would violate the laws of kashruth and would be offensive to readers.