Alexander Hamilton and the Civic Status of Jews in the Early Republic

“I fear prepossessions are strongly against us,” Alexander Hamilton confided to his beloved wife, Eliza. “But we must try to overcome them.” That day, February 5, 1800, marked the beginning of a high-stakes trial in which Hamilton represented the merchant Louis Le Guen, who was facing down allegations of commercial fraud. The allegations were bogus, but Hamilton was less than optimistic, telling Eliza, “If I should lose my cause I must console myself with finding my friends. With the utmost eagerness I will fly to them.”

Five years earlier, Hamilton had traded his role as treasury secretary for a far less powerful but much more lucrative endeavor: litigation. He emerged as an iconic figure of the New York bar, combining peerless mastery of law with oratorical charisma at trial. In the courtrooms of New York, as in other all settings, Hamilton usually brimmed with confidence. But the Le Guen case left him atypically unsure, and for good reason. Hamilton’s central witnesses were Jewish.

A pernicious and absurd antisemitic stereotype—long in vogue in the Old World, with residual reverberation in America—held that Judaism called on its followers to lie in court. That invidious trope would become a cudgel in the hands of Gouverneur Morris, Hamilton’s opposing counsel.

Morris is not widely remembered today, but he was a titan of the era. In the 1770s, he served as a delegate to the Continental Congress. In the 1780s, Morris penned the “We the People” preamble to the new federal Constitution. In the 1790s, he represented the Washington administration in a key diplomatic post. And now at trial Morris brought his star power to the cause of religious bigotry.

Morris’s closing argument assailed Hamilton’s key witnesses—“these Jew witnesses,” as Morris indelicately described them—purely because of their faith. “Jews are not to be believed upon oath,” he asserted without compunction.

After court adjourned, Hamilton asked a law clerk, “This speech has made a great impression, has it not?”

“It had,” the clerk responded.
“How then do you think it should be met?”
“In the same manner.”[1]

Spectators packed the court gallery the next day to see Hamilton train his talents on Morris. Hamilton had always been a fighter, whether brandishing a musket or a quill. And the principle of religious equality was certainly worthy of his pugnacious energies. Hamilton well understood that the consequences of Le Guen’s case extended far beyond the commercial dispute at issue. Whether an American courtroom would treat Jew and Gentile alike was a far-reaching question indeed. At stake was nothing less than the meaning of the nascent American Republic. Morris’s reliance on antisemitic point-scoring rested on the tacit premise that the Revolution’s egalitarian rhetoric was an empty promise. But Hamilton would not readily relinquish his faith in equality.

In his own closing argument, Hamilton reminded the jurors that Morris had flagrantly impugned the Chosen People: “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?” Hamilton recounted the ancient history of antisemitism, when the Roman empire dispelled Jews from the Holy Land. Jews became “remnants of scattered tribes . . . an isolated, tributary, friendless people.”[2] By Hamilton’s telling, Morris’s attack on the Jewish witness was a modern gloss on that hoary hatred.

Hamilton declared that Lady Justice drew no distinction between Jews and all others: “Be the injured party . . . Jew, or Gentile, or Christian, or Pagan, Foreign or Native, she clothes him with her mantle, in whose presence all differences of faiths or births, of passions or of prejudices—all are called to acknowledge and revere her supremacy.”[3] It was an extraordinary moment. Here was a founding father calling for the court to fulfill America’s revolutionary promise of equality for the very people whom the Old World had long condemned to second-class citizenship. For all his anxiety at the trial’s start, it ended with vindication for Hamilton: a 28-to-6 victory.

Friends and opponents alike who saw Hamilton’s courtroom performance that day marveled at his unprecedented fervency. For a man whose default setting was intensity, it says much that the case stirred in him especial passion. His contemporaries could see that he was unusually invested, but they remained in the dark about why: Hamilton was probably Jewish by birth and upbringing.

Raised in the Caribbean by a mother named Rachel Levine who enrolled him in a Jewish school, Hamilton likely had a Jewish identity in his formative years. A thoroughgoing discussion of the evidence for his Jewish boyhood—which can be found elsewhere for interested readers—lies beyond my ambit here. But suffice it to say that Hamilton was the only founder with sustained exposure to the Jewish community in his youth. Any Jewish identity he had, he left behind in the Caribbean. And yet, as the Le Guen case makes plain, Hamilton never forgot. He brought to his American adulthood a deep reverence for the Jewish faith and a firm conviction that its adherents deserved civic equality.

The Le Guen trial is striking for what it reveals not just about Hamilton but also about the nation he helped create. It is telling that he even needed to uphold the proposition that a court should credit the testimony of Jews. The United States was a young country that, for all its egalitarian promises, still had harbored age-old prejudices.

The civic status of Jews had been a political lightning rod ever since the birth of the republic. Most early state constitutions limited office-holding to professing Christians. Jews could not practice law in a majority of jurisdictions. Whether a Jew could even sue in court was a justiciable issue. Cultural antisemitism compounded legal forms of discrimination. That America’s Jews had overwhelmingly sided with the patriot cause—spilling their blood and spending their treasure in service of independence—made the prejudice they faced thereafter all the more unjust.

Yet there were signs of hope for America’s small Jewish community. One by one, states lifted civic disabilities on their Jewish residents. Meanwhile, the delegates at the Constitutional Convention undertook a radical step for religious equality by opening federal office to Jews. And just as importantly, George Washington lent his singular prestige to the acceptance of Jewish people. His famous Newport letter of 1790—addressed to the Touro Synagogue in Rhode Island—declared in stirring prose, “the Government of the United States . . . gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”

It was against this backdrop—wherein antisemitism and egalitarianism vied for supremacy—that Hamilton delivered his spirited defense of Jews in court. His closing argument stands as the most full-throated repudiation of Judeophobia to pass the lips of any founder. Hamilton did not singlehandedly vanquish Jew-hatred in America that day, but he sent a powerful message that antisemitism would not be left unanswered.

In the two centuries since Hamilton emerged from that courthouse triumphant, the question of Jewish belonging in the United States has waxed and waned. Sometimes, antisemitism has been relatively quiescent, confined to the margins of our national discourse. Other times it has forced its way to the center of our politics. We inherit from the founding generation neither an unblemished record of inclusivity nor an unalloyed history of prejudice, but rather a centuries-old struggle between the two. Hamilton understood that Jewish belonging would not materialize of its own accord. He fully appreciated that enlightened voices needed to speak out in defense of Jewish Americans, even when doing so was politically inconvenient. It is a lesson that echoes through the ages, no less resonant in our day than it was in Hamilton’s own.

Andrew Porwancher is director of graduate studies and professor in the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University. He is the author of The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton (Princeton University Press, 2021) and Theodore Roosevelt and the Jews (under contract, Princeton University Press).