Revisiting Hamilton’s Legacy Through A New Lens

In this episode, our guest, Dr. Andrew Porwancher, helps us explore how a founding father with Jewish roots shaped the early American landscape. This episode delves into Alexander Hamilton's fascinating Hamilton's overlooked Jewish heritage. Joined by an esteemed professor who has authoritatively written on the subject, we explore Hamilton's early life, Hamilton's education at a Jewish school in the Caribbean, and the influence of his mother, Rachel Levine. Discover how these unique aspects of his upbringing influenced his identity and interactions with the Jewish community in America, giving us a richer understanding of his pivotal role in the foundation of the United States.

We also examine the strides made toward Jewish inclusivity in early America, driven by figures like George Washington and Alexander Hamilton. Learn about Hamilton's groundbreaker Hamilton's at Columbia University, which abolished religious requirements and opened the doors for Jewish students. These efforts redefined the educational landscape and had far-reaching implications for American political leadership. Our discussion highlights the importance of these inclusivity measures and their lasting impact on the nation.

Lastly, we delve into Hamilton's complex legacy, the criticisms he faced, and how historical memory has shifted over time. From his innovative financial plans to the cultural phenomenon of Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical "Hamilton," he explores how perceptions of Hamilton have evolved. We also reflect on the decisive role of musical theater in sparking interest in history and making it accessible. Additionally, we share a sneak peek into the upcoming book "American Maccabee: Theodore Roosevelt and the Jews," revealing the unexpected "ed alliances and actions of another American icon. Tune in for an enriching conversation that bridges the past and present, offering fresh insights into America's history.

Andrew Porwancher's Website
Constitution Podcast with Dr. Porwancher
ANDREW PORWANCHER ON WISDOM FROM THE HAMILTON MUSICAL

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:46

I am so excited about this episode. This is a special episode because we're in the middle of summer, right? Some teachers are taking a break, Some teachers are in the middle of classes. There's so much going on. But at Arizona State University, one of the really cool things is we have a theater. It's called Gammage Grady Gammage Theater and there are plays.

Speaker 1: 1:09

It is one of my favorite things to do and Hamilton is coming again this year and it just so happens that one of our amazing professors just wrote a book about Alexander Hamilton that I have again been deep diving and noticed that another one of my favorite scholars, Dr Stephen Knott, has already commented on your book because he also wrote a book on Alexander Hamilton. But Hamilton is such a complicated person that I feel like we could write books forever and still not get this. So, Listeners, you probably recognize this voice because we did a podcast on the Constitution and a wheel of cheese, but I'm going to have you reintroduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your new book on Hamilton.

Speaker 2: 2:03

Sure Well, first off, thank you so much for having me. Thank you for having me back. It has been really one of the great privileges of my career to be able to have taught and researched and written about Hamilton at a really unique moment. Hamilton was sort of derided for a couple hundred years. He was kind of the punching bag of the American founders and thanks to Lin-Manuel Miranda, hamilton has been having his moment this past decade, and so it's an exciting time to be a Hamilton scholar and to see a new generation of Americans be freshly alive to his unique contributions to the founding. And so I, even before the musical started, if you can believe it, started working on a book called the Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton that came out just a few years ago, which in book length is in book years, is quite recent, and, and so I went down this deep dive of Hamilton's youth.

Speaker 2: 3:11

I had been teaching initially at the University of Oklahoma before I came to ASU, teaching constitutional history, and I love to bring in biographical details of the characters that I'm teaching about. I want something like the Federalist Papers to be a flesh and blood artifact of humanity, not this bloodless abstraction. So I'm a historian, I love to bring in the biographies and in reading up on Hamilton, in preparing to talk to my students about this iconic figure in our constitutional history, it turns out he had a mother named Rachel Levine, who enrolls him in a Jewish school in the Caribbean, and I thought this is a really curious set of facts for someone whom we've long assumed was a cradle to grave Christian. And I got a research grant to go down to the Caribbean to start looking through the archives and subjecting longstanding assumptions about Hamilton to historical scrutiny, and this sent me down a seven-year rabbit hole that culminated with the publication of my book.

Speaker 1: 4:16

It's so interesting because I think that Americans in general think of founding fathers and they think like, oh, they were all Christian. But the more you look into it, and because Hamilton kind of comes from this, you know, we we don't know. They say James Hamilton is his father, but from what I've read there's not like proof. Proof His background is so it's just a big question. And so to even consider what religion he is like how, what, what first started this for you?

Speaker 1: 4:58

where you're like, wait a minute, what? Because who looks into like? I mean genuinely I don't know that I would look into religion for Hamilton first. There's like 10,000 other things I would look at. But what? Why does religion matter when we're talking about the founding fathers?

Speaker 2: 5:18

I mean religion matters profoundly when thinking about any of the founders. Their world was a fundamentally religious world, and just like today we have very rich and often contentious debates among ourselves as Americans about the proper relationship between religion and statecraft, so too was the founding generation preoccupied with and full of dissenting opinions about church and state. So religion for any of them is really significant. And you noted and I think quite perspicaciously that when you think about Hamilton it's not the first thing you think about. You think about the Bank of the United States, you think about his role at the Constitutional Convention, you think about his relationship with George Washington and the Revolution, jefferson and Madison those are the founders we think about when we think about religion in the early years of the Republic.

Speaker 2: 6:13

And some of the other iconic names I would say including Washington, including John Jay not just Hamilton had a lot to say about religion are important figures for thinking about the religious history of the United States, and yet they have often been neglected by historians.

Speaker 2: 6:32

And so for me it was the fact that he had this mother, whose surname was Levine, which is a quintessentially Jewish surname, and she enrolls him in a Jewish school at a time when Jewish schools exclusively educated Jewish children, and these facts struck me as really curious. And Hamilton biographers knew what his mother's name was, they knew that he goes to this Jewish school, but they are fixated on the remarkable events of his adult life and so they hadn't really bothered to go down to the Caribbean in any sort of in-depth way and try to study his religious upbringing upbringing in his Caribbean childhood was, as we just sort of unthinkingly assume, christian, or whether it's possible that, notwithstanding his self-identification in his adulthood as a Christian, could he perhaps have had a Jewish upbringing in his Caribbean youth. And ultimately I conclude, not as a matter of definitive proof but as an admittedly probabilistic venture, that, based on the fragmentary record we have, the argument that Hamilton probably has a Jewish identity in his upbringing is the most consistent with the available evidence we have in the historical record.

Speaker 1: 8:04

And in your book you talk about. You know he has a relationship with the Jewish community in America. It really that made him unique. How do you think that his religious upbringing him being at a Jewish school, even if he didn't identify as a Jewish person once he came here? How do you think that? I'm trying to think of how I want to say like, ask this how do you think that influenced how he thought about government, how he thought about, you know, citizens and just America in general?

Speaker 2: 8:43

Yeah, it's a really great question and in many ways it is the real question. At the heart of my book I have this argument that is designed to have some curb appeal about. Well, actually, this founding father may have had a secret Jewish identity in his youth, and I stand by that argument fully. Is the one you bring up that Hamilton likely had a Jewish upbringing? That informed a particular vision he has of American society, a vision in which Jew and Gentile will stand upon an equality.

Speaker 2: 9:23

What is striking about America in the founding period is that it is animated by these noble promises of equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, and yet it is a society that is riven with what I describe as hereditary hierarchy, and so it is a society where free predominates over slave, Christian over Jew, man over woman, you know, settler over indigenous, etc. Etc. And much of American history has been about closing that gap between the promise of the revolution and our practices. Jews are the most significant non-Christian minority faith in America in the early years of the Republic, and so the status of American Jews becomes a test. It is a test of whether America is going to fulfill its founding creed of equality or whether the inspired words of the Declaration are just window dressing in a society that's going to continue, as many European societies did, to subject Jews to second-class citizenship.

Speaker 2: 10:37

And there are some people in America who want it to be an overtly Christian country where Jews might be tolerated but they don't stand on an equality, where they're not able to practice law, they're not necessarily able to run for the state legislature, they're not necessarily eligible to vote, and indeed most state governments in the early years of the republic denied Jews some combination of these kinds of civil rights.

Speaker 2: 11:06

What's so remarkable about Hamilton and other like-minded people is that, including George Washington, famously, they envisioned an American society where Jews would be full participants in the civic life of the nation. And Washington and Hamilton, along with others, Madison and others at the Constitutional Convention, are part of a generation of framers who ban religious tests for office in the federal constitution, which often that doesn't get as much attention as the free exercise clause, but that is a remarkable advance for religious liberty at the time. And so Hamilton, drawing from this early exposure to Judaism, which is undeniable, and a probabilistic identity as a Jew, is coming to America in his adulthood. Not speaking about his past, really any aspects of his past, including his religious upbringing. And yet you can see in his fervent advocacy of religious equality for Jews these pronounced echoes of his West Indian past.

Speaker 1: 12:23

So just to kind of give us a little bit of context, you know, we know that there has been anti-Semitism throughout history. What was their anti-Semitism in America, in the colonies, during this time?

Speaker 2: 12:38

To be sure, america in some ways is very unique from Europe, where most of the Jewish newcomers are coming from, and in some ways it's similar. America in the 18th century, like many European countries, does suffer from strains of anti-Semitism. There are people in the early years of the Republic who do not want to see American Jews share in the full prerogatives of first-class citizenship, and they're explicit about that. There is a case in Georgia where a Jew who was a Revolutionary War veteran has to argue that he even has standing to sue despite the fact that he's not a Christian. There are questions about whether Jews can give sworn testimony in court, and so in many ways all of these different aspects of American civic life become a battleground for whether Jews and Gentiles will be treated equally under the law. And in addition to some legal forms of anti-Semitism, there's also cultural anti-Semitism. Every single synagogue that is in the United States at that time gets desecrated at some point, is vandalized at some point. Now Jews are, I should note, actually distinct from Catholics in that Catholics actually were subjected to more discrimination. There were more Catholics than there were Jews, and there was a lot of anti-Catholic sentiment among many Protestants at the time not all of them. You look at Washington, he's extraordinarily ecumenical, he's extraordinarily inclusive when it comes to religious differences. He reminds his fellow Americans that it was a Catholic nation, france, that came to our aid in our moment of need during the revolution. But there is undoubtedly anti-Semitismism as well.

Speaker 2: 14:32

But if you look at america versus europe at that time, many european nations at some point or another had expelled their jewish communities. The inquisition is still alive and well in spain. At the time of the American founding it actually endures into the 19th century. England had kicked out its Jews and only readmitted them the century before America secures its independence. There are all kinds of examples of Jews being banished or subjected to total segregation, where they were cordoned off into their own districts that were locked up at night, these Jewish quarters. There's nothing like that in America.

Speaker 2: 15:18

And so many Jews are drawn to America because, relative to Europe, there are greater opportunities to fully participate in the economy.

Speaker 2: 15:28

And they, yes, there's some legal discrimination, yes, there's some cultural discrimination, but by and large they are treated far better than they were in Europe. So, for example, in the British army a Jew could not become an officer, but in Washington's continental army, being a Jew in no way posed an obstacle to becoming an officer and in fact some of his most important officers were Jews. You have an example in 1783, america negotiates its peace treaty with Britain, ending the war for independence, and Jews in London consider sending the king a congratulatory letter to give him their best wishes on this achievement of peace. And they decide not to send the letter because they say we don't even want to be seen as touching politics, we need to just back off. We want to be seen as completely apolitical. In contrast, in America, american Jews are stridently saying we fought and bled for American independence and we are demanding the rights that were promised us in the Constitution. And fortunately for these Jews, in people like Alexander Hamilton, they found powerful allies in the Christian community.

Speaker 1: 16:51

And Hamilton famously went to Columbia. You talk about in your book how he, you know he makes Columbia University more welcoming to Jewish people. Was there a? You know? You talk about religious tests, which I am going to link our Constitution podcast because that to me was so interesting. That little piece of it Did universities back then kind of, you know, keep Catholics, jews, anybody away. That would have gotten to the point where Hamilton's like this isn't a thing. We need to make Columbia University a more welcoming place.

Speaker 2: 17:36

Yeah, you know it may be hard for our modern listeners to imagine a question of Jewish belonging at Columbia to be a hot-button political issue, but in fact it was back in the 18th century. So Hamilton is a really interesting figure in this regard. He goes to Columbia. It's actually called King's College before the war. It gets renamed Columbia after the war. You can't have fought a war against a monarch and have your alma mater called King's. That would be unseemly. We're a republic now. So they gave it what was seen as a solid, republican American name Columbia.

Speaker 2: 18:13

And Hamilton is intimately involved with his alma mater and he works with John Jay, with whom he'll later collaborate on the Federalist Papers. John Jay is also an alumnus of Columbia and they institute a number of reforms that are friendly to Jews. They do away with religious requirements for the college presidents, so now Jews are eligible to be president of Columbia. If you look at other colonial era colleges like Rutgers and Brown, they don't change the requirements for their college presidents until the 20th century. Hamilton's 150 years ahead of his time. Hamilton is instrumental in putting the first Jew on the board of any American college. His name was Gershon Satius, who was the Hazan. He was functionally the leader of New York synagogue at that time, and there wouldn't be another Jew on Columbia's board again until the 20th century. Once again, hamilton is more than a century ahead of his time.

Speaker 2: 19:09

Hamilton also does away with mandatory forms of Christian worship for undergrads, and this is pretty striking. These schools that date back to the colonial era to your question were largely designed for Christians and particularly to train people for the clergy, and then they expand their missions. They also start to train people for law, which ends up becoming Hamilton's profession. Many college graduates end up becoming physicians, and so they brought in their purview Columbia in particular, because it wasn't this bucolic college out in the countryside, it was in New York City, and so you have a disproportionate number of Columbia alumni going into business and commerce.

Speaker 2: 19:55

And so it makes sense that, as the mission of these schools and the kinds of things that their graduates are doing becomes more diverse, that the student body might become more diverse as well, and in fact by the late 1790s you get a Jewish student coming to Columbia. There actually been one when Hamilton was there, an anomalous one in the 1770s, and today you know Columbia, I think maybe something like 20% Jewish, and you can trace the origins of Jewish inclusivity at Columbia to Hamilton, and given how disproportionately American political leadership has come from a small handful of colleges, that was true then, it can often be true today. Who gets to go to these colleges is not a triviality. It is a matter of great import for American political leadership.

Speaker 1: 20:50

You talk about this stuff and it makes me realize how young our country really is. And you talk about this stuff and it makes me realize how young our country really is, because when you say things like didn't happen till the 20th century, I'm like I was born in the 20th century. Now, granted, it's a century, but it just goes to show you like our, our nation is still very young as you know we look worldwide.

Speaker 2: 21:11

Can I tell you one anecdote on that point? This will get us slightly away from Hamilton, but there was a Supreme Court justice whose grandmother, when he was a boy growing up in Antebellum, new England, would tell him stories about seeing redcoats march through the streets of Boston when she had been a girl. And on the other side of his life he had a Supreme Court clerk who was in his 20s at the end of this justice's tenure in the 1930s and that clerk lived until the 1990s. And so there are people who were alive during the American Revolution who knew this justice, and there were people alive in the 1990s who knew this justice, and I think it's a really striking indication of just how young a republic we are.

Speaker 1: 21:58

I'm going to go do a deep dive on that, that's. It is like I mean, we're talking about America 250 coming up and I'm like man, it's just. This is why the study of history is so important, because it is not something that happened in the past. We're talking like mere generations removed from us that some of this happened.

Speaker 2: 22:19

As you were studying Hamilton.

Speaker 1: 22:21

Right, this is before the play comes out. You said and I love this that he was kind of the punching bag of the founding fathers. Right, because I think that it's human nature to label somebody as good or bad, even though people in general are complicated. What did you find to be a redeeming quality of Hamilton during your research that just kind of was like huh, he shouldn't be the punching bag, right, because I've studied Washington and Jefferson and Madison and they're such complicated human beings but people want. They were good or they were bad. During your research, what was something that you were like? You know, this is kind of a stand up guy.

Speaker 2: 23:09

You know, hamilton was very polarizing in his own day. Hamilton was very polarizing in his own day, and his enemies derided him I think unfairly as being a lackey of the moneyed classes, as being somebody who's basically trying to enrich the already wealthy at the expense of ordinary soldiers and soil tillers. And, by the way, a lot of these accusations that were leveled against Hamilton and against the financial system he built were infused with anti-Semitism. Hamilton is accused of being in league with allegedly rapacious Jewish globalist agents who are somehow screwing over the little guy through their imaginations. If you look at Hamilton's financial plans, he is not interested in trying to enrich the already wealthy at the expense of everybody else. What he's trying to do is and this is something that I learned in the course of my research he is trying to create stakes. He believes that if America's wealthiest people have a stake in ensuring the perpetuity of the union, it is more likely to survive. And so his goal is not to enrich the already wealthy. His goal is to take this fragile republic that might yet be at risk of recolonization. You know that's hard for us to imagine today. We know how the story played out From their perspective. America was a long shot, and there were real, valid concerns, even after winning the War of Independence, that America's experiment in self-government might well die in its infancy and Hamilton's financial system creates the economic foundations upon which our political experiments in democracy might well endure have been the most common about Hamilton that he's this shady guy who's propping up Wall Street and doesn't care about Main Street fundamentally misunderstands his motivations and also the outcomes of his financial policies, which were very much directed towards galvanizing the American republic, not in engaging in some kind of class warfare. Hamilton, as we know, dies young. He is killed in a duel with Aaron Burr, and his most fervent enemies have decades left in which they can impugn Hamilton's integrity without Hamilton vociferously rebutting them.

Speaker 2: 26:00

And you talked about Stephen Knott, who is one of my favorite historians. He has a book that I highly recommend called Alexander Hamilton and the Persistence of Myth. You're nodding your head, as you know it. That talks about why it is that the memory of Hamilton and the criticisms of him are often so divorced from the reality of the man, and so it is. For people who study the American founding, it's really incredible to see what the musical has done, because it has completely changed the political culture around Hamilton's memory in this country and it'll be fascinating to see the extent to which that develops over the course of our lifetimes.

Speaker 2: 26:46

If you look at Jefferson, you know he was beloved as the author of the Declaration of Independence the author of the Declaration of Independence, and then with research about him and Sally Hemings and the likelihood that he fathered children with his slave, that has to some degree tarnished Jefferson's reputation. It's at least made him a more complicated figure. You look at someone like Washington who on so many grounds, including on the question of religious liberty, is unimpeachable. He's also implicated in the institution of slavery. You look at someone like John Adams, who actually people didn't really love at the time but he's kind of beloved by historians because he just put down all of his thoughts with no apology, in unvarnished terms, which makes him a great source to use, and David McCullough did so much to elevate Adams in the imagination.

Speaker 2: 27:41

I mean Ben Franklin. You can't not love Ben Franklin and in fact I was talking to a theater critic in New York who said that he suspects that Lin-Manuel doesn't have Franklin in the Hamilton musical because Franklin is so below that audiences will be so drawn to Franklin that it would take away from Hamilton's luster, such as the magnetism of Franklin, and so you have you have this cast of characters whose stock has risen and fallen, but generally been higher than Hamilton, and it will be really fascinating to see what happens with Hamilton's memory. If we have anything to learn from our friend Professor Knott, it is that historical memory tends not to be stagnant. It's dynamic, it changes with each new generation, and so it's something I'll be watching closely in the decades to come.

Speaker 1: 28:31

You talked about Thomas Jefferson.

Speaker 1: 28:34

Annette Gordon-Reed, who also has commented on your book, her Hemingses of Monticello, is amazing, because this is what I do in my spirit relationship with slavery and how complicated it was, because, martha, you know some of the enslaved persons came from her husband's family. How the complications of slavery during the time is more than just owning people. It's who owns what and it's it's so. It just is so complicated and so interesting because the more we dig and the more we learn they're not gods right, they're men of their time. So you talked about the play. You got to see the play before it became this like you can't get tickets anywhere. Can you tell us about that?

Speaker 2: 29:33

Because I'm so jealous. Yeah, I was in New York City over the summer. That's when academics tend to do their archival research and Hamilton's legal papers are held at his alma mater at Columbia. So I was in New York City for the summer doing research for the book early days of the research, and this new musical, hamilton, was in previews. It hadn't had its premiere yet, and so the secret wasn't out and I thought well, a musical on Hamilton. You know, this is probably one, the only time there's ever going to be a musical on a topic I happen to be writing about.

Speaker 2: 30:07

So that seemed rather serendipitous, but it also sounded so gimmicky I thought this is probably going to be a joke. It's going to shut down after like two weeks, and so if I don't go to see it now, I'm not going to get to see it, because no one besides a professional historian would even want to see this. And so you could get a ticket the day of at face value. You know, get some previews, and and so I go and I'm just like, I'm like blown away, and I look around and I think everybody else is too, and I realized, like you know, I'm not a musical theater expert, but it seemed to me I didn't know if it was just my historian's bias that this might catch fire, and it did, I think, beyond anybody's wildest dreams.

Speaker 2: 30:49

And what was so cool is that the cast would just like hang out after the show and talk to people, and so I got to talk to a lot of the original cast members about some of the research I was doing. Daveed Diggs, who played Thomas Jefferson, is both Black and Jewish, and in fact his Jewish mother was at the show, and so Daveed Diggs and his mother and I have this long conversation about the complexities of Jewish identity. I got to speak to Christopher Jackson, who played Washington, and even more than Lin-Manuel Miranda, jackson is considered the real scholar of that original cast. He had read so many books and I actually heard from his manager a few weeks later, like hey, he wants your book, but the book was still like six years away from coming out.

Speaker 1: 31:41

So did you send him a copy?

Speaker 2: 31:43

I feel like we need yes. He needs to have a copy, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, and I even got to speak briefly with Lin-Manuel Miranda himself.

Speaker 2: 31:51

I'd love to tell you we're very close friends and in a Tuesday poker match not to do a poker game not the case, actually but he was very encouraging, very lovely guy. He has a great reputation in entertainment circles for being a very down to earth person and, as someone who is a nobody in the entertainment world, I can tell you in my brief interaction with him he was very warm and very friendly and so it was just really an extraordinary opportunity to get a chat with the cast, talk about some of the research and hear from them and hear their perspectives. And I think one of the things that is really exciting for me is to see people working in a different idiom, working in musical theater, take history and reimagine it in new ways. You know it's kind of an easy and I think not very fun, kind of a cranky thing as a historian to be like, well, this wasn't accurate and that wasn't accurate, and you know the standards for a book, I think just need to be different. There is such a thing as artistic license. There's not such a thing as historical license. My only license is to be faithful to the historical record. But I think a playwright can take liberties and can reimagine the past and hopefully that leads people who saw the show to go out and pick up a book on Hamilton, maybe even pick up my book and learn something more of the history in a fully accurate rendering. But I trust and respect audiences enough to understand that they are seeing a musical, that it is not a strictly faithful rendition of history and that there are books from professors and other writers that they can turn to for that kind of material.

Speaker 2: 33:32

And so I actually wrote a piece which I can share and you can link to if you're interested, where I actually defend the Hamilton musical against criticism from fellow historians, because I think that the Hamilton musical in some ways is actually, from a certain angle, actually a better rendition of history than what we get in most of the histories, because many of the biographies just sort of gloss over Hamilton's early years. And what we see from Lin-Manuel Miranda is a really keen focus. In that first song on Hamilton's childhood it's all about his upbringing in the Caribbean, and then if you look at other songs that focus on his adulthood, they will regularly make references back to his Caribbean past. So when he is embroiled in the Maria Reynolds scandal he sings about the hurricane he survived in the Caribbean. Lin-manuel is thinking really hard about what it means to take seriously the import of somebody's childhood on their adulthood, and I think he's doing that better than a lot of biographers often tend to do.

Speaker 2: 34:37

I'm the son of a child psychologist, so I might be more primed to do that than the average person. I shouldn't give myself too much credit. So thanks, mom. But it really matters a lot, and sometimes historians shy away from writing about childhood because I think that they're concerned about getting out too much on a limb and saying well, can we really make these inferential leaps from childhood to adulthood? And I think the answer to that is to be candid with the reader about. You know, this is what we know. We can't always draw a straight line from A to B, but Alexander Hamilton is the only founder to attend a Jewish school in his upbringing and he is also the most fervent supporter of Jewish rights in the early Republic of any founder. And I think it would be folly to think that there was no causal relationship whatsoever between those two details.

Speaker 1: 35:29

It's so interesting you talk about, I mean, chris Jackson is my favorite. That that is. I've seen Hamilton a few times. Um, that is always the time when I cry because his voice is so amazing.

Speaker 1: 35:40

And now I'm thinking there are reference, like biblical references when George Washington talks, and now I'm like I want to watch it again because there are no references. Religious references when hamilton's singing or when they talk about that washington's are very obvious. You know the vine and the fig tree, like I say, obvious, maybe obvious for people who grew up having to read the bible. Um, but now I feel like when I watch it again it's going to be through more of that lens of I wonder how musical theater is exploring that, because and I do absolutely want this piece defending Hamilton as a musical, because I will tell you, as somebody who is in a classroom environment, the amount of interest and excitement that kids had for history and government that went even beyond Hamilton, because then there were questions about, you know, about Washington and about Aaron Burr and Jefferson, and you know Chris Jackson singing One Last Time.

Speaker 1: 36:52

I cannot tell you how much more interesting it made teaching Washington's farewell address. Musical theater makes history accessible and you're right, like and I'm definitely one of those people that is like that did not happen, whatever else, but at the same time, I I just want to be a part of this and if it gets people excited and it gets people, like you said, to read articles, to read books and to get more into this time in history, it's absolutely done its job.

Speaker 2: 37:27

A thousand percent, and if just 2% of people who see the musical are compelled to go out and get a book on the founding era, it's. You know, I think Lin-Manuel has done a service for enhancing people's understanding of history. The line about the vine and fig tree I'm really glad you brought that up because it is actually really significant to the story I tell in my book, my book. In 1790, washington visits the Toro Synagogue in Newport. It is the oldest synagogue structure in North America. It's still there today. People can go see it. It's still a functioning synagogue, it's a beautiful building. And he visits this synagogue.

Speaker 2: 38:14

The Hassan of the synagogue, the warden I should say gives an address to Washington. And when Washington gets back from his trip to Rhode Island and he goes to New York, he writes a letter to this synagogue that is considered the most important document in American Jewish history. It's sort of a striking thing that the most important document in American Jewish history written by a Christian. And in this letter Washington draws this language from the book of Micah and he says everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make them afraid. And imagine what that would have meant to the Jewish community at that time. Here is the president of a new country, a time when there's not much precedent to be had. Washington is the first right. The power of precedent is at its zenith. He is uniquely situated to shape, for generations to come, the tenor of Jewish belonging in America. And he is writing to a people, the Jews, who had been subjected to blood-soaked persecution throughout Europe. And he's saying in this nation, you don't have to be afraid. And he is drawing language from Hebrew scripture, no less. And Washington says in this letter that the government of the United States will give to bigotry no sanction to persecution, no assistance to bigotry. No sanction to persecution, no assistance. This letter is not just of unparalleled significance to American Jewish history, but it is among the most important documents I would submit in the history of Jews globally, because it is the first time that a head of state anywhere in the world acknowledges Jews as citizens.

Speaker 2: 40:02

And your listeners might not be surprised to learn that I offer an admittedly speculative, that Hamilton may have been instrumental in influencing Washington's views. In the Newport letter, jefferson scholars say oh, this is all of Jefferson's fingerprints on it. Madison scholars say oh, this sounds like Madison, all of Jefferson's fingerprints on it. Madison scholars say oh, this sounds like Madison, I think it's actually Hamiltonian. But there's no doubt that it is fundamentally Washingtonian. This is Washington to a T, and even if Hamilton did influence Washington's views, washington was a person who believed in his bones in religious pluralism. He believed down to the very marrow that america should be a place for people of all faiths, and the newport letter is the most vivid and elegant and persuasive and moving illustration of that sentiment that just gave me the chills.

Speaker 1: 40:54

I did not know that. And now I'm like I need to find this letter, like I want to create a lesson, like what a there's so much with that right Washington acknowledging it. And and now I'm like that even that piece in the musical, I'm like there's, there's new significance to that. Now I'm so excited I have this really long list for you Because I think it's important to understand again, kind of going back to what I said at the beginning, is that a lot of people are under the assumption like the United States was founded as a Christian nation and in our constitution episode, you know, you talked about the anti-Catholicism and I was raised a Catholic, my family is Irish Catholic and I, again, being raised as the Catholic, did not know about all the anti-Catholic sentiment. And now I'm learning. You know, I know about antisemitism, world War II, like I know that and I've never gone this far back to understand. Like no, there are roots as soon as the nation was even a thought.

Speaker 1: 42:09

Are there any resources besides your book, which we are absolutely going to link um that you feel if somebody is watching the uh, the musical or they're listening to this podcast and they're like this is so interesting. I wish I knew more, which I already have written down to you know, the George Washington letter. There's just so much. I'm so excited about this and we can definitely put this in later to the notes, because I'm sure we'll think of something later. But somebody wants to know a little bit more. Where do you, where do you start?

Speaker 2: 42:58

wants to know a little bit more. Where do you start? Yeah, it's a great question and I'll mention a few books that people might be interested in. Of course I would be honored if people thought about picking up my book, but I've not written the only book on this issue.

Speaker 2: 43:12

So, on the Catholic question, there's a book by a historian named Michael Bredenbach, and my apologies if I'm mispronouncing that Mike, but he and I were actually in grad school together. I've not seen him in years, but I saw that he had a book out with Harvard University Press that came out a few years ago called Our Dear Bot, liberty, catholics and Religious Toleration in Early America, and this is a well-received book that I think it offers a nice complement to the kind of work I'm trying to do on Jewish history there on the Jewish side, because my book is very Hamilton focused. But there's a book that's a little bit broader in terms of its scope on Jews and a little bit broader in terms of its time period of and a little bit broader in terms of its time period of interest, but certainly looking at the founding called A Promised Land, jewish Patriots, the American Revolution and the Birth of Religious Freedom, and that's by a scholar at Auburn University named Adam Jortner, who I happen to know very good scholar and really an expert scholar and really an expert in religion. And there's a book that I'm just working my way through now by another really good young historian named Benjamin Park, and this is on Mormon history, and I mentioned this because I know that there's a very strong Mormon presence in Arizona and Mormon history is fascinating and it is so inextricably linked with the history of religious liberty in America.

Speaker 2: 44:39

And his book is called Kingdom of Nauvoo, very well received and well regarded by critics, and it is a narrative history about the origins of Mormons and particularly this small scale kingdom. They set up the kingdom of Nauvoo in the American Midwest and so I think, if you're interested in these kinds of topics, there are so many other books out there. There are entire books that have been written about just Jefferson and religion or just Washington and religion. Anyone who's listening, feel free to send me an email. You can look me up on the ASU website. I give you a whole bibliography, but those are a few books to sort of whet your appetite on religion and the founding.

Speaker 1: 45:27

And we will link all of these books and I will link your webpage. It's not hard to find you on ASU's website to get the email address. I'm so excited about this. I feel like this is the second time now that we've recorded a podcast and I feel like it's the same excitement. It's so fun to learn all of these things. Is there anything else that we have not hit that you want to make sure that people know about? The Jewish world of Alexander Hamilton?

Speaker 2: 46:03

Well, here's what I would say the Jewish world of Alexander Hamilton. The process of writing that book made me appreciate the utility of using Jewish history as a lens to think about American political and constitutional history more broadly. And Theodore Roosevelt was such a fan of Alexander Hamilton I thought you know. I wonder if Roosevelt shared these philo-Semitic, these pro-Jewish sentiments. And it turned out that there was such a rich and untold history of Theodore Roosevelt and the Jews that my new book coming out next spring with Prince University Press, called American Maccabee, theodore Roosevelt and the Jews, explores for the first time the untold story of TR and the Jewish community.

Speaker 2: 46:57

And I'm kind of putting you in a bind here, but I would love to come back on this podcast when the book comes out next spring and do a whole unit on TR, because he is a mesmerizing figure and in some ways he is.

Speaker 2: 47:12

He's a really unobvious ally of the Jewish community. He grows up as a scion of the Protestant elite, he's in genteel circles that are tinged with this kind of upper crust anti-Semitism and yet he develops this incredibly deep bond with the Jewish community at a moment of real crisis in Jewish world history, when the pogroms in Eastern Europe are claiming untold Jewish lives and prompting a mass migration of Jews from Eastern Europe to American ports. And Roosevelt understands, I think, better than a lot of his contemporaries, that how he treats the Jewish population, how America treats its Jewish citizens, as a test case for what kind of country America is going to become in the 20th century. And so I'm hugely excited to have drawn from declassified records from the Roosevelt administration, from the State Department, to be able to bring sources to light that have not appeared in any other Roosevelt biographies before, and to be the first person to tell this story. So stay tuned for Teddy Roosevelt.

Speaker 1: 48:30

Yes, because I don't know if you know this about me I love presidential history. I find it so fascinating. I feel like every teacher of history has a historical crush and mine is Teddy Roosevelt. I just find his life fascinating. It's very funny because I was talking with Jeff, my colleague, about Teddy Roosevelt.

Speaker 1: 48:57

We were at a conference in South Dakota and I was talking to, I genuinely I find him so fascinating and so I keep saying this, but I don't have any other words. I'm so excited to do that podcast because I love, and I feel like this just encapsulates it. You talked about using Jewish history as a lens to learn about American history, american constitutionalism, because lenses are important. Right, it's important for us to understand that it's not just our lens. There are other ways to learn things. And when we talk about religious tolerance and you said this earlier it's not necessarily tolerance, it's equality, and those are two very different things. And when we're talking about creating a nation, and even now, it's equality, not tolerance.

Speaker 1: 49:55

I just I have four pages of notes that I'm just so excited about. Thank you so much. This. I wish this was just my job, that I could just sit and interview people and learn. This was so good, and I can't. I'm already thinking about the post um, so I'm gonna say this by the time this does post, I will have Andrew's um not critique defense of the Hamilton musical on our website. I will have probably tons of links because there's just so much good stuff here. And if you're listening to this podcast. It's probably because you love history and you want to go down these rabbit holes too, so thank you so much for your time, andrew. I am so appreciative that I get to work with you and I get to learn from you, and this has just been the best hour of my week.

Speaker 2: 50:55

Oh, this has been the highlight of my week. I'm so excited that the musical is coming to our backyard. I was telling Liz before we started recording. We can actually see the gamage from my backyard. So my wife and I are excited to go to see the musical. And it's just exciting to get to be the local scholar who worked on Hamilton for seven years, and so I hugely appreciate the opportunity. And it's just great chatting with someone who is an educator and not to say that I haven't enjoyed doing podcasts with journalists, who are often the people doing podcasts, but there's something really enriching about two educators getting to come together and talk history. So I'm gonna not be shy about trying to forge my way back into your podcast feed and get another episode. Yes, okay.