Alexander Hamilton and the Hebrew Republic

• In Event: Modern Uses of an Ancient Bible

Abstract

As George Washington prepared to step down as the first American president in 1796, he tapped his trusted aide Alexander Hamilton to pen a Farewell Address. Hamilton included a passage on religion that many historians consider Washington’s most important pronouncement on faith. The Farewell Address championed a mutually supportive relationship between government and religion. Whereas Thomas Jefferson believed that the separation of church-and-state was an essential precondition for religious liberty, the Hamiltonian school of thought harmonized religious pluralism with state support of faith.

There was an important precedent for the latter approach: the Hebrew Bible. Christian Hebraists on both sides of the Atlantic looked to the Ancient Israelite government as a model for modern states to emulate. The sixteenth century Dutch philosopher Hugo Grotius described “the Hebrew Republic” as committed to the twin principles of religious tolerance and government support for religion. Hamilton was deeply influenced by Grotius, especially the text that extensively discussed the Hebrew Republic, "De jure belli ac pacis." Hamilton’s contemporaries recognized that his approach to church-state relations owed its intellectual lineage to Ancient Israel, referring to it as “a Jewish plan.”

Recovering the Hamilton model of church-state relations is important for several reasons. The Jeffersonian approach won out in constitutional history, and so the literature on the early republic has largely overlooked the very existence of a competing school of thought. Whereas scholars assume that those historical figures most committed to the Jeffersonian ideal were the most sympathetic to minority faiths like Jews, in fact the greatest philo-semites were those who wanted a bridge rather than a wall between the state and religion. Moreover, Hamilton’s relationship with Judaism is entirely neglected as a subject—he attended Jewish school as a boy, studied the Hebrew Bible in its original language, and continued his Biblical education into his early adulthood. His reading of the Bible as a constitutional text is one piece of Hamilton’s rich relationship with Judaism.

Author

• Andrew Porwancher