Alexander Hamilton on the ten dollar bill.
Credit: YamabikaY, via Shutterstock

Yes, there needs to be a woman on a piece of American currency. Harriet Tubman, Susan B. Anthony, Eleanor Roosevelt — they’re all good.

And, yes, that means that someone needs to vacate the front side of our paper money.

My personal vote was for us to take Andrew Jackson off the $20 bill.  I am by no means alone in this. Even Ben Bernanke wanted him gone. Jackson was a genocidal criminal with gallons of Indian blood on his hands. We had every good reason to expect that Andrew would have been shoved aside, but apparently, that hasn’t happened.

The candidate for replacement — or at least, being relegated to the back of the American wallet — is now Alexander Hamilton.

I am crying foul. C’mon — the first Secretary of the Treasury is the subject of a musical. You can’t just sweep him aside like that.

More than that — I am crying Anti-semitism.

Or, maybe even anti-immigrant-ism.

There is conjecture that Alexander Hamilton was from a partial Jewish background. Hamilton was born in 1755 on the British island of Nevis in the West Indies (making him an immigrant). While his father, James Hamilton, was of Scottish descent, the origins of his mother, Rachel Faucette, are shrouded in mystery.

Rachel might have at one time converted to Judaism, probably when she married her first husband, a certain Mr. Lavien. She never formally divorced Lavien, and therefore Hamilton’s birth was deemed illegitimate. This blemish kept him out of the island’s local Anglican school, and so, Hamilton attended the local Jewish school in Charleston, which had a significant Jewish population. There, young Hamilton learned how to read Hebrew.

For those of you are lie awake at night, and continue to worry about the Pew report: this means that Alexander Hamilton might have been halachically Jewish.

But, even more important, let’s give credit where it is due: Hamilton had more Jewish education than the overwhelming majority of American Jewish kids.

Perhaps that is why Hamilton always had a certain soft spot for the Jews. As his biographer, Ron Chernow, quoted him: “From their earliest history to the present time, [the progress of the Jews] has been and is entirely out of the ordinary course of human affairs. Is it not then a fair conclusion that the cause also is an extraordinary one – in other words, that it is the effect of some great providential plan?’”

In fact, Hamilton never practiced Judaism, and never considered himself Jewish, either. His religious journey took him from a fervent evangelical Presbyterianism, to a rational theism, and in his later years, back again to Christianity in his later years.

But the rumors about Hamilton’s alleged Jewish origins qualifies him for a very elite list — quasi-, pseudo-, crypto-, and maybe-Jews in American history. There have long been rumors about Columbus’ alleged Jewish roots. (True: his voyage coincided with the date of the expulsion from Spain, and he did have many conversos — Jews of Spanish background — in his crew.)

Many Jews have imagined that Abraham Lincoln was Jewish. There are now several books about Lincoln’s ties to the Jews, including those by historians Gary Zola and Jonathan Sarna.

And then, there are the Jewish pirates of the Caribbean. It seems that they attacked Spanish galleons in order to re-capture the wealth that the Spanish crown had stolen from their families during the Expulsion in 1492. Ole!

(Why do so many of us — usually Jews of a certain age — “collect” famous people who might have been Jewish, or who we wish were Jewish? I suspect that this is a fading element of American Jewish culture. It emerges out of a passionate need that we thought would have been, well, history — to be accepted as “real” Americans, with a real part in the larger American story. Every immigrant group exhibits this kind of ethnic pride; recall the father in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, who was quick to point out the Greek origins of, well, everything.)

Back to Hamilton. His end was tragic — shot in a duel with Aaron Burr at Weehawken, New Jersey (though not, apparently, at the New Jersey Turnpike rest stop that bears his name). As my mother would have said: “Nebbich” (poor guy).

And, no — there is no evidence that Aaron Burr (a notorious traitor) knew, or suspected, that Hamilton was Jewish as he was pulling the trigger.

So, I am all for a woman sharing Hamilton’s pride of place on the ten dollar bill. Go for it. It’s long past time.

But please — can we keep Hamilton on there, as well?

He is the only early American poster boy for Jewish continuity that we have.