I had to do some digging (and admittedly there's probably a better source), but I remembered hearing that Hamilton was ethnically Jewish.
Alexander Hamilton was born on the British island of Nevis, in the West Indies, on January 11, 1755. His mother was most likely Jewish, and his father, James Hamilton, was a non-Jewish Scotsman descended from the House of Hamilton in Ayrshire, Scotland. In the 1760s, Alexander attended a Jewish school in Nevis, which was housed in a synagogue in Charleston, the island's capital. The local Anglican school was not an option for Alexander, because he was a bastard in the eyes of the church. His mother, Rachel, had never divorced her first husband, who was also Jewish, and her union with James was therefore not technically marriage, making Alexander illegitimate.
After completing his education in Nevis, Alexander moved to Charleston, South Carolina in search of a better life and career. He became George Washington's aide during the American Revolution, was the principal author of the Federalist Papers, and served as the United States' first Secretary of the Treasury, under George Washington. Throughout the rest of his life, it seems that he had no affiliation with Judaism.
On p. 17-18 of the Chernow book, Hamilton's connections with the Jewish people are underscored.
Perhaps from this exposure at an impressionable age, Hamilton harbored a life-long reverence for Jews. In later years, he privately jotted on a sheet of paper that the "progress of the Jews . . . from their earliest history to the present time has been and is entirely out of the ordinary course of human affairs."
He went on to describe the Jewish people's very existence as evidence of "some great providential plan."
For someone who came from so little to become so much underlines both the meritocratic principle of the Constitution and its advocates as that principles embodiment.
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