Finkelman Files an Amicus Brief
A New York Welcome for a Brooklyn Professor
“I quickly discovered that there is no special breed of people called Californians, with their own culture and background and attitudes. I discovered that most Californians came from other places, where racial prejudice abounded… There also seemed to be a special art form in California: the art of seeming to like people that you really don’t like... Back in New York City, you knew who liked you and who didn’t. You knew where you were. But in California I felt like I was in the middle of the ocean on a raft.” — Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, November 3, 1969, Sports Illustrated
Historians are part storytellers, part politicians, and their credibility depends on what they include and exclude. For years, I have been telling a historical fact that appears untrue in order to ascertain a person’s character. I considered my half-truth a test, and after ensnaring one of America’s top legal historians, I will now reveal my trap.
Did the Founders of the United States envision a Catholic or Protestant nation? Answer: ex-Maryland, they wanted a republic with checks and balances rather than a king or a Pope, and they differed on how to distribute power to accomplish that end. No serious historian can refute my last sentence, but the next statement will reveal whether you understand human nature: did any legitimate or conforming Catholics sign the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution? To test so-called experts, I have been saying zero Catholics signed the Constitution and only one signed the Declaration of Independence. However, textbooks will tell you two Catholics signed the Constitution and only one signed the Declaration of Independence. The Catholic who signed the Declaration of Independence (Charles Carroll) is the brother of one of the two Catholic signees to the Constitution (Daniel Carroll), the other being Thomas Fitzsimons, who was anti-slavery. None of them appear to be conforming Catholics.
We know the Church and other long-standing institutions, including Ivy League universities, built their wealth using chattel slavery; indeed, the word “Black” in today’s vernacular comes from the Spanish (and Catholic) word for the color black.1 Back then, under the doctrine of papal supremacy, you could not be anti-slavery and in line with the Pope’s thinking.2 As for the Carroll brothers, remember that the Founders were generally anti-Catholic and in the middle of wartime preparation, when outsiders are instinctively mistrusted.
“I do declare that there is no transubstantiation in the sacrament of the Lord’s supper in the elements of bread and wine... I do declare that I will [conform] to the Doctrine and Discipline of the Church of England as by Law…” — 1754, anti-Catholic oath signed by George Washington, required to validate his and others’ military commissions
Why was the Carroll family an exception to anti-Catholic antipathy in the colonies? The likely answer is that they were spies and military recruiters for the Protestants. You can’t win a war without good intel and able bodies, and the Carroll family checks off all the usual characteristics of a spy family. I lack proof suitable for an academic journal, other than human nature during wartime and hundreds of letters from the Founders decrying divided loyalties, monarchies, and papal doctrine, but academic thinkers are often behind the curve for a reason. Any minority knows if you’re the only one around, you had better conform, be different (and better) than the usual stereotype (which Fitzsimons was), or keep your mouth shut about your true beliefs. My favorite part about Daniel Carroll is the following entry in the National Archives: “Not much is known about the next two decades of his life [from age 21 to 41] except that he backed the War for Independence reluctantly and remained out of the public eye.” A religious minority from a rich family openly ingratiates himself into a cabal of revolutionary Protestants and nothing is known about his formative years? As far as I’m concerned, the Carrolls were as Catholic as I am Zoroastrian, and my “zero Catholics” test exposes who is looking deeper than the surface and who understands religion as history rather than mere ideology.3
What does all this have to do with Paul Finkelman, a legal historian aligned with the Democratic Party? Nothing at all, except the email he sent in response to mine is so condescending4, I finally had to divulge my American history “trap.” If someone knows a Carroll brother signed the Declaration of Independence, they probably know another Carroll signed the Constitution, right? My statement, “Zero Catholics signed the Constitution, and only one signed the Declaration of Independence,” would, between two normal educated persons having internet access, produce questions concerning how one knows only part of the Carroll family, or why one Carroll would be Catholic and the other not. For Dr. Finkelman, the response was the following:
“I won’t debate this now but two Catholics signed the Constitution and one signed the Declaration... So your history is deeply flawed and incorrect... Half the first class at West Point was Jewish. And of course many founders. Jefferson, Franklin, Paine, and Rush were famously non-theological.”
I made some comments above about human nature, and Professor Finkelman’s misleading statement about West Point Academy’s inaugural class allows me to explain further. Finkelman is technically correct: 50% of West Point’s first class was Jewish: “The Academy’s first graduating class of 1802 was 50% Jewish when Simon Magruder Levy graduated with one other cadet.” But the first class had only two cadets. The other cadet was General Joseph Gardiner Swift, and the type of relationship they had was exposed in a letter sent by Levy to Swift, in which Levy signs off as “Your most obedient Servant.” Tellingly, Swift once described Levy as hailing from a “respectable Jew family,” which any non-whitewashed minority knows is code for, “He’s one of the good ones.” Given deep-seated antipathy towards Catholics and Jews by early American Protestants, you couldn’t be a minority among them unless you helped expand their property holdings5—in Levy’s case, he killed Native Americans—or were non-conforming to stereotypes believed by the majority about race or religion, which meant a rejection of the papal supremacy doctrine. Had the Carrolls been openly practicing Catholics in line with the Pope, they would not have been able to ingratiate themselves with Protestant revolutionaries to the extent they did, and Fitzsimons obviously deviated from the Church of his time because of his anti-slavery stance.
Finkelman doesn’t know what it’s like to be a disfavored minority because he grew up in Brooklyn and was then elevated by Catholics and Democrats because of his willingness to propagate a vision of American ideals not generally true on the ground for those lacking access to lawyers and the money they control.6 It’s a neat trick by the Devil: instead of assassinating minorities who present a version of history that increases mistrust of powerful institutions, elevate as many smart minorities and angels into universities and law schools as possible and make them feel important. At some point, when the economy suffers because of a failure to regulate debt and banks in a capitalist consumer-driven economy which is inherently volatile, you can point the finger at elites in ivory towers trying to fix things by passing laws and filing cases.
Some time in the future, Dr. Paul Finkelman will file another amicus brief, pat himself on the back, and go home believing he’s accomplished all he can. Unfortunately, his difficulty understanding human nature means he might be extinguishing the only thing most of the dead own: a right to have their stories told truthfully and realistically, even if it conflicts with a political party’s or benefactor’s idealistic grand vision.
© Matthew Mehdi Rafat (September 2025)
Australia (2008) and Faraway Downs (2023): “Most people like to own things. You know, land, luggage, other people. Makes them feel secure. But all that can be taken away, and in the end, the only thing you really own is your story.”
Language is more truthful than any other historical metric. Early Catholics in America never saw African slaves as human beings—only a color different than theirs.
Every single Pope so far has been white. Coincidentally, yesterday I saw a non-Anglo male wearing a Hell’s Angels jacket, so the Church might have fallen behind Satanic motorcycle gangs on the issue of diversity.
If you examined my legal first name and saw I was educated at a Catholic university, in a time of limited information, you wouldn’t know I identify as Sufi.
It immediately conjured journalist Calvin Trillin’s poem about how Donald Rumsfeld treated the press:
“With condescending smile so tight, / He seems to take a great delight / Explaining… / As if they’re kids who aren’t too bright… / Don’t might and arrogance make right?”
(The Lede: Dispatches from a Life in the Press, by Calvin Trillin, p. 134, hardcover, published by Random House New York)
Greed can be stronger than xenophobia.
Were liberal values perceived as honest by most Americans, Donald Trump would not have been President twice, with a first term generated in response to Barack Obama’s presidency.