This spring, at the height of the anti-Israel campus protests, a mob stormed Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall, named for Alexander Hamilton, perhaps the school’s most famous alumnus. Meir Soloveichik notes the symbolism (no doubt unknown to the vandals) of this attack on a building whose namesake was one of America’s great philo-Semites. Hamilton, while working as a lawyer, once found himself representing a man who brought several Jews to testify in his defense. To impugn their testimony, the opposing counsel, Gouverneur Morris, argued that, as Jews, they could not be trusted.
Thus did Morris adopt a strategy that was abhorrent but not insensible: to act on the assumption that anti-Semitism was very potent and that the “heart of man” was vulnerable to it.
What is remarkable about Hamilton’s response is that it not only denounced Morris’s bigotry; it also made a case for American philo-Semitism. Hamilton utilized language that was less legal than theological, asking the tribunal about Morris: “Has he forgotten, what this race once were, when, under the immediate government of God himself, they were selected as the witnesses of his miracles, and charged with the spirit of prophecy?” It was, in other words, the Jews who served as the medium of the very Scripture that had inspired American republican government, and who observed that “pure and holy, happy and Heaven-approved faith.”
But as impressive as Hamilton’s rhetoric was, the result was equally important: the court embraced Hamilton’s position by a vote of 28–6, signifying that the anti-Semitism that truly had marked the hearts of so many men would be so remarkably absent in the hearts of so many Americans then and in the years to follow.
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentary.org/articles/meir-soloveichik/columbia-antisemitism-alexander-hamilton-philo-semitism/