Columbia, Alexander Hamilton, and the Roots of American Philo-Semitism

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.