Anyone who has ever listened to a commencement speech knows the drill. We expect graduation addresses to be long on wisdom, punctuated by humor, and—most important—short in duration. In the United States, the tradition of the commencement oration dates to the founding era of our first colleges. Early American graduation speeches were also vehicles for erudition and scholarly prowess. In fact, the first American graduation speeches were often delivered in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. Whether or not their audiences understood their content was beside the point. Just as it is today, college commencement was an outlet for symbolic demonstration and public performance.
In June of 1800, Columbia College held its commencement ceremony at St. Paul’s Chapel, which at that time overlooked the Hudson River. More than a dozen graduates and dignitaries spoke their pieces that day, on topics ranging from “negro slavery” to a comparison of Napoleon to Julius Caesar.
One of the speakers that day was Sampson Simson, who happened to be the first Jewish graduate of Columbia and would go on to become the founder of Mt. Sinai Hospital. Simson gave his speech in Hebrew, but it had been written for him by his Hebrew teacher, Gershom Mendes Seixas, who served as the hazzan of Shearith Israel and was also Columbia’s first non-Christian trustee.
Columbia was less than fifty years old in 1800, but New York City was closing in on the two-hundredth anniversary of Henry Hudson’s voyage up the Hudson. Even if Simson’s audience failed to understand a single word of his oration, the title of his speech supplied the needed information: “Historical Traits of the Jews, from their first settlement in North America.” Like the city itself, Seixas and Simson had well over a century’s worth of local history to draw upon. Their speech spoke New York Jews into existence.
