The first to boldly associate the Statue of Liberty with welcoming refugees, Emma Lazarus was also arguably the first public voice of American Zionism. Her work raises questions of identity we still struggle with today

Emma Lazarus’ life reads like a parable of American Jewish identity. Born in 1849, Lazarus descended from at least three generations of Portuguese Jews who’d come to America prior to the mid-18th century. Raised in a rationalist, upperclass home, she was at ease in elite New York society, identifying with the values and aspirations of the literary circles in which she moved. She regarded the transcendentalist author and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) as her mentor, submitting her published poetry for his appraisal.

Lazarus’ early career is framed by the emergence of a body of women’s prose and poetry made possible by the revolution in women’s education and status that spanned the 19th century. She herself was privately tutored, however, mastering German and Italian and (much later) studying Hebrew. Her first publications are the work of an accomplished young poetess ambitious enough to feel slighted when these compositions weren’t included alongside those of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Thoreau in Emerson’s Parnassus anthology.

 

Outside the Synagogue

The Lazaruses belonged to Shearith Israel, the oldest Sephardic congregation in New York. Although Emma’s greatuncle officiated there as rabbi, her parents weren’t the synagogue’s most engaged members. She, however, was approached by Gustav Gottheil, rabbi of the Reform Temple Emanu-El, to contribute to a hymnal he was editing by rendering Reform founder Abraham Geiger’s German translations of medieval piyyutim (liturgical poems) into English. Impressed by her published translations of Heinrich Heine’s poetry, Rabbi Gottheil also suggested she compose some hymns of her own. Lazarus was skeptical. As she replied to him in a letter dated February 6, 1877:

As for writing hymns myself, the flesh is willing but the spirit is weak. I should be most happy to serve you in your difficult and patriotic undertaking, but the more I see of these religious poems, the more I feel that the fervor and enthusiasm requisite to their production are altogether lacking in me. (Richard J. W. Gottheil, The Life of Gustav Gottheil: Memoir of a Priest in Israel [Bayard Press, 1936], pp. 62–3) 

Nonetheless she did provide him with the requested translations.

Lazarus was clearly more than a little involved in Jewish culture and community when Gottheil invited her to accompany him to Ward Island on October 14, 1882, to witness the mass immigration of Jews from eastern Europe.  

For Emma, now thirty-three and presumably an established spinster, this was an awakening to Jewish history and continuity. What shape, what direction, what principles would define American Jewry? Lazarus was among the first to ask these questions, which remain ongoing challenges. She stood at the intersection of three key strands of American Jewish life: the migration from Europe to the U.S., which consequently became a major Jewish center; the emergence of a hyphenated, “Jewish-American” identity; and the rise of Zionism. Lazarus, as we will see, embodied the frictions as well as the confluences between these strands.

 

Americans in the Holy Land

In both America and England, Palestine had been emerging as a topic since the early 19th century, initially in the context of Christian missions. As new travel and communication technologies brought the Middle East within western reach, and the decline of the Ottoman Empire roused diplomatic and imperialist interests there, the Holy Land became a focus of debate.

Meanwhile, the U.S. was expanding: manifest destiny propelled the country’s growing white population westward to build its own promised land. This movement echoed the Puritans’ Mayflower voyage – which they perceived as a reenactment of the Hebrew slaves’ Exodus from Egypt to the Holy Land – that had led to the first American colonies. The Second Great Awakening raging in 19th-century America, a religious revival expressed in the rapid spread of the Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches, unleashed a missionary energy extending all the way to the land of Israel. Palestine thus became a magnet for pilgrims, tourists, artists, and scholars of archaeology and geography, followed by merchants eager to supply their needs.

Lazarus’ own awakening to Palestine can be attributed to such philosemitic writers as the British female novelist George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans, 1819– 1880), to whom she dedicated a play, and Sir Laurence Oliphant (1829–1888). The reverberations of their works in America (where Oliphant spent several years living in a commune) seem to have impressed her more than the efforts of Moses Montefiore and other Jewish proponents of a return to Zion. 

 

Turnabout

Lazarus’ outing with Gottheil resembles nothing so much as a conversion experience. The stark encounter with the Jewish masses swept ashore at Ward Island (where thousands were packed into temporary housing) came to her as a prophetic call. She promptly penned a series of powerful polemics and poems, addressed to both Jews and Christians, exploring and extending the meaning of membership in the Jewish people in various directions. These remained pertinent not only for her own time but until today.

Lazarus was incensed by the publication of an article by one Madame Ragozin in The Century (an illustrated monthly) in defense of Russian pogroms. Ragozin’s essay, “Russian Jews and Gentiles,” presented Russian Jewry as an alien, subversive, heretical presence deserving persecution. Lazarus responded with “Russian Christianity vs. Modern Judaism,” which set out from its very title to alter the historiographic map by which Ragozin had divided all Jews into “those who followed Jesus, and those who crucified him” (“Russian Jews and Gentiles,” The Century 23, no. 1 [April 1882], p. 909). Lazarus countered that Jewish history continued to flourish in its own right and was “the oldest among civilized nations” (“Russian Christianity vs. Modern Judaism,” ibid. 24, no. 2 [May 1882], p. 49).

Emma followed up with “The Jewish Problem” (ibid. 25, no. 5 [February 1883]), reaffirming Jewish history from a Jewish point of view as apposed to the Christian one prevalent in American culture. As the author wryly reminded subscribers, she aimed to “review briefly [the Jews’] history since the scriptural age, where ordinary readers are content to close it” (ibid., p. 602).

The very notion of an independent Jewish history was a departure. As a broadly Christian tradition, American religious culture had referred to the Jewish people as either a mere prelude to Jesus or the discarded refuse of history following the Jews’ rejection of the Christian messiah. Lazarus’ treatment of Jewish history owed much to the revolutionary works of Heinrich Graetz (History of the Jews [1853–70]) and Leopold Zunz, which she read in German.