SOURCE: Young, Bette Roth. “The Work,” “Jewish Themes,” “A Jewish Polemic.” In Emma Lazarus in Her World: Life and Letters, pp. 28-42, 52-63. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1995.

[In the following excerpt, Young offers a thematic survey of Lazarus's works, beginning with her interest in heroism and culminating in her treatment of Jewish subjects and polemic against anti-Semitism.]

When we look at additional subjects for Emma's poetry and prose, we find a significant number of artists, heroes, and great men who transcended geography and time: medieval French King Robert Capet; mythic heroes Admetus, Orpheus, Lohengrin, and Tannhauser; the Talmudist, Rashi; Spanish artist José Ribera; German authors Goethe and Heine; Shakespearean actor Tommaso Salvini; virtuoso pianist Rafael Joseffy, composer Ludwig van Beethoven; French authors Eugène Fromentin and Henri Regnault; British author and artist William Morris; American authors Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; political leaders President James Garfield, Czar Alexander, and Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. Furthermore, Lazarus used her heroes to discuss her concerns about life and art. We find recurrent themes in her works that deal with destiny and greatness, odd subjects for a reclusive dreamer.

Could it be that Emma Lazarus identified with her characters, the heroes about whom she wrote? Could she have been living vicariously through them? She seems to suggest this as the only role appropriate for women in “Echoes,” a short poem she wrote in 1880:

Late-born and woman-souled I dare not hope,
The freshness of the elder lays, the might
Of manly, modern passion shall alight
Upon the Muse's lips, nor may I cope
(Who veiled and screened by womanhood must grope)
With the world's strong-armed warriors and recite
The dangers, wounds, and triumphs of the flight;
Twanging the full-stringed lyre through all its scope.
But if thou ever in some lake-floored cave
O'erbrowed by rocks, a wild voice wooed and heard,
Answering at once from heaven and earth and wave,
Lending elf-music to thy harshest word,
Misprize thou not these echoes that belong
To one in love with solitude and song.(1)

Less than two years after this poem was written, Emma began her aggressive campaign in behalf of beleaguered East European Jews. We will see that her public reclamation of her Jewishness was not a sudden response to the excesses of the hour, but an evolutionary journey. From the first, we witness her need for a faith, a belief system that she could adopt, a teleology with which to handle the age. Her involvement with concepts like Destiny would ride in tandem with her problem with the Church, a problem that would come down to earth with an immediacy she could not ignore, in the anti-Jewish excesses in Europe. Her attention to current events would help her deal with the cosmic problems she addressed as a young woman.

Emma lived in a particularly anomic period in the nation's history. The Civil War, which she experienced as an adolescent, was followed by an industrialization out of control. Secular messianism competed with religious doctrine in an attempt to provide answers to social problems and teleological questions.

The country's anomic sense of self extended to the cultural arena, even though a genteel aristocracy of arts and letters, Gilder, Stedman, and other friends of Lazarus, tried to preserve old values. The sense of a historical void permeated the essays of thinkers like George Woodberry and Edmund Stedman, who lamented the fact that this country had no noble history, no inspiration for a uniquely American culture.²

Emma addressed herself to that issue with great passion in an essay in the 18 June 1881 number of the Critic and in a letter to Stedman. She told him that she had “never believed in the want of a theme, wherever there is humanity,” she said, “there is the theme of a great poem.” But she protested too loudly, perhaps, and in the end she found another people, another history for her grand theme.³

Implicit in Emma's work is her infatuation with heroism. She articulated this in an early letter to Helena Gilder in reference to Turgenev's Virgin Soil:

I am sure Mr. Gilder has the same idea about it that I have. Why do you find it so sad & depressing? To me it is hopeful, not because it ends with a marriage & the chief characters in whom our sympathy is enlisted, turn out ardently happy, but because the whole book is so permeated with an atmosphere of aspiration & heroism. Whenever I look into it or think of it I am reminded of a verse in the Koran that promises to the faithful—“one of the two most excellent things, martyrdom or victory.” Viewed in this light, even Nedzhdanoff ceases to be a failure, & his suicide becomes a noble necessary act. In that little band of enthusiasts of which he is leader, there is nothing mean.⁴

Emma would find in Jewish Nationalism a noble and heroic cause, a focus for her passion. But we are ahead of our story.

“Bertha,” Emma Lazarus' first long poem, covers fifty-five pages and was written before she was seventeen years old. Historical figures carry her message. Robert Capet, son of tenth-century French King Hugh Capet, and his wife Bertha are her central characters. The Pope discovers these two star-crossed lovers are cousins and orders the marriage annulled. They refuse to obey his decree and are excommunicated. Bertha, however, gives birth to a son, who is kidnapped by the abbot of the nearby monastery and is drowned. The child is replaced with a grossly deformed infant in the care of the abbot. Bertha, believing the child to be her own, retires, in penance, to a convent. There, in a bridal gown, she prostrates herself on the altar and dies. From the first, the Church was a grotesque villain for the young Emma.⁵

“Tannhauser” is included in Emma's second published volume of verse, Admetus and Other Poems. Her hero's conflict is explicitly with the Church; his descent into Venusberg is an attempt to find spiritual peace. He wishes he could “kneel and hail the Virgin and believe.” His description of Christianity leaves little room for doubt about his displeasure or about Emma's:

The world is run by one cruel God,
Who brings a sword, not peace. A pallid Christ,
Unnatural, perfect, and a Virgin cold,
That gives us for a heaven of living gods,
A creed of suffering and despair, walled in
On every side by brazen boundaries,
That limit the soul's vision and her hope
To a red Hell or an unpeopled heaven.
Yet I am lost already,—even now
Am doomed to flaming torture by my thought
O Gods! O Gods! Where shall my soul find peace?(6)

When Tannhauser rejects Venus and her bacchanal, he becomes a penitent ascetic whose pilgrimage to Rome is informed by an obsessive need for expiation of the sin of his orgy with Venus. But he finds a brutal and unforgiving Pontifical College, as excessive in their hatred as is Venus in her love, a stark contrast to Tannhauser's self-enforced penury. Rather than forgiveness, they offer self-righteous rebuke. Having been rejected, he comes then, alone, to the “broad of the Campagna” and suddenly snaps the “Cord that held the cross about his neck,” flinging it far from him. The “leaden burden” flung, he kneels and cries,

O God! I thank Thee, that my faith in Thee
Subsists at last, through all discouragements.
Between us must no type or symbol stand,
No mediator, were he more divine
Than the incarnate Christ. All forms, all priests,
I part aside, and hold communion free
Beneath the empty sky of noon, with naught
Between my nothingness, and thy high heavens—
Spirit with spirit.(7)

Tannhauser dies, “His fleshly weeds of sin forever doffed.” At the end of the poem, “Tannhauser lay and smiled, for in the night / The angel came who brings eternal peace.” And he is forgiven. “The pastoral rods had borne green shoots of spring, / and leaf and bloom. God is merciful.” Tannhauser is the first of Emma's exiles who find peace outside the Church.⁸

In fact, “Outside the Church” is the title of Lazarus' fifteen-stanza poem published in the Index, the journal of the Free Religious Association, in 1872. She appealed to “Mother Church” for the “utter peace” the liturgical chants inspired, asking for “refuge from distress and sin, / the grace that on thine own elect falls,” and longing with one great wish to “hear the mastering word, to yield, to adore, / conquered and happy, crying ‘I am thine!’” And she waited, “but the message did not come; … the lifeless rites no comfort could impart.” It was only “outside the Church,” beneath the open sky, that Lazarus found her “religion,” a part “of all the moving, teeming, sun-lit earth.” “O simple souls,” she cried, “who yearn with no reply, / too reverent for religion, ye may find / All patience, all assurance life can bring / In this free prospect, 'neath the open sky!”⁹

Many who study Emma Lazarus have seen this poem as evidence of Lazarus' whole-hearted acceptance of transcendentalism. But as Dan Vogel says, “Lazarus came to Nature by a process of elimination.”¹⁰

But Lazarus would extend her dialogue with the Church in an unequivocal attack. When we examine her poetry, we see a preoccupation with Christian anti-Semitism, strange business for a woman whose best friends were Christian. Her argument with the Church finds its way into her long poems and into her plays. In defending the East European Jews in later work, she takes an apologetic position, blaming their “faults” on centuries of Christian anti-Semitism.

We have no biographical data to tell us why anti-Semitism was such an issue in Lazarus' work, but we have the literary record to support this contention. Although she seems to have been comfortable as a Jew in a Christian milieu, her writing suggests a conflict in her thought. She is almost brazen in her exposure of a corrupted clergy, a primitive dogma, and a barbaric Christian populace. We could say, perhaps, that her early works were only fantasies, typical of the time. But in her Jewish polemic, she transferred these issues from what appeared to be medieval fantasy to “current events,” making it mandatory to take her early work seriously. Although she used fantasy and myth before 1880, her message remained the same when she brought the subject into her own era.

Perhaps the most explicit example of Lazarus' rejection of Christian doctrine is seen in one of her Jewish poems, An Epistle, published in the American Hebrew in June 1882. It is subtitled “From Joshua ibn Vives of Allorqui to His Former Master, Solomon Levi-Paul de Santa-Maria, Bishop of Cartagena, Chancellor of Castile, and Privy Councillor to King Henry III of Spain.” The author tells us that in the poem she has done “little more than elaborate and versify the account given in Graetz's History of the Jews … of an Epistle actually written in the beginning of the 15th century by Joshua ben Joseph ibn Vives to Paulus de Santa Maria.”¹¹

In the epistle, Joshua ibn Vives, a Jew, asks his former Jewish mentor and now Jew-baiter, Paulus de Santa Maria, why he chose to convert to Christianity. With sarcasm and irony, ibn Vives rejects three motives—ambition, doubt, and fear. In questioning the fourth motive, conviction, Lazarus leaves no doubt as to her own opinion of Christianity. Through ibn Vives, she says that she will not argue about the “Virgin's motherhood” or the resurrection, she who knows “not how mine own soul came to earth, / Nor what should follow death.” And man can never know “even in thought the height and girth / Of God's omnipotence; … but that He should dwarf Himself to us—it cannot be!”¹²

Lazarus looks at the works of nature and sees in them the wonder of God:

The God who balances the clouds, who spread
          The sky above us like a molten glass,
The God who shut the sea with doors, who laid
          The corner-stone of earth, who caused the grass
Spring forth upon the wilderness, and made
The darkness scatter and the night to pass.

“That he should clothe Himself with flesh, and move,” she challenges, “Midst worms a worm—this sun, moon, stars disprove.” The epistle ends with ibn Vives bending his “exile-weary feet” to his former “boyhood guide,” whom he implores to teach him the “invisible to divide, / Show me how three are one and One is three!” He cries, “How Christ to save all men was crucified, / Yet I and mine are damned eternally.”¹³

We do not know when this poem was actually written, but it is evidence of the enduring enmity Lazarus felt for Christianity. On 3 October 1882, she wrote to her friend Rabbi Gustav Gottheil after reading an excerpt in the New York Times of a talk he had given. She asked him if he had really said “as was reported in yesterday's Times that ‘the Christian Church is a noble and vital institution.’ I hope not!” she exclaimed.¹⁴

Emma's problem with both Christian doctrine and Christian anti-Semitism served as a negative motivation for much of her poetry. But a more positive impetus for her creativity came with her need to explicate her ideas about the interrelationship of her concepts of Destiny, Nature, and Talent.

In her only novel, Alide (1874), Lazarus' central character, Goethe, is a great man called by Destiny to develop his talent. He is the author's voice. He expounds upon Shakespeare to articulate a concept of Destiny. “Shakespeare's plots,” he says, are “no plots. All his plays turn upon the hidden point which no philosopher has yet seen and defined, in which the peculiarity of our Ego, the pretended freedom of our will, clashes with the necessary course of the whole.”¹⁵

Lazarus had more interest in the concept of free will than its use as a literary construct. In a letter to her friend Tom Ward, she wrote that she had “never seen the ‘free will’ problem stated in a more satisfactory way than in a translation I lately read of an Indian poem.” Her transcription echoes Goethe's words:

Man follows the bent of his will, subdues or is led by his passions, respects life or ruthlessly snaps it, bows to the law of his conscience or willfully lives in rebellion. He says to himself, “I am free!” He says true; he is free to grow noble, he is free too to work his undoing. But let him act as he will he is a tool in the hands of Destiny, used to perfect the fabric of life. There are sons of the night & their portion is blackness; there are sons of the Dawn & the daylight is theirs; both are workers for Destiny—from the labors of both issues harmony. But of evil comes good, but not for the doer of evil; he has earned for himself sorrow, that he did freely; he has worked for the good of the universe—that he did blindly in obedience to the hidden pleasure of Destiny!¹⁶

In this passage, Lazarus seems to see man as a puppet whose strings are pulled by an invisible Destiny. But her construct has another facet: Destiny is a controlling force calling individuals with talent to greatness.

Goethe is an artist who must follow his calling whatever the moral consequences. He is a necessary cog in Destiny's wheel. In Goethe's analysis of Hamlet's renunciation of Ophelia, the author uses Shakespeare to elucidate her concept of the overriding duty of talent. He feels that Hamlet sincerely loved Ophelia “before the beginning of the play”:

She was the sweetheart of his boyhood, the companion of his hours of recreation. But from the moment that his capacities are disclosed to him by the revelation from another world, he is bound by the highest duty of man—that which he owes to himself—to discard everything that can cramp or impede the development of his own nature, and the fulfillment of the sacred office to which he is called. The beauty and sweetness of Ophelia's character cannot be exaggerated, yet she is no mate for Hamlet. He simply outgrows her; or rather, in binding himself to her, he has underestimated his own powers, and after these have been supernaturally revealed to him, it is impossible for him to return to his earlier position.¹⁷

In hearing this pronouncement, Alide (Friederike Brion) realizes that, like Hamlet, Goethe has a higher duty to his art. She renounces him for the sake of his talent. Critics view Alide's renunciation of Goethe the poet as an expression of Lazarus' own feeling of martyrdom as a woman. But clearly, her issue is with Goethe, not with Alide, who simply acts as she must in Lazarus' thought system. As Dan Vogel wrote, Goethe is “an Artist and an Artist has a duty beyond the ken of simple innocent country girls.”¹⁸

Alide is an example of Lazarus' infatuation with charisma. Her description of Goethe as a “great man” is implicit in her drawings of the other men she chose to spotlight. “It is this faculty of great men which makes their simplest action fresh and original,” she says. “They are generous of their soul. They meet with abundant vitality the demands of every hour, and thus shed a peculiar glory upon whatever claims their regard.” And in describing Goethe, she says, “It needed no keen observer to perceive that ‘nothing he did but smacked of something greater than himself,’ for the magnetism of his personality bore as emphatically the impress of his genius as anything he has left behind.”¹⁹

Lazarus believed that talent in designated individuals was crucial for Destiny's grand design and that Destiny demanded obedience. But informing this command was an optimistic worldview. Destiny was Progress, an idea she articulated in her short story “The Eleventh Hour,” published in Scribner's in 1878. Her only other work of fiction, it is a panegyric to that “colossal experiment,” the United States, where one could witness the “execution of divinely simple laws.”²⁰

Sergius Azoff, a disillusioned Romanian artist, is the foil for Richard Bayard, an upper-class New Yorker who in the end saves the artist from suicide. Azoff finds no inspiration as an artist in America and becomes a day laborer. He fails in this pursuit and becomes an “opium eater.” Bayard, quite by accident, reaches him as he is about to end his life. In his gentle rebuke to Azoff, he is Lazarus' voice. Through him, she introduces her somewhat fatalistic concept of “art” as a talent guided by Nature, or Destiny.

Bayard tells Azoff that the world seems to him “an immense working-place, a factory, if you will, where each of us has his special task assigned, which he cannot honorably shirk. A certain amount of labor has to be accomplished for some universal end which we cannot conceive, the law is Progress; in generations we scarcely see a step of advance.”²¹

For Lazarus, Nature gives each person an unnegotiable place in the universe. Bayard tells Azoff that he is right in saying that Nature has refused him a place “among the diggers and delvers of soil. Nature,” he says, “makes no mistake; she does not create a sensitive, receptive brain, an accurate eye, an uncommon touch, a poet's imagination, an ardent heart of universal sympathies, for the purpose of securing one more beast of burden.”²²

Emma Lazarus believed that there were “natural inequalities” in man and in “races,” as we shall see in her Jewish polemic. Ironically, “progressive” Jews have lauded her so-called commitment to the principles of Karl Marx. Although she may have admired the heroism in a Turgenev novel, she disliked social systems that tried to equalize human beings. She stated this in a letter to Thomas Wren Ward, in 1877, telling him that her mind had been “very much exercised by the Railroad Strikes and Communism in general.” She asked him if he agreed that “there is something essentially unjust about the whole theory of Communism[.] I shall never believe in it,” she said, “as long as there are such natural inequalities in the minds & capacities of men.”²³

Although Lazarus was concerned with only one fallen individual, one artist, in “The Eleventh Hour,” she generalized her idea to an entire population, her people, the East European Jews, four years later. By then, she ordered the people of the planet into races, in a social construct modeled after those of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. For Emma, Nature or Destiny had been thwarted by a Christian anti-Semitism causing grotesque permutations in the Jewish “race.” In the grand scheme, Jews had been intended for greatness; detoured, they were physically and psychically destroyed.

“The Eleventh Hour” is an ode to the grand possibilities in the American experience. Although Emma Lazarus is known for her devotion to Jewish Nationalism, her belief in the heroism in American history and the viability of an American “culture” was expressed in her poetry, essays, and correspondence. Her celebration of America in “The Eleventh Hour” exhibits an intuitive understanding of and endorsement of the young nation's capabilities.

Bayard tells a disillusioned Azoff that America is midway between “the Utopian fancies you brought here and the gloomy conclusions to which you have arrived now.” He tells Sergius that he has made the “common mistake of most Europeans in bringing the miniature standard of Europe with which to measure and judge a colossal experiment.” Here, he believes, “art and beauty must and will survive,” although it was impossible in that time of transition to determine what forms they would assume. Lazarus through Bayard observed “immense forces at work” building cities of “gigantic scale.” The “prosperity” of the continent would be assured in the “execution of divinely simple laws.”²⁴

.....

Although Lazarites have hardly noticed Emma Lazarus' attention to Jewish themes before 1882, it was in evidence as early as 1867, when she wrote “In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport.”²⁵ Modeled after Longfellow's poem “In the Jewish Cemetery at Newport,”²⁶ it is relevant to her later work, because the focus of the piece is on the tragedy of “lone exiles of a thousand years, from the fair sunrise land that gave them birth!” She wrote a number of significant works dealing with the excesses of anti-Semitism before 1882, when she began her overt campaign against anti-Jewish persecution.

In 1876, Lazarus added two “imitations” to the translation of Heine's “Donna Clara.” All three poems were published in the Jewish Messenger. In this work Emma addressed medieval anti-Semitism, using a cleric as villain. “Donna Clara” is the story of the anti-Semitic daughter of the Alcalde, the mayor of the town, who meets and falls in love with “a handsome unguilty stranger.” He tells her, after hearing her anti-Semitic excesses, that he, her beloved, is the son of the “respected, worthy, erudite Grand Rabbi, Israel of Saragossa.” Here the ballad ends. Lazarus wrote the two additional “imitations” to fulfill the poet's intention to write a trilogy “in which the son, conceived in this illicit moment, grows up hating Jews and then, becoming a Dominican monk, cruelly persecutes them.” Pedro, the lovers' offspring, is the central character of Emma's “Don Pedrillo” and “Fra Pedro.”²⁷

In “Don Pedrillo,” Donna Clara has become a penitent, living like a nun, “first at matins, first at vespers.” Her son is zealous in his hatred of Jews, and coaxes his pet parrot to “speak thy lesson, thief and traitor, / Thief and traitor” croaked the parrot / “Is the yellow skirted Rabbi.” A rabbi whom his mother has befriended confronts the child, chiding him for his “evil words.” Pedrillo replies that it is “no slander to speak evil of the murderers of our Savior.” He is only biding his time till manhood, when he may “wreak all my lawful hatred on thyself.” He tells the rabbi, “[A]ll your tribe offends my senses, / They're an eyesore to my vision, / And a stench upon my nostrils.” He hates these “disbelievers” with their “thick lips and eagle noses.”²⁸

In “Fra Pedro,” Lazarus' ironic treatment of the brutality of the cleric is gentle yet instructive. Pedro has been asked to save Saragossa's “finest physician” from the intended destruction of the Jewish community. He refuses to do so, asserting that should he find a single drop of Jewish blood in his “vein's pure current,” he would not shrink from ending his life to “purge it.” “Shall I gentler prove to others?” he asks. “Mercy would be sacrilegious.” After his statement that he would “exterminate” these Jewish “abominations” and more, the poem ends with the sun dropping “down behind the purple hillside” while “above the garden / Rang the Angelus' clear cadence / Summoning the monks to vespers.”²⁹

Lazarus' imitations are faithful to Heine's verse in both meter and word usage. His poem was written, she said, “not to excite laughter, still less to denote a mocking spirit.” It was written to “render with epic impartiality in this poem an individual circumstance, and at the same time something general and universal, … conceived … in a spirit which was anything rather than smiling, but serious and painful, so much so that it was to form the first part of a tragic trilogy.”³⁰

Heine, we know, confronted anti-Jewish persecution in Germany and, because of that, became an embittered expatriate. But why did the acculturated Emma Lazarus, at that time just twenty-seven years of age, choose to finish Heine's task? This was her first work published in a Jewish journal.

In March and April 1880, Henry Ward Beecher's journal, the Independent, published two long poems by Lazarus. “Rashi in Prague” and “The Death of Rashi” confront anti-Semitism in twelfth-century Prague.³¹ Rashi is another of Lazarus' great men. He was a legend during his life and is still considered one of the most erudite Talmudists in Jewish history. The poems are fables; her history is out of sequence. Nevertheless, in these works she clarifies her position, painting a landscape of sharp contrast between the brutality of the Christian mob and the serenity of the Jews it destroys.

Rashi enters Prague, in his “wide wanderings,” and is hosted by Rabbi Jochanan and his beautiful daughter, Rebekah. His triumphant welcome on the Jewish streets raises the ire of the duke, Wladislaw, and his bishop. Ruffian soldiers storm the rabbi's house and carry both Rashi and the rabbi to the duke. The bishop recognizes Rashi as the “physician” who miraculously healed him in Palestine, and so both are freed. In “The Death of Rashi,” a Christian stabs him during a Passover seder. Rebekah, who is his wife by this time, feeds him the herb potion that brings him back from the dead. He lives on to continue his good works.

Lazarus' descriptions in the first poem are excessive, as in her account of the destruction of the rabbi's house, for example:

The strong doors split asunder, pouring in
A stream of soldiers, ruffians, armed with pikes,
Lances and clubs—the unchained beast, the mob.
Then, while some stuffed their pockets with baubles snatched,
From board and shelf, or with malignant sword
Slashed the rich orient rugs, the pictured woof
          That clothed the wall.

She polarizes her characters in caricature. Rebekah, the rabbi's daughter, represents the ideal Jewish woman, the “radiant girl” who dared not “lift / Shy, heavy lids from pupils black as grapes / That dart the imprisoned sunshine from their core.” Rashi is the consummate hero:

From his clear eyes youth flamed magnificent;
Force, masked by grace, moved in his balanced frame,
An intellectual, virile beauty reigned
Dominant on domed brow, on fine, firm lips,
An eagle profile cut in gilded bronze,
Strong, delicate as a head upon a coin,
While as an aureole crowns a burning lamp,
Above all beauty of the body and brain
Shone beauty of a soul benign with love.

Duke Wladislaw is a stereotypical anti-Semite who “heard / With righteous wrath his injured subjects' charge / Against presumptuous aliens.” He remembers how Prague

Harbored first,
Out of contemptuous ruth, a wretched band
Of outcast paupers, gave them leave to ply their
Moneylending trade and lease them land
On all too facile terms. Behold! today
They batten on Bohemia's poverty;
They breed and growl like adders, spit back hate
And venomed perfidy for Christian love.

Rashi is Emma Lazarus' first Jewish “exile.” In addition, in this work she returns to Jews as a community in exile. Rashi brings “glad tidings” of his brethren in the Diaspora. He tells of the papal treasurer who is a Jew; the flourishing academies at Babylon, Bagdad, and Damascus; and ben Maimuni, the “pearl, the crown of Israel,” in Cairo, the “second Moses, gathering at his feet the Sages from all over the world.” But he forgets or ignores, according to Lazarus, the “chief shrine, the Exile's Home, whereunto yearned all hearts”:

All ears strained for tidings, someone asked,
“What of Jerusalem? Speak to us of Zion.”
The light died from his eyes. From depths profound
Issued his grave, great voice: “Alas for Zion!”
Verily she is fallen! …
One, only one, one solitary Jew
The Rabbi Abraham Haceba, flits
Ghostlike amid the ruins; every year
Beggars himself to pay the idolaters
The costly tax for lease to hold agape
This heart's live wound; to weep, a mendicant,
Amidst the crumbled stones of palaces
Where reigned his ancestors, upon the graves
Where slept the priests, the prophets, and the kings
Who were his forefathers. Ask me no more!(32)

This poem is complete fable. Rashi died some thirty years before ben Maimuni (Maimonides) was born. From all accounts, he never traveled to Prague. And Lazarus' conception of Zion as bereft of all save one Jew is excessive. From the fall of the Second Temple in 68 a.d., small and often impoverished communities of Jews had lived in Palestine.

The poem is significant for a number of reasons. First, it shows clearly Emma's knowledge of and concern with the problem of Exile for the Jew. Second, she is aware of the longing of her people for a return to their homeland as early as 1880, two years before her active advocacy in their behalf. As a matter of fact, she had been attracted to the Spanish Jewish poets some years earlier. She chose to translate a number of their poems, some of which addressed with eloquent poignancy that longing. The Jewish Messenger in 1879, for example, published her translation of a poem by Judah HaLevi:

Oh, City of the world, with sacred splendor blest,
My spirit yearns to thee from out the far-off West,
A stream of love wells forth when I recall thy day,
Now is the Temple waste, thy glory passed away.
.....Oh! how I long for thee! Albeit thy King has gone.
Albeit where balm once flowed, the serpent dwells
Could I but kiss thy dust, so would I fain expire,
As sweet as honey then, my passion, my desire!(33)

Probably Emma Lazarus' most acclaimed work of fiction is The Dance to the Death, a dramatization of the German prose narrative “Der Tanz zum Tode.”³⁴ In this tragedy, Lazarus magnifies her treatment of Christian anti-Semites. In the terror of the Black Death, the Jews in France have been tortured and burned. Blind Rabbi Jacob Cresselin comes to tell the Jewish community at Nordhausen that they must exile themselves or suffer the same fate. At the same time, Henry Schnetzen is advising Landgrave Frederick to destroy the community, as we know, not because of the plague but because it has been discovered that Prince William is in love with Liebhaid von Orb, the adopted daughter of Susskind von Orb. Schnetzen has no idea that Liebhaid is his own daughter, whom he assumes is dead. This constellation of facts provides the personal tragedy set within the larger tragedy of the immolation of the entire Jewish population in the synagogue. When Schnetzen learns of Liebhaid's true identity, he thinks it a trick and realizes the tragic truth only as the flames engulf her.

Lazarus' characterization of the cleric Prior Peppercorn is a logical extension of that of Fra Pedro. He is terrifying. In the play form, she is able to develop his rage more fully. The prior's speeches are filled with lethal language and show Lazarus' acute perception of a European anti-Semitism rooted in Christian theology. Peppercorn tells the princess, William's mother, that it is better for her son, who has been locked in a palace apartment, “to perish in time than in eternity.”

No question here of individual life; our sight
Must broaden to embrace the scope sublime
Of this trans-earthly theme. The Jew survives
Sword, plague, fire, cataclysm—and must since Christ
Cursed him to live till doomsday, still to be
A scarecrow to the nations. None the less
Are we beholden in Christ's name at whiles
When maggot-wise Jews breed, infest, infect
Communities of Christians, to wash clean
The Church's vesture, shaking off the filth
That gathers round her skirts—A perilous germ!
Know you not, all the wells, the very air
The Jews have poisoned?—Through their arts alone
The Black Death scourges Christendom.(35)

The princess urges Peppercorn to permit Liebhaid to convert and marry her son. Although the prior acquiesces, Liebhaid refuses, even after she has learned of her lineage. Saying that she loves the prince “as my soul,” she proclaims “no more of that” and announces that she is “all Israel's nor—till this cloud passes, / I have no more thought, no passion, no desire. / Save for my people.”³⁶ Lazarites view this speech as autobiographical. Because it was published in Songs of a Semite, at the height of her Jewish campaign, they view Lazarus as a martyr who gave her personal life for her cause. Josephine's essay validates this contention. But the play was written at least two years earlier, when some of the same sources insist her Jewishness was as yet unborn.

Probably one of Lazarus' favorite exiles was Harry [sic] Heine. In addition to her translations of his works, she composed and published two lengthy essays about him. The first, written in 1878, became the introduction to a volume of her translations of his poetry, published in 1881.³⁷ A review in the Century chastised her for failing to consider Heine “from the standpoint of an Israelite, and something authoritative as to the position in Germany, both as a student and exile. … Now that the Judenhetze is once more in Prussia and Russia,” the critic noted, “it is time for a well-informed co-religionist to be heard. … Here is a chance for one so well-fitted by birth, education, and a poetical nature as Emma Lazarus. The main objective would be the consideration of Heine as a Hebrew poet, who used German as his native, and French as his adopted tongue.”³⁸

This criticism is significant, first of all, because it is incorrect. Emma's essay is based on the tragedy of Heine's Jewish birth in a virulently anti-Semitic Germany. Second, Josephine seems to have accepted the Century's criticism. According to her, Emma was “as yet unaware or only vaguely conscious of the real bond between them—the sympathy in the blood, the deep, tragic, Judaic passion of eighteen hundred years that was smoldering in her own heart, soon to break out and change the whole current of her thought and feeling.”³⁹ Biographers address Emma's treatment of Heine from the points of view of the critic in the Century and Josephine Lazarus.

Lazarus' second essay on Heine, published in the Century in 1884, seems purposefully defiant of her earlier critic.⁴⁰ In “The Poet Heine,” she stated that Heine could be seen as Hellene or Hebrew, but he was above all and only a poet, and she would treat him as an artist in discussing his work. Nevertheless, because the essay was published in 1884, during her “Jewish” phase, Lazarus' biographers have lauded her attention to Heine as a Jew.

Heinrich Heine is known as a renegade from his Jewish heritage. In the first essay, Lazarus tried to correct this assumption, saying that his baptism occurred only after he had exhausted ways to alleviate the restrictions against Jews who wished to become attorneys, a profession for which he was trained. She explained that he then dedicated himself “more entirely to upholding the rights of [his] unhappy brethren.” Eventually, he found it beneath his dignity to live in Germany as a baptized Jew and settled in Paris, a more benign climate for Jews, according to Lazarus.⁴¹

Lazarus compares Goethe's Germany to that of Heine. His “cheerful-burgher life” is contrasted to the “gloomy Judengasse” where “squalid, painful Hebrews were banished to scour old clothes.” In this “wretched by-way,” which was “relegated” to Heine, he must be “locked in like a wild beast, with his miserable brethren every Sunday.” And she asks, “How shall we characterize a national policy which closed to such a man as Heine every career that could give free play to his genius and offer him the choice between money changing and medicine?”⁴²

Lazarus deals with Heine's Jewishness when she discusses the “Rabbi of Bacharach,” which, like her works, illustrates the persecutions of their people during the Middle Ages. Heine, “one of the most subjective of poets,” treated his theme “in a purely objective manner,” allowing himself “not a word of comment or condemnation.” And although he painted “the scene as an artist, not as the passionate fellow-sufferer and avenger that he is, … what subtle eloquence lurks in that restrained cry of horror and indignation which never breaks forth.” Lazarus tells us that Heine never signed his Christian name Heinrich, but he never surrendered his love for the country that loathed his people.⁴³

In spite of the Century's criticism in 1882, or perhaps because of it, Lazarus' second essay was informed, not by her need to exonerate Heine as a Jew, but by her purpose to defend his right to be judged as a poet. Lazarus, like Heine, would try to remain objective; her emotion, like his, would bleed through the words. She admitted in 1884 that there was a duality about Heine, whose Greek traits of “laughter and sunshine,” the “intellectual clearness of his vision,” and his “pure and healthy love of art for art's sake,” were in “perpetual” conflict with his “somber Hebrew” side. “A mocking voice, Hebrew, Christian, tragedy, comedy, an adorer of despotism incarnate in Napoleon, an admirer of Communism embodied in Proudhon—a Latin, a Teuton, a beast, a devil, a god!” For Lazarus, Heine was “all and none of these; he is a poet.” And that was how she would “consider him in these pages.” Her discussion of his Jewishness consisted of two sentences explaining that his “home-life and surroundings were strictly Jewish” and that he was baptized “not from conviction, but in order to secure freedom in the choice of a profession, as the German code of that day obliged every Jew to become either a physician or a money-lender.”⁴⁴

Emma Lazarus felt a kinship with Harry Heine. Although she never experienced the paralysis of Heine's Germany, her sensitivity to Christian anti-Semitism became outrage in 1882. She began dealing with anti-Semitism in 1876, six years before the start of her aggressive campaign in behalf of her co-religionists in the East, and dressed the topic in medieval disguise. By 1882, she lifted the mask, presenting contemporary Christian anti-Semitism to Christian and Jew, with a terrible honesty.

.....

In 1882, Emma Lazarus published a book of poetry that she titled, audaciously, Songs of a Semite. “Anti-Semitism,” a word coined by German anti-Jewish agitator Wilhelm Marr in 1879, came to be a general label for all forms of hostility to Jews throughout history. Marr used it proudly to proclaim his intense antipathy toward Jews.⁴⁵ Emma took the Semitic label every bit as proudly in public identification with a despised people. From 1882 until her death, she published powerful poetry with Jewish themes. Strident, passionate polemic, the works were written to two audiences, Jewish and Christian. She urged her people to renew themselves, to recapture their past glory, to reclaim their ancestral homeland, and she reminded her Christian readers of their historic and recurring anti-Semitism, as in “The Crowing of the Red Cock”:

Where is the Hebrew's fatherland?
The folk of Christ is sore bestead;
The Son of Man is bruised and banned,
Nor finds whereon to lay his head,
His cup is gall, his meat is tears,
His passion lasts a thousand years.
.....When the long role of Christian guilt
Against his sires and kin is known
The flood of tears, the life blood spilt,
The agony of ages shown,
What oceans can the stain remove
From Christian law and Christian love?(46)

In “The Banner of the Jew” she called on Jews to reclaim their nation:

Oh for Jerusalem's trumpet,
To blow a blast of shattering power,
To wake the sleepers high and low,
And to rouse them to the urgent hour!
No hand for vengeance—but to save,
A million naked swords would wave.
O deem not dead that martial fire,
Say not the mystic flame is spent!
With Moses' law and David's lyre,
Your ancient strength remains unbent,
Let but an Ezra rise anew,
To lift the Banner of the Jew.(47)

Although Emma's poems and essays seem to have been addressed to the same audiences, the essays were both patronizing and apologetic. In her poetry she stood with her people; in her prose she stood above them. She wrote three essays on Jewish themes for the Century and fifteen for the American Hebrew.⁴⁸ Many assert that her first Century essay, “Was the Earl of Beaconsfield a Representative Jew?,” was an aberration for which she atoned in later essays. They are incorrect. In that piece we find characteristics of the Jew that would remain consistent in her later polemic in defense of her people.

When the Disraeli essay was published in April 1882, the Jewish community was outraged. At first glance, Lazarus seems to have presented “hardly a cliché which the anti-Semite would seriously oppose.”⁴⁹ The problem with this less-than-flattering essay was that it appeared in the same issue of the Century as that questionable essay by Mme. Ragozin, and Emma would respond to her scathing presentation of Russian Jews exploiting Russian peasants. Emma's portrayal of Disraeli seemed to echoe some of Ragozin's ideas.

Lazarus wrote the Disraeli article in response to a monograph by Georg Brandes in which he asserted that Disraeli was not a representative Jew, that he lacked the “many-sidedness” of the Jew. He lacked the noble qualities of a Spinoza.⁵⁰ On the contrary, Lazarus asserted that Disraeli had the qualities of both a Spinoza and a Shylock, that as prime minister of England, “poet, novelist, orator, satirist, wit and dandy,” he could lay claim to “many-sidedness of sympathy and mind.” However, Disraeli was not a “first class man,” she asserted.

[H]is qualities were not those of the world's heroes; he possessed talent, rather than genius; he was a sagacious politician aiming at self-aggrandizement; not a wise statesman building his monument in enduring acts of public service, and the study of his career is calculated to dazzle, to entertain, even to amuse, rather than to elevate, to stimulate, or to ennoble.

“But,” she continued, “do all these derogatory facts preclude him from being considered a representative Jew? On the contrary, we think they tend to confirm his title.” Calling Disraeli a “brilliant Semite,” she wrote that his “typical national character” developed from “centuries of persecution.”⁵¹

Lazarus contended that “centuries of persecution and the enforced narrowness of their sphere of action” had caused the Jewish “race” to be second rate. For example, much might have been heard of their achievement in the arts, but “among no modern people has the loftiest embodiment of any single branch of creative art been a Jew.” And the “great modern revolution in science” had gone on without their participation or aid. In her opinion, the next hundred years would “be the test of their vitality as a people.” The “phase of toleration upon which they are only now entering” would “prove whether or not they are capable of growth.”⁵²

For Lazarus, Disraeli's Jewishness informed his activities and actions. She noted that he had

in an eminent degree the capacity which seems to us the most characteristic feature of the Jew, whether considered as a race or an individual, … the faculty which enables this people, not only to perceive and make the most of every advantage of their situation and temperament, but also, with marvelous adroitness, to transform their very disabilities into instruments of power.

And he had that “patient humility which accepted blows and contumely in silence.” This was not “the inertia of a broken will, but the calculating self-control of a nation imbued with persistent and unconquerable energy.” Emma said that no other Jewish trait was “more conspicuously exemplified than this in the career of Benjamin Disraeli. It was this which supported him through his repeated defeats before securing a seat in Parliament and again through the disgraceful exhibition of Parlimentary brutality which attended his maiden speech.” On that day, his “peculiar manner and outlandish costume” was, according to Emma, “something deeper than the so-called Oriental love of show. … [I]t is probable that the wily diplomat adopted it deliberately as a conspicuous mark for the shafts of scorn—… to divert attention from the natural race peculiarities of his appearance. The ridicule he foresaw as inevitable; rather let it be poured on the masquerade dress, which could be doffed at will, than upon the inalienable characteristics of his personality.”⁵³

Emma continued her adulation, telling the reader that no Englishman could ever forget that Disraeli was a Jew; therefore “he himself would be the first to proclaim it, instead of apologizing for it.” Rather than “knock servilely at the doors of the English aristocracy,” he “conquered them with their own weapons, he met arrogance with arrogance, the pride of descent based upon a few centuries of distinction, with the pride of descent supported by hundreds of centuries of intellectual supremacy and even of divine anointment.”⁵⁴

As these passages make quite clear, Emma Lazarus had a chauvinistic attitude about her own Jewishness. Her admiration of Disraeli is equally explicit. “In the attitude which he assumed, politically, socially and aesthetically, toward his race,” she said, “we do not know which to admire more—the daring originality of his position, or the pluck and consistency with which he maintained it.” Emma probably identified with Disraeli, whom she saw as a Jew in Christian society. More significant, however, he was a Sephardic Jew, as was she, and he “knew himself to be the descendant, not of pariahs and pawnbrokers, but of princes, prophets, statesmen, poets, and philosophers, and in his veins was kindled that enthusiasm of faith in the genius and high vocation of his own people, which strikes outsiders as an anomaly in a member of an habitually dispised race.” Moreover, the “narrowness, the arrogance, the aristocratic pride, the passion for revenge, the restless ambition, the vanity and love of pomp of Benjamin Disraeli, no less than his suppleness of intellect, his moral courage, his dazzling talents, and his triumphant energy, proclaim him, to our thinking, a representative Jew.”⁵⁵

Emma Lazarus presented Disraeli, blemishes and all. Instead of criticizing him, she celebrated his traits as representative of his Jewishness. It was her contention that Disraeli and all modern Jews were products of centuries of oppression. She saw the Jewish “race” as a mutation, a distortion from its pure and heroic state in biblical times. Its survival as a group was a miracle.

At the risk of tarnishing her halo, we must point out that today Emma Lazarus would be known as a racist. Her stereotypical concept of the Jewish “race” is almost as offensive as that of those European anti-Semites she held in such great disdain. As we shall see, the words she used and the ideas she put forth to describe Disraeli do not disappear. On the contrary, her paradigm is well thought out in her subsequent Jewish essays, and was borrowed, in fact, from a woman for whom she had a great deal of admiration and respect, George Eliot.

In her last novel, Daniel Deronda, and in “The Modern Hep! Hep!,” a late essay, Eliot, a philo-Semite, designed a Jewish thought system. Her work would become the basis for future Zionist thought. For Eliot, the potentially “noble” character of the Jews had become corrupted in their effort to survive. It was true, for example, that Jews were ambitious and avaricious. This was the result of de-nationalization. “It is certainly worth considering,” she said, “whether an expatriated, denationalized race, used for ages to living among antipathetic populations, must not inevitably lack some of the conditions of nobleness.”⁵⁶

Jews as a race had lost their nation, a geographical space in which to reside or to love from afar. Herein lay the problem. “[E]ndowed with uncommon tenacity, physical and mental, feeling peculiarly ties of inheritance both in blood and faith, remembering national glories, trusting in their recovery, abhorring apostasy, … they would cherish all differences that mark them off from their hated oppressors. … Doubtless such a people would get confirmed in vices.” Re-nationalization, on the other hand, had the mystical ability to change the negative character traits of the people who accepted it. “The nobleness of a nation” depended on the “presence of a national consciousness,” as did the nobleness of each individual citizen.⁵⁷

We do not know when Lazarus first read George Eliot's Jewish works, but she quoted the novel and the essay throughout her own Jewish essays. In Eliot she apparently found a focus for her emotion and her thought. Interestingly, although Eliot has been seen as a philo-Semite, “The Modern Hep! Hep!” displays a chilling racism. Perhaps Emma's knowledge of Eliot's bias strengthened her own concept of the enforced separateness of her Jewish “race” and of herself as a member of that people.

Eliot believed that “[t]he pride which one identifies with a great historic body is a humanizing, elevating habit of mind, inspiring sacrifices of individual comfort, gain, or other selfish ambition, for the sake of the ideal whole; and no man swayed by that sentiment can become completely abject.” Emma could not have said it better. But that “great historic body” had to be protected against “alien” blood. “Let it be admitted,” said Eliot, “that it is a calamity to the English, as to any other great historic people, to undergo a premature fusion with immigrants of alien blood; that its distinctive national characteristics should be in danger of obliteration by the predominating qualities of foreign settlers. … I am all ready to unite in groaning over the threatening danger.”⁵⁸

Eliot did not advocate sending away those Jews who were “elbowing us in a threatening crowd,” but “our best course is to encourage all means of improving these neighbors,” she said, “and for sending their incommodious energies into beneficent channels.”⁵⁹ Emma Lazarus was to propose this in her own polemic in 1882-83. “Improving these neighbors” was her objective for those East European Jews who had appeared on her doorstep. For those who remained in Europe, repatriation to re-nationalized Palestine was the only solution. Both Lazarus and Eliot saw re-nationalization, in an age when nationalism was a powerful new concept, as a transcending, cleansing experience for a people seriously flawed.

Although Josephine Lazarus asserted that the impetus for Emma's Jewish polemic came as a result of that “fatal juxtaposition” of her Disraeli essay and Ragozin's piece, her rejoinder just one month later exhibits a knowledge and understanding of East European Jewish history she could hardly have acquired “on the spot,” so to speak.

Ragozin, a Russian expatriate living in the United States since 1874, addressed the “situation” in eastern Europe from a Christian point of view. In a most articulate way, she attempted to prove that the world at large was in error in blaming anti-Semitism for what she saw as the “mild” destruction of Jewish property in Russia. Ragozin used a Jewish convert to Christianity, Jacob Brafmann, as her authority, quoting from his highly questionable treatise The Kahal, an exposé of Jewish communal life. In short, it was Ragozin's contention that because the Jewish community was treated as a state within a state, Jews behaved as if it were one, structuring their community in such a way that the governing body, the kehilla, taxed and terrified its constituency. As a result, Jews in turn exploited their peasant neighbors, selling them spoiled meats, indulging the peasants' alcoholic tendencies with their breweries and inns, and coercing them into borrowing sums of money they could not repay. Therefore, the peasant attacks on the Jewish populace were understandable; the Jews deserved them.⁶⁰

Lazarus refuted these charges, point by point, in her rejoinder, her second Century essay, “Russian Christianity versus Modern Judaism.” Not only did she teach her readers about the dynamics of East European Jewish life, she took issue with Ragozin's whitewash of the brutal pogroms, discussing the means of torture and describing the wholesale destruction of Jewish villages. Nevertheless, she seems to have accepted Ragozin's description of the East European Jewish personality or character.

Ragozin described Russian Jews as “loathsome parasites,” herding together in “unutterable filth and squalor, … a loathsome and really dangerous element,” spreading “all kinds of horrible diseases and contagions.” But this is not the reason they were hated, they were “loathed because their ways are crooked, their manner abject—because they do not stand up for themselves and manfully resent an insult or oppose vexation, but will take any amount and cringe, and go off with a deadly grudge at heart which they will vent cruelly, ruthlessly.” Ragozin called for emancipation for Russian Jews so that they could dissolve their own system of government as well as their exclusive religion that had what she saw as archaic practices. Lazarus took issue with this idea in her rebuttal, pointing out the fallacy in the idea that emancipation would eliminate anti-Semitism. She cited West European countries as examples where emancipation and subsequent political power had caused anti-Semitic excesses.⁶¹

Lazarus felt that Jews must reform themselves both occupationally and religiously. This would not cure anti-Semitism, however. Only when Jews had a homeland of their own would anti-Semitism cease. She articulated these ideas in her lengthy treatise, An Epistle to the Hebrews. This series of fifteen essays appeared in the American Hebrew from November 1882 to February 1883. It has been described, with admiration, by one Lazarus scholar as her “mature confession of her faith, the most effective contribution she made to Jewish thought and policy.”⁶² The series is racist, derogatory, patronizing, apologetic, and harsh. Nevertheless, in these essays her call for a technical education for East European Jewish refugees in the United States, and a repatriation to Palestine for those remaining in Russia, has brought her enduring honor.

Emma Lazarus set herself up, as did Paul, from whom she borrowed her title, as a harbinger of Truth. The word “Hebrews” suggests that she was using Hilton's definition, designating her audience as so-called uptown Jews, many of whom were acculturated to the point of assimilation, as was she. Her desire in addressing her “fellow Jews” was to rouse them through study of their “glorious” past to join her in her mission for re-nationalization of their ancient homeland. For Lazarus, as for Mordecai Ezra Cohen, George Eliot's hero in Daniel Deronda, whom she quoted, Jewish Nationalism apparently was the ultimate charismatic experience. With Eliot, she endowed history with the power to create a conversion experience for all who would study the “full beauty and grandeur of her past, the glory and infinite expansiveness of her future.”⁶³

As in her essay on Disraeli, Lazarus described and explained the flaws of her “race,” the result of centuries of oppression. Because they were now the focus of attention in the “present adversity,” the persecution of her people in Russia was a chance, however, to “look into the mirror held up by well-wishers and enemies alike”; to investigate the situation “coolly, rationally, and impartially.” Wherever a blemish was found, they must “shrink from no single or united effort to remove it.”⁶⁴

“Judaism,” as Lazarus called it, was both a race and a religion with a divine mission to lift up “our own race to the standard of morality and instruction” in order to “promote the advancement and elevation of the Gentiles.” With unabashed pride, Lazarus boasted that the Jew, with moral and intellectual eminence, would serve as a “beacon-light to others.” She wanted a “nation of priests, … devoted servants of the holy spirit. What is needed,” she said, “as George Eliot said, is ‘the torch of visible community,’—that these few scattered workers be united and reinforced until they represent no longer an insignificant minority, but a resolute and homogeneous nation.”⁶⁵

Emma Lazarus' concept of “Judaism” was unorthodox to say the least. At that time, there were two branches of Judaism recognized in this country, Traditional and Reform. Traditional Jews observed the 613 commandments, or mitzvot, and believed that when the Messiah came, the land of Israel would witness the ingathering of all Jews, living and dead.

Orthodox Judaism had changed little in the almost two thousand years since the destruction of the Second Temple and the dispersion of the Jews of Israel. Reform Judaism was another story. German Jews who had migrated to the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century had been intensely patriotic in Germany, even though their position in the general community was fragile. When they came to the New World they brought their patriotism with them, embracing the United States with the fervor with which they had loved their homeland. They also brought their ideas about a modernization of their religion.

By the 1880s, Reform Jews had negated almost all of the significant concepts and practices of traditional Judaism in an effort to Americanize the religion. They proclaimed America as their homeland, removing all prayers addressing the return to Zion. They would become anti-Zionists and would hold that position until the Holocaust. They did away with most observances. No longer did they keep kosher, nor did the men wear headcoverings or prayer shawls inside the synagogue. They called their houses of worship temples rather than synagogues. For them, there was no need to return to Jerusalem. Paradise could be found, now, on American soil.

Reform Jews placed their emphasis on prophetic Judaism. They saw their role much as Emma had articulated, as a “light unto the nations.” But Emma could not have become a member of a Reform Jewish congregation because of her position on Palestine. We know that Emma's solution to the Jewish Problem rested on the repatriation of Jews to their homeland, Palestine. Although she could agree with most of the tenets of Reform Judaism, her idea of a return to Zion would have been challenged.

We would say today that Emma Lazarus was an ethnic Jew. She would have been very uncomfortable with that definition if she could, in fact, have understood what it meant. Lazarus saw herself as a member of a race. But she had no intention of encouraging the perpetuation of the ethnic characteristics of that people. For a variety of reasons, she wanted the East European Jews to become as American as those Americans born here. On the other hand, she wanted American-born Jews not to become aware of their ethnic history, an ethnicity rooted in what she called East European obscurantism, but to become knowledgeable, through study, of their ancient heritage.

Lazarus contended that her race could be saved from the “chronic decadence” that resulted from “luxury, materialism and indifferentism [sic] by sedulously nourishing the sacred fires of historic memory at the same time that we emancipate and fortify our Reason to keep pace with the intellectual advance of the age.”⁶⁶

We know that Emma Lazarus was honored in the Jewish community as the premier spokesperson for East European Jews. Clearly, her immortal sonnet is addressed to “wretched” refugees. But, interestingly, she saw those from eastern Europe, these “pale and stunted pariahs,” as “unfitted [sic] by nature and education for competition for existence under American conditions.” She took literally the words of Darwin and Spencer, to whom she referred throughout the Epistle. She saw Russian Jews, who had emigrated to these shores, having lived for centuries in the “darkness of a superstitious obscurant religion, in the filth of poverty,” as a group of people desperately in need of education. They must be taught the “Godliness of cleanliness, the dignity of womanhood, the delights of reason, the moral necessity of a broader humanity, the universal charity.”⁶⁷

Emma's aristocratic cast of mind informed her ideas about education for young Jewish immigrants. She bemoaned the “wretched quality of work performed by the majority of American mechanics and domestic servants,” as well as the “false sense of pride that revolted at the very name of servant, as derogatory to the freeborn American.” She admonished her co-religionists against shunning domestic work, which so many Americans did. And although she saw this as a national problem, she felt that it was an “unhealthy social tendency fraught with even greater danger for the American Jew than for the American Christian.” Jews, Lazarus felt, lived more by their wits than by their hands, a function of years of oppression when all trades were closed save usury. Thus, if they were “as a rule a race of soft-handed, soft-muscled men,” it was not their fault. Now they must return “instantly and earnestly” to the “avocations of our ancestors in the day when our ancestors were truly great and admirable.”⁶⁸

In an article published in the American Hebrew in October 1882, Lazarus spoke strongly for “employment and education.” It was on both that the survival of the race depended.

Mr. Spencer and Mr. Darwin, not to cite less authoritative names, have pointed out the positively maleficent effects of ignorant philanthropy, and the portentous evils of that short-sighted charity which neglects to take into account the laws of nature and of natural selection. In justice to future generations, in justice to ourselves, in justice to the objects of our sympathy, we must dispense only those gifts which strengthen the character and the mind, and we must study how best to avoid the rush of enfeebling the race by pauperization, and the artificial preservation of the vicious and idle.⁶⁹

Emma Lazarus' crusade seems to have been uncomfortably frantic. She told East European Jews to reform themselves, and her passion was informed, one must suppose, by fear. The terrible problem for Emma Lazarus was the reality of collective guilt, imposed upon all Jews in a hostile Gentile community that continued to condemn them “as a race for the vices or follies of individual members.” Lazarus knew this was inevitable, even for American Jews; they belonged to a “race whose members are unmistakably recognized at a glance, whatever be their color, complexion, costume or language.”⁷⁰

An Epistle to the Hebrews, a brutally honest assessment of the Jewish Problem as Emma Lazarus saw it, was reissued by the Federation of American Zionists in 1900, thirteen years after her death, and published again in 1987 as an annotated edition by Lazarus authority Morris U. Schappes.⁷¹ The language and ideas are archaic and offensive to a post-Holocaust generation, but Lazarus' treatise is an artifact of her era. Placed in a culture where Darwin and Spencer were the interpreters of a world in which industrialization had run wild, her construct would make sense. With George Eliot as a resource, her words would be taken seriously.

In February 1883, Emma's third Jewish essay, “The Jewish Problem,” was published. Thousands of Christian readers of the Century were edified by this chauvinistic appeal for sympathy. Throughout the piece, Lazarus quoted Christian clergymen for authentic historical accounts of Jewish persecution in Christian Europe. Early on, she referred the reader to Reverend Henry Hart Milman, Dean of St. Paul's, “if it be supposed that I am drawing too dark a picture of Christian atrocities and too partial a presentment of the innocence of my victims.”⁷²

The first part of the essay is a “brief history of the Jews from the Third Century before the Christian Era” to the present. Lazarus acknowledged her “indebtedness to a pamphlet written in 1881 by German Christian, C. L. Beck, entitled ‘A Vindication of the Jews’” from which she had “freely quoted.” Step by step she traced the litany of persecution in each country in Europe and was relentless in her description of the various methods of torture. Her pessimism, even after the emancipation of Jews in western Europe in the early nineteenth century, extended to her own country, where the word “Jew” was “in constant use, even among so-called refined Christians, as a term of opprobrium, and is employed as a verb to denote the meanest tricks.”⁷³

Interestingly, Lazarus had included with the corrected proofs of her essay a letter to Robert Underwood Johnson, one of her editors at the magazine. She thanked him for pointing to her errors in spelling and grammar, and then with sarcasm asked him to thank the appropriate party for the “charming” review of Songs of a Semite. She wished “he could be a Jew for only 24 hours,” she wrote, “& he would then understand that neither materialism nor indifference prevents the Jews from decrying their provocateurs. They have never had a long enough interval of security or equality (if indeed they have ever had the latter) be able to utter a lamentation without risk of bringing down upon themselves again the immemorial curse.”⁷⁴

The second part of the essay dealt explicitly with the Jewish Problem. Emma Lazarus found a Jewish solution, similar to those of her fellow proto-Zionists in Europe, and agreed with her adversaries who proposed that Jews exit host countries in which they were unwanted residents. She told her Christian audience that Jews, “naturally a race of high moral and intellectual endowments,” may have, however, “superficial peculiarities which excite the aversion of Christians, … the lingering traces of unparalleled suffering.” But Jews, she said, have too long turned the other cheek. They have proved themselves willing and able to assimilate with whatever people and to endure every climactic “influence. But blind intolerance and ignorance are now forcibly driving them into that position which they have so long hesitated to assume. They must Establish an Independent Nationality.”⁷⁵

“The idea formulated by George Eliot,” she said, “has already sunk into the minds of many Jewish enthusiasts.” Quoting both Daniel Deronda and Mordecai Ezra Cohen throughout the essay, she agreed with their concept of “an organic center,” a homeland, for their “race.” With a “heart and brain to watch and guide and execute, the outraged Jew shall have a defense in the court of nations, as the outraged Englishman or American.”⁷⁶

Emma Lazarus had a vision. Her treatment of the meaning of Exile, first articulated at the age of eighteen in her poem, “In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport,” became a call to action as she came to know the meaning of Christian anti-Semitism. Her exaltation of “martyrdom” and “heroism” matched her need to recapture a time of grandeur for her people. But Emma lived in the real world where a “colossal experiment” involving masses of people in the organized chaos that was the nation's largest metropolis was being conducted before her eyes. In the midst of this ferment, she faced Jews of an eastern Europe ignored or at least passed by in the modernity of the hour. Her solution, repatriation of East European Jews, would be both realistic and romantic in the eyes of this late nineteenth century New Yorker.

Never in her wildest imaginings could Emma Lazarus have predicted the capacity of that city to accommodate the more than one million East European Jews who would emigrate there between the 1880s and World War I. She would have been astonished to see how rapidly those exiles would adapt their religion and their way of life to American culture.

Emma Lazarus had a great deal to say about the subject of exiles, as we know. But her position was contradictory. Not only was she drawn to Jewish exiles at an early age, she addressed the subject in one of her last published pieces, “By the Waters of Babylon,” which appeared in the Century in 1887, shortly before her death. In the first of these poems, “Exodus (August 3, 1492),” she dealt with the expulsion from Spain, when all of Spain's Jews, Emma's ancestors, were forced either to convert to Catholicism or to leave. Interestingly, she treated these exiles with respect; when she wrote of exiles from eastern Europe, later in the piece, she saw them in a different light. These outcasts with “ignominious features,” and “shuffling gait” wore “the sordid mask of the Ghetto.”⁷⁷ And we will remember that when she was composing her famous sonnet, she was also working to keep alive her organization for the repatriation of Jewish exiles to Palestine.

Lazarus could rhapsodize over Jewish exiles in history, but those who would be settled in the neighborhood next door were cause for apprehension. We have seen the specter of anti-Semitism that threatened even well-established Jews in the late nineteenth century. Emma was dislocated from her security as a Sephardic Jew, so to speak. Furthermore, she had been dislocated, physically, in that rapidly changing Manhattan environment. Her family had to move uptown in 1877 when a furniture warehouse next door chased them out of their Fourteenth Street home where they had resided for twenty years. They lived on Fifty-seventh Street for only six years and then moved back downtown to Tenth Street.

Perhaps Emma was drawn to exiles because symbolically she was an exile herself. Not only was she uprooted geographically, her own identity was fractured. She was a woman for whom her father had grand professional ambitions, in a world where domesticity reigned supreme; a Jew whose relationship to her Christian friends was ambiguous; an “outlaw” among her own observant Jewish relatives; a northerner with southern connections; and a New Yorker whose close friends, Tom Ward and Rose Lathrop, were New Englanders. Where would she fit in?

We need to say, finally, again, that it is not clear, really, why this woman, who in 1880 felt herself relegated to “elf-music,” would bond to a people with whom she had nothing in common save an opprobrious name. But the Darwinian geist of the era seemed to permit her to see the possibilities of a reversal of the “mutations” caused by centuries of persecution. Lazarus' chauvinistic and enthusiastic endorsement of Jewish history and her belief in man's capacity for change in the “proper” environment led to a self-anointed leadership of her people. She became an Ezra. Her vision of a Jewish state as a palliative for anti-Semitism came to fruition sixty years after her death.

Emma Lazarus was an American original. Born into the constraints of a nineteenth-century Victorian angle of vision, she was made aware of her talent at an early age. She knew that she was expected to take herself seriously. Her parents enabled her to meet the important American and European artists and thinkers of that time. And these intellectuals served to validate her as a young woman to reckon with. This patrician young Jewess found herself as comfortable in Concord or Newport or the capital cities of Europe as she was in Manhattan. But the “quaintness” of Concord, the superficiality of Newport, the dazzling differentness of Europe would never provide the environment demanded by her muse. Only in Manhattan, in the neighborhood of her birth, would she find the backdrop for her short life's achievements.

Notes

1. The poem was written in October 1880 and was not published until 1944, when Morris U. Schappes included it in his collection of Lazarus' work. Morris U. Schappes, ed., Emma Lazarus: Selections from Her Poetry and Prose (IWO Jewish American Section, 1944).

2. For a fine explanation of these pieces and Emma's response, see Vogel, 107-8.

3. Lazarus, “American Literature,” 164. She wrote a letter to Stedman some time before December 1881, when Stedman's article “Poetry in America,” which Lazarus discusses, was published in Scribner's. For Lazarus' letter to Stedman, see Schappes, The Letters of Emma Lazarus, 24A.

4. Letter 2HdeKG.

5. Lazarus, Poems and Translations, 63-118.

6. Emma Lazarus, Admetus and Other Poems (1871; reprint, Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Literature House, Gregg Press, 1970), 86.

7. Ibid., 123-27.

8. Ibid., 132.

9. Emma Lazarus, “Outside the Church,” Index, 14 December 1872, p. 399.

10. Vogel, 87.

11. Emma Lazarus, “An Epistle,” in Poems 2:45-58, quotation on p. 45.

12. Ibid., 45, 47-53, 57.

13. Ibid., 57-58.

14. Emma Lazarus to Gustav Gottheil, 3 October 1882, Schappes, ed., Letters, no. 37.

15. Emma Lazarus, Alide: An Episode of Goethe's Life (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1874), 152.

16. Letter 20TWW. Interestingly, Emma's sister, Josephine, wrote a similar letter to Ward, transcribing the same poem, apparently unaware of Emma's letter. Josephine Lazarus to Thomas Wren Ward, n.d., TWW Papers.

17. Lazarus, Alide, 153-54.

18. Vogel, 102.

19. Lazarus, Alide, 102-103.

20. Emma Lazarus, “The Eleventh Hour,” Scribner's 16 (June 1878): 252-56.

21. Ibid., 256.

22. Ibid.

23. Letter 7TWW.

24. Lazarus, “The Eleventh Hour,” 256.

25. Emma Lazarus, “In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport,” Admetus, 160.

26. For Emma's thoughts about Longfellow, see her “Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,” AH [American Hebrew], 14 April 1882, pp. 98-99.

27. Heinrich Heine, “Donna Clara,” trans. Emma Lazarus, Jewish Messenger, 18 February 1876, p. 1.

28. Emma Lazarus, “Don Pedrillo,” Jewish Messenger, 18 February 1876, p. 1.

29. Emma Lazarus, “Fra Pedro,” Jewish Messenger, 18 February 1876, p. 1.

30. Ibid.

31. Emma Lazarus, “Rashi in Prague,” Independent, 25 March 1880, pp. 27-28; idem, “The Death of Rashi,” Independent, 8 April 1880, p. 27. Rabbi Shlomo ben Isaac lived in the latter half of the eleventh century. Born in Troyes, France, he established an academy there, where he remained until his death. He was the first of the Jewish scholars in western Europe to write commentary on the whole of the Hebrew Scriptures. His greatest accomplishment was his commentary on the Babylonian Talmud. His work more than any other would be used in medieval Jewish scholarship and after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. See Joan Comay, Who's Who in Jewish History after the Period of the Old Testament (New York: David McKay, 1974), 328.

32. Lazarus, “Rashi in Prague,” 27.

33. Judah HaLevi, “Longing for Jersualem,” trans. by Emma Lazarus, Jewish Messenger, 1 February 1879, p. 1.

34. Zeiger, 43-48.

35. Lazarus, The Dance to the Death, in Songs, 20-21.

36. Ibid., 32.

37. Heinrich Heine, Poems and Ballads of Heinrich Heine, trans. with an intro. by Emma Lazarus (New York: Hurst, 1881).

38. “Miss Lazarus's Translation of Heine,” Century 23 (March 1882): 785-86.

39. [Josephine Lazarus,] “Emma Lazarus,” 879.

40. Emma Lazarus, “The Poet Heine,” Century 29 (December 1884): 210-17.

41. Heine, trans. Lazarus, ix.

42. Ibid., xiv.

43. Ibid.

44. Lazarus, “The Poet Heine,” 210-11.

45. For more information on Wilhelm Marr, see Encyclopaedia Judaica (1972), 2: 1015.

46. Emma Lazarus, “The Crowing of the Red Cock,” Jewish Messenger, 19 May 1882, p. 1.

47. Emma Lazarus, “The Banner of the Jew,” Critic 2 (18 June 1882): 164.

48. The three Century essays were “Was the Earl of Beaconsfield a Representative Jew?” (April 1882); “Russian Christianity versus Modern Judaism” (May 1882); and “The Jewish Problem” (February 1883). The fifteen essays in the American Hebrew, included in her Epistle to the Hebrews, ran from November 1882 to February 1883.

49. Zeiger, 109.

50. Georg Brandes, Lord Beaconsfield: A Study (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1880).

51. Emma Lazarus, “Beaconsfield, a Representative Jew?” 941.

52. Ibid., 942.

53. Ibid., 940.

54. Ibid.

55. Ibid., 941.

56. George Eliot, “The Modern Hep! Hep!” in The Works of George Eliot: Adam Bede, Theophrastus Such, Essays (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, n.d.) 124-43, quotation on 135.

57. Ibid., 132.

58. Ibid., 136, 137.

59. Ibid., 141.

60. Zénaide Ragozin, “Russian Jews and Gentiles, from a Russian Point of View,” Century 23 (April 1882): 905-20.

61. Ibid., 918, 920; Emma Lazarus, “Russian Christianity,” 52.

62. Zeiger, 111-12.

63. Emma Lazarus, An Epistle to the Hebrews (New York: Federation of American Zionists, 1900); ed. Morris U. Schappes (New York: Jewish Historical Society of New York, 1987): 7.

64. Ibid., 9.

65. Ibid., 9, 13-15.

66. Ibid., 15.

67. Ibid., 19, 74.

68. Ibid., 17, 19-20.

69. Emma Lazarus, “The Schiff Refuge,” AH, 20 October 1882, p. 114.

70. Lazarus, Epistle to the Hebrews, 79.

71. See n. 19.

72. Lazarus, “The Jewish Problem,” 605.

73. Ibid., 608.

74. Robert Underwood Johnson Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Lazarus' letter is undated.

75. Lazarus, “The Jewish Problem,” 608-10.

76. Ibid., 610.

77. Emma Lazarus, “By the Waters of Babylon: Little Poems in Prose,” Century 33 (March 1887): 801-3.