SOURCE: Young, Bette Roth. “Emma Lazarus and Her Jewish Problem.” American Jewish History 84, no. 4 (December 1996): 291-313.

[In the following essay, Young discusses Lazarus's literary response to anti-Semitism and her proposed solution to the problem of Diaspora Jews in An Epistle to the Hebrews.]

“The truth is that every Jew has to crack for himself this nut of his peculiar position in a non-Jewish country.”

Emma Lazarus

Less than a month after Emma Lazarus died, one of her editors, Joseph Gilder, memorialized her in an issue of The Critic, his widely read journal of literature and the arts. He wrote that the children of Moses Lazarus “had Christians for playmates and schoolmates and most of Emma's friends were Christian. … She died, as she lived, as much a Christian as a Jewess—perhaps it would be better to say neither one or the other.”¹

This curious interest in Emma's religious affiliation was shared by her close friend, Rose Lathrop, Nathaniel Hawthorne's daughter, who converted to Catholicism in the late nineteenth century and became a nun. She wrote to a mutual friend, Helena deKay Gilder, at least two letters inquiring whether Emma had converted to Catholicism before she died. She certainly hoped that she had.²

Emma's friends weren't the only ones interested in the status of her Jewishness. Her sister Annie, who had converted to Anglican-Catholicism, wrote a letter in 1926 to Bernard G. Richards denying his request for the rights to publish her Jewish poems, for which she had the copyright.

There has been a tendency on the part of the public, to over emphasize the Hebraic strain of her work, giving it this quality of sectarian propaganda, which I greatly deplore, for I consider this to have been merely a phase in my sister's development, called forth by righteous indignation at the tragic happenings of those days. Then, unfortunately, owing to her untimely death, this was destined to be her final word.³

Emma Lazarus (1849-1887) is remembered, of course, as the author of “The New Colossus,” the sonnet to the Statue of Liberty. But at the time of her death the poem had fallen into obscurity, where it rested until 1903 when it was engraved on a bronze plaque and installed inside the pedestal of the statue. When she died she was eulogized by both the Jewish and Christian community in a memorial issue of the American Hebrew as a Jewish heroine. As a matter of fact, she called herself a “Semite” in one of her most well-received offerings, “Songs of a Semite.”⁴

Since her death Emma Lazarus has been imprisoned in an identity she would scarcely recognize. If Annie Lazarus was sure Emma's Jewishness was just a passing phase, her sister Josephine, unwittingly perhaps, created a Jewish persona for her sister that has followed her into all sorts of biographies, encyclopedia entries and journal essays.

Until recently an essay written by Josephine in 1888 has been the biographical authority, enlarged upon and embellished to suit the fancies of those who wished to remember Emma as a “tragic Jewish priestess” bereft of humor and of love. Why Josephine chose to remember her sister as a sort of Jewish Emily Dickinson is anyone's guess, but the meager collection of primary resources by and about Emma has lent undue importance to her sister's portrait.

Josephine painted Emma as a morose recluse of uncommon talent whose Jewish identity was awakened in 1882 when news of the desperate plight of the Czar's Jews transformed her into a strident activist whose work in behalf of her people captured her imagination and her life. Public protests in London and New York to Russian excesses against the Jews were a “trumpet call that awoke the slumbering and unguessed echoes,” stirring her sister to action.⁵

The central issue in a study of Emma Lazarus is her identity as a Jew. Just what kind of a Jew was she? Was her commitment to her people more than a passing fancy? Was it Josephine or Annie who knew the “real” Emma Lazarus? It is not surprising that these women should be at such odds about their beloved sister. When we examine Emma's life we see that her identity was bifurcated from the start. In an age when Christians and Jews in this country lived separate lives, for the most part, Emma Lazarus seems to have insinuated herself into Christian society with dignity and grace. At the same time, however, she mounted an assertive campaign against Christian anti-Semitism, medieval and modern.

As Joseph Gilder noted, Emma Lazarus' best friends were Christian. Except for her numerous sisters, she seems to have had no close Jewish friends.⁶ On the other hand, for at least two years in her life, 1882 and 1883, she “plunged wrecklessly” into what she called the “Jewish Question” and the “Jewish Problem” in a self-assured attempt to solve it.⁷

An attempt to define Emma's Jewishness is problematic. She uses the words “Jew” and “Judaism” interchangeably and asserts that the Jewish people is both a religion and a race.⁸ The nicest thing that can be said about Emma's concept of Judaism is that it is abstract. It bears no resemblance to rabbinic Judaism and only a distant similarity to Reform Judaism. At times it is almost unintelligible.

In an essay which appeared in both the New York Sun and the American Hebrew she wrote:

The gradual elevation and refinement of the Hebrew concept of God from anthropomorphism to pure spiritual proves how it may adapt itself without danger to human thought. It is not like every other religion hampered by mythology or legend. The idea of the unity of the creative force and the necessity of moral law—these are its sacred treasures, acquired by the intuitive wisdom of its forefathers and neither assailed nor reached by all the revolutions of modern science … this faith, capable of infinite expansion and subtilization, may go hand in hand with science, strong and steadfast as herself, to very brink of the unknowable and the unthinkable.⁹

If Emma's Judaism is amorphous, her commitment to her people is enigmatic. Why did Emma Lazarus bother with Judaism or the Jewish people at all, and just when did she begin to pay attention to them? Some would agree with Josephine Lazarus that her sister was “born-again,” a Jew who recaptured her Jewish identity at the age of 33. If we look at the calendar of the events in her life until that time little would suggest that she had much to do with Jewishness, however we define it—cultural, religious, or ethnic—until then. On the other hand, when we examine her work we see an early aversion to Christianity, a passionate contempt for medieval Christian anti-Semitism and a surprisingly broad knowledge of Jewish history.

Emma Lazarus was born in New York City, lived there all of her life, and died there in 1887. Her family tree was deeply rooted in American soil. Both her father's family, the Lazaruses, and her mother's family, the Nathans, had come to Manhattan before the American Revolution. Her father, Moses Lazarus, a wealthy sugar merchant, was a renegade from the Orthodox ritual of the Sephardic Jewish community, apparently the first in his family to rebel. With membership in both the very exclusive and gentile Union and Knickerbocker Clubs and a summer home in Newport, Rhode Island, long before Jews were welcome there, Lazarus seems to have had little interest in Judaism, the Jewish community or his own Jewishness.¹⁰

Lazarus did have an interest in securing for Emma a place in the American literary landscape. He nurtured her gift for poetry and translation, subsidizing the publication of her work when she was seventeen years old. Moreover, he saw to it that she met the foremost American scholar, Ralph Waldo Emerson, soon thereafter.¹¹ Emerson became the first of many late-nineteenth-century thinkers to become her friend.

Her father's hand continued to be seen in that relationship. When Emma wrote to Emerson inviting him to visit, her father added a note of his own.¹² Perhaps we should call Moses Lazarus a “stage father.” It is safe to assume that in those early years it was he who arranged introductions to such notables as the internationally acclaimed Anton Rubenstein and the Italian Shakespearean actor Tomasso Salvini.

By the time she was twenty-five Emma was corresponding with such luminaries as Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev with a self-confidence that belied her young years.¹³ Her father had taken her seriously at an early age; she was not surprised when others did so as well.

The year 1876 was a defining one for Emma. It was then that she met Richard Watson and Helena deKay Gilder, key figures in American culture at the turn of the century. We don't know how she met this couple, but they seem to have taken up where her father left off. They welcomed Emma into their extended family and into their circle of friends. The Gilders knew everybody who was anybody. Their “Friday evenings” were legendary. Politicians, artists, actors, and authors from the United States and Europe would gather there. Emma was regularly in attendance.

Emma met Richard Gilder when he was editor of Scribner's. He immediately published her work. In 1882 she followed him to the Century Magazine, which became under his stewardship the most widely read journal of culture, history and the arts in the United States. Emma was a not infrequent contributor. Even more important, she became a part of the inner circle of artists and critics who shaped American aesthetic values and opinion in the late years of the nineteenth century. One scholar has said that era was not the Gilded Age but the “Gilder Age.”¹⁴

The discovery of over one hundred letters to Helena and Richard Gilder from Emma and her sisters Josephine, Sarah and Annie provides new insight into Emma's life and thought.¹⁵ They reveal not the recluse her sister Josephine painted but a very busy young woman who participated fully in the cultural life of her city. There is little to distinguish her from her gentile friends. She observed Christmas, for example, and spent erev shabbat not at home but at the Gilders' fabulous Friday evening salons.¹⁶

Emma's intellectual life, however, tells another tale. We first see the Church as a grotesque villain in “Bertha,” her fifty-five page poem written before she was seventeen years old. Based on historical fact, the poem tells the story of star-crossed cousins of the tenth century French prince Robert Capet and his wife, Bertha. After refusing to obey orders from the abbott to annul their marriage they bear a child, whom the abbott switches with one that is deformed. Bertha flees to a nunnery and dies.¹⁷ Lazarus' aversion to Christian clerics would continue in later work.

We see an interest in Jewish themes in “In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport,” written in 1867 when Emma was eighteen years old. In it Emma perceptively portrays the tragedy of the Jew in exile, foreshadowing, perhaps, her later passionate commitment to a Jewish home in Palestine.

What prayers were in this temple offered up,
Wrung from sad hearts that knew no joy on earth,
By these lone exiles of a thousand years,
From the fair sunrise land that gave them birth …
Alas! we wake: one scene alone remains,—
The exiles by the streams of Babylon.(18)

In 1876, the year she met the Gilders, Emma published in the Jewish Messenger her translation of Heinrich Heine's unfinished poem Donna Clara, which she completed. In Donna Clara Heine portrays Christian anti-Semitism which Emma enlarges upon. Donna Clara, a Spanish anti-Semite, meets and falls in love with a “handsome knightly stranger.” She tells him that she loves him,

          oh my darling,
And I swear it by our Savior,
Whom the accursed Jews did murder
Long ago with wicked malice.

They make love, and as he is about to leave, Donna Clara asks his name.

I, Señora, your beloved,
Am the son of the respected
Worthy, erudite Grand Rabbi
Israel of Saragossa.

In Emma's sequel Donna Clara has had a child, Pedro, who has no idea that he is Jewish and becomes a rabid anti-Semitic cleric. He is unremitting in his hatred toward Jews. At one point he tells a rabbi:

All your tribe offends my senses,
They're an eyesore to my senses
And a stench upon my nostrils.

In decreeing the destruction of the Jewish community, Fra Pedro will not save even Saragossa's finest physician. He says that if he found a single drop of Jewish blood in his veins, he would not shrink from ending his life to purge it.¹⁹

Emma continues her polemic against medieval Christian anti-Semitism in two poems about Rashi, which appeared in 1880 in The Independent, Henry Ward Beecher's paper, widely read by Christians across the country. “Rashi in Prague” and “The Death of Rashi” are set in Czechoslovakia in the twelfth century. In these two poems Emma's righteous Jews are contrasted to the Christian anti-Semites she loathes, and Rashi is idealized:

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, …
Above all beauty of the body and brain,
Shone beauty of a soul benign with love.

In contrast, Duke Wladislaw remembers how Prague

          harbored first,
Out of contemptuous rhythm a wretched band
Of outcast paupers, gave them leave to ply their
Moneylending trade and least them land …
They breed and growl like adders, spit back hate
And venomed perfidy for Christian love.(20)

These explicit denunciations of medieval Christian anti-Semitism were only the beginning of Emma's published accusations, not only against medieval anti-Semitism but against the Christian anti-Semitism of her own time. All the while she seems to have been perfectly comfortable in the drawing rooms of her Christian intimates in Manhattan and Newport, Lenox and Concord, Massachusetts.

These poems reveal a knowledge of and empathy for medieval Jewish history. Her play “The Dance to the Death,” written in 1880 and published in Songs of a Semite in 1882, continues her expose of Christian anti-Semitism in Nordhausen, Germany, at the time of the Black Death. It is the gruesome story of the Jews of that city who were crowded into their synagogue and immolated. Once again, Lazarus exhibits a knowledge of the virulent anti-Semitism and Christian theology which would precipitate such an event. Placing in the mouth of another Jew-hating Christian cleric are words that would appear again in Hitler's diatribes; Prior Peppercorn is the logical extension of Fra Pedro:

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.(21)

In 1881 Emma Lazarus published a poem in Scribner's, “Sic Semper Liberatoribus, March 13, 1881,” extolling the virtues of the fallen Czar of All the Russias, Alexander I. “What alien current urged on to smite him dead, / Whose word had loosed a million Russian chains?”²²

In 1882, just one year later, Emma seems to have become acquainted, perhaps for the first time, with the experience of East European Jews. It was then that she became the self-appointed spokesperson for her tempest-tost people. She began to write stirring poetry such as “The New Ezekiel,” “The Banner of the Jew,” and “The Crowning of the Red Cock.” In these poems Emma recalls the martyrdom of her people through the ages and calls upon them to regenerate themselves:

Oh for Jerusalem's trumpet now,
To blow a blast of shattering power,
To wake the sleepers high and low,
And rouse them to the urgent hour!
No hands for vengeance but to save,
A million naked swords should wave.(23)

Emma's interest in her East European people was in itself not unusual. We know that she was sensitive to Christian anti-Semitism. Furthermore, many Christians had decried the plight of her people in public meetings and in writing. As she wrote to her friend Rose Hawthorne,

The Jewish Question which I plunged into so wrecklessly & impulsively last Spring has gradually absorbed more and more of my time & heart—It opens up such enormous vistas in the Past & Future, & is so palpitatingly alive at the moment—being treated with more or less ability & eloquence in almost every newspaper & periodical you pick up—that it has about driven out of my thought all other subjects—²⁴

The Czar's Jews had become a popular cause. But not only did Emma become an advocate for her people, she assumed their beleagured identity. Not that she moved to the Lower East Side, learned Yiddish and adopted their lifestyle, although she did help young immigrant girls at the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society, a short-lived German-Jewish helping institution, and was at Ward's Island, the holding place for immigrants who were not permitted to enter the United States, on the day of the great riot by inmates protesting the living conditions there.²⁵ But she became the injured party, railing against what she saw as the hostility to the immigrants she championed as well as to herself. Where did her self-proclaimed injury come from?

Emma's personal relationships with her Christian friends were noteworthy for their reciprocity. From her correspondence with Helena Gilder we know that she accepted their friendship with enthusiasm and that she welcomed the opportunity to know the Gilders' Christian friends. Henry James and Emma Lazarus had high regard for each other. James and Helena deKay had been childhood friends in Newport. It was James who introduced Emma to his Jewish friends, the Leonard Montefiores and Lady Francis Goldsmid, as well as those he shared with the Gilders when Emma was in England. And it was Emma's friend Georgina Schuyler who saw to it that the sonnet was placed in the pedestal in Emma's memory.²⁶

In spite of these and other unequivocal friendships with Christians, Emma's Jewish identity rested on her defensiveness as a Jew. That is, in spite of her myriad Christian friends, she was not immune to Christian enmity. We could say that it was in the air. With the rise of Nativism in the last quarter of the nineteenth century in the United States came the specter of anti-Semitism. In 1877 one of the most infamous incidents occurred when Joseph Seligman was excluded from the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Seligman had come to this country from Germany in 1837 and with his family established a banking empire with branches in England, Germany, and France. He had frequented the Grand Union Hotel for years. The hotel was owned by department store magnate A. T. Stewart. When Stewart died management of the hotel was turned over to Judge Henry Hilton, who did not like Jews. His exclusion of Joseph Seligman became a national incident.

In defense of his position Hilton made clear what he thought of “Seligman Jews.” The words that appeared on page one of The New York Times are chilling. He differentiated between so-called Hebrews, good Jews, Sephardic Jews such as Emma's family, the Nathans, and “Seligman Jews.” Calling him a “sheeney,” he says the Seligman Jew is

of low origin, and his instincts are all of the gutter—his principles small—they smell of decayed goods, or of decayed principles. But he has extracted cash out of his gutter, his rags, his principles, and he shoves his person upon respectability … He is shoddy, false, squeezing,—unmanly.

In spite of strong protest, Hilton refused to change his position. Soon other hotels and resorts followed suit.²⁷

While we have no knowledge that Emma or her family personally experienced this kind of anti-Semitism before she began her crusade for East European Jews in 1882, we can be sure that she knew about the Seligman affair. In 1883, six years after the incident occurred, she involved Seligman's son, Edwin Robert Anderson Seligman, in her endeavor to rescue her people.²⁸

Emma witnessed two other incidents of defamation of Jews in print, one of which touched her personally. How strongly she reacted appears in two letters she wrote in 1883, one to a gentile, Century Magazine associate editor Robert Underwood Johnson, and the other to the editor of the American Hebrew, Philip Cowen. In the first instance, Emma's own work was the impetus for the attack. An unflattering portrayal of Jews had appeared in the Century in an anonymous review of her recently published Songs of a Semite. Emma Lazarus had proclaimed publicly with that title her identification with her despised people. The slender little volume included her strident Jewish poetry and “The Dance to the Death.”

While the criticism of her book did not attack Emma personally, it was obviously meant for her eyes to see. The critic says that Jews have never defended themselves, had never fought back. Rather, they are

when speaking of them as a whole—given to materialism, and, when protected by the laws of a country quite content to feather their nests & and live that opulent, pleasure-seeking life which is full of the kindly offices of those who love their families, but is little inclined to look beyond or above.²⁹

Emma answered with an angry, sarcastic retort.

What a charming notice the Century has given my “Songs of a Semite.” I appreciated very much its warm and sympathetic tone. I don't know & I don't wish to know who my friendly critic is—but all I can say against him—is that I wish he could be a Jew for only 24 hours—& he would then understand that neither materialism nor indifference prevents the Jews from decrying their persecutors. They have never had a long enough interval of security or equality (if indeed they have ever had the latter) to be able to utter a lamentation without risk of bringing down upon themselves again the immemorial curse. Even I have been much criticized by my own people for what many consider the want of tact & judgement in speaking so freely.³⁰

The article was not the first in the Century to be critical of Jews, not the first to which Emma had responded. In April 1882 an expatriate Russian, Zenaide Ragozin, published a scathing attack of Russian Jews, “Russian Jews and Gentiles, from a Russian Point of View.”

Ragozin, a recent Russian expatriate to the United States, addresses the situation in Russia from a Russian Christian's point of view. Using Jacob Brafmann's infamous “expose” of Jewish communal life, The Kahal, it is her thesis that because the Jewish community is treated as a state within a state it has no regard for the dominant culture and exploits its peasant neighbors, selling them spoiled meat, encouraging their alcoholic tendencies and coercing them into borrowing money they could not pay back. Any excesses against them are to be expected and are deserved.

Ragozin describes Russian Jews in the standard stereotypical way. “Loathsome parasites,” they herd together in “unutterable filth and squalor. … A loathsome and really dangerous element” which spreads “all kinds of horrible diseases and contagions.”³¹ Ragozin's rhetoric sounds like the medieval language Emma had exposed in her earlier work.

Emma's rejoinder, “Russian Christianity versus Modern Judaism,” appeared in the next issue of the Century. She refutes Ragozin's charges point by point and provided her Christian readers with the dynamics of East European Jewish life as she sees it. Quoting Jeremiah, she asserts

That the Jew should ever form a ‘hostile state within a state’ is rendered impossible by a solemn Biblical injunction commanding fidelity to the ruling government: ‘And seek the welfare of the city whither I have banished you, and pray in its behalf unto the Lord, for in its welfare shall ye fare well.’³²

The folks at The Century Magazine were Emma's friends and yet in the space of a year that journal had published two attacks on Jews, one aimed indirectly, we must conclude, at Emma. Of course, these were not the particular incidents that compelled her to act. Her campaign had begun sometime before the essays appeared. Just how many other slights had she contended with?

In her letter to Cowen Emma responds to an article in the New York Sun written by one Frank Wilkeson stereotyping Jews in the cotton states in the South. According to Wilkeson the Jews in the South were ruining Southern planters by foreclosing on their estates. The article generated a number of letters from both Christians and Jews, most refuting Wilkeson's charges.

Emma replies that she is “perfectly conscious” that the contempt and hatred expressed in the article “underlies the general tone of the community toward us” (underlining in original). She reiterates her contention that, when she would “even remotely hint at the fact that we are not a favorite people” she is “accused of stirring up strife and setting barriers between the sects.”³³

If we look at Emma's friendships more closely we see that she was labelled as a Jew by some of her acquaintances and friends. For example, when Thomas Wentworth Higginson met her in Newport in 1872 he had written his sisters to ask if they had ever heard of “any poems by Emma Lazarus? She is a rather interesting person and her volume of poems are better received in England than here.” He went on to say that she was a “Jewess; they are very rich and in fashionable society in New York.” And Henry James wrote to his sister Alice, in the summer of 1882 that he “met and fell in love with Emma Lazarus: a poetess, a magaziness, and a Jewess.”

Ellen Emerson wrote to her niece upon meeting Emma: “Then think of what nuts it was to me, old S. S. teacher that I am, to get at a real unconverted Jew (who had no objection to calling herself one, and talked freely about ‘Our Church’ and ‘we Jews’).”³⁴ We know nothing to indicate that Emma was aware of any of this. Was she, perhaps, the token Jew? Whatever her status, during those years in which she was so involved with her Jewish polemic Emma maintained her Christian friendships. She sent copies of “Songs of a Semite” to her friends Henry George, William Wetmore Story and Rose Lathrop, for example.³⁵

Emma felt comfortable enough about her Jewishness to brag to Helena Gilder from London in 1883 that her “own people—the Jews—receive [her] with open arms” and that she thought the reason Robert Browning was so good to her was that he was a “great enthusiast of the Jews.” She met and dined with no less than forty British dignitaries, artists and thinkers, most of whom were Christian.³⁶ She seems to have been able to glide effortlessly from her campaign against Christian anti-Semitism into the welcoming arms of Christian Great Britain.

If Emma's life seems to have been bifurcated, her thought seems at times even more conflicted. An important example is her feelings about her beloved Jewish exiles. In 1883 Emma's friend Constance Cary Harrison had asked her to contribute a poem to a literary portfolio that would be included in an art auction organized to raise money for the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. At first she declined, saying she could not “write to order.” Harrison prevailed upon her, telling her to imagine what the statue would mean to her East European immigrant Jews at New York harbor. Several days later Emma sent “The New Colossus” to the auction. It was the only offering to be read on the evening of the gala and was then largely forgotten.³⁷

One would assume that the tired, poor and huddled masses in Emma's poem were her tempest-tost East European Jews. At the same time she was writing her sonnet to the Statue of Liberty, a poem defining that lady as a “Mother of Exiles,” she was trying to keep alive her fledgling organization, the Society for the Improvement and Emigration of East European Jews. It was the purpose of this organization to raise enough money to send great numbers of East European Jews to resettle in Palestine. A precursor to Herzl's Zionism, it survived for less than two years.

Emma organized the Society in February 1883. The only record of its existence is found in her letters to Edwin Robert Anderson Seligman. This tiny organization included some interesting people: the economist Edwin Robert Anderson Seligman (1862-1939) and Socialist Daniel DeLeon (1861-1914), who were graduate students at Columbia University; Seligman's cousin, DeWitt Clinton Seligman; Frederic deSola Mendes (1859-1927), spiritual leader of Congregation Shaarey Tefillah in New York City; and Nathan Bijur (1862-1930), who would become a distinguished New York Supreme Court jurist and play a leading role in the resettlement of East European Jews to the United States. Attorney Julius J. Frank (1852-1931) would become active in the B'nai B'rith and was one of the founders of the Young Men's Hebrew Association of New York. Emma refers in her letters to Seligman to a Mr. Rice, probably Professor Isaac Leopold Rice (1850-1915), who lectured at Columbia in the School of Political Science. She also refers to a Mr. Ullmann, perhaps Nathan Ullmann, art editor of the American Hebrew. Mrs. Minnie Louis, one of the three women to belong, founded the Downtown Sabbath School in 1886. (It became the Hebrew Technical School for Girls.) Many saw Emma as the inspiration behind the drive for technical education for Jewish children. An unidentified sister, probably Josephine Lazarus, was the third woman in the Society.³⁸

These people were young; all were in their twenties or thirties. We don't know how or why Emma came to choose most of them—none were national Jewish leaders at that time. This would be a problem, because Emma had grand—or one might say grandiose—plans for her group. She would need all of the heavyweights she could get.

Agreeing that the “Re-Colonization of Palestine was the only solution possible of the Jewish Problem of Eastern Europe,” the Society wished to “extricate our unfortunate co-religionists from their present untenable position.” They would seek the cooperation of Jews and Christians alike.³⁹ Although she was probably the only member of her group whom the rest of the world had heard of at the time, Emma contacted such international sources for funding as Baron Maurice de Hirsch and the Alliance Israelite Universelle, for assistance and advice. She was held in such high esteem that both the baron and the Alliance responded with several ideas. Nevertheless, the society struggled for survival. It was unable to agree even on a plan put forth by Baron de Hirsh which, Emma said, was “couched in the most generous terms & does not involve the expenditure on our part of a single penny.” Although Emma had the prospect of promising assistance, members of her group seem to have been unable to commit themselves to the project.⁴⁰

Emma's solution to the Jewish Problem had appeared at least a decade too soon. Her tiny group was probably too inexperienced to know how to energize others in support of their effort. There may have been another problem, hinted at in one of Emma's letters to E. R. A. Seligman: the question of double loyalty. In one of her first letters to him Emma describes the results of the first meeting, which Seligman could not attend because of eye problems. She states their objectives, their desire to rescue East European Jews, and tells him that they plan to draw up a circular to be distributed to interested Jews and Christians. Emma and De Leon will be the authors of this pamphlet, and they want Seligman to join with them in this endeavor.

Now, does all this sound very incendiary? I detect in your note a lingering spark of mistrust—& I can most sincerely reassure you that no slightest grain of political purpose underlies or is in any way connected with our scheme. Mr. DeLeon & Mr. Rice would be as thoroughly opposed to anything in that direction as you are yourself—& I am certain that all such misgivings would have forever vanished from your mind if you could have been with us last evening.⁴¹

Through the years, of course, the question of double loyalty has been a recurring issue when American Jews considered the restoration of the Jewish State. Emma was sensitive to this concern. She addresses it more than once in An Epistle to the Hebrews, a series of fifteen essays which appeared in the American Hebrew from November 3, 1882, to February 23, 1883:

[u]tterly false and groundless is the assumption that a strict allegiance to the spirit of Judaism, a thorough interpenetration with her historic memories and poetic traditions, need conflict in any way with the Jews' duties or sentiments as citizens of a non-Jewish state. On the contrary, an intensifying of the noblest Hebrew spirit would tend to make better citizens, inasmuch as it would surely make better men. … To Jeremiah and Samuel Judaism owes its faculty of existing on foreign soil.⁴²

Emma Lazarus articulated her solution to the Jewish Problem in the Epistle before she established her Society. Most of what she says is not new. She admits borrowing from at least three precursors to Herzl: Leo Pinsker, George Eliot and Laurence Oliphant. She refers to them frequently throughout her work. Oliphant and Eliot were recognized and respected gentiles who advocated a Jewish home in Palestine. They would give Emma's work authority.

Arthur Zeiger convincingly demonstrates that Emma relied heavily on Eliot, Pinsker and Oliphant. He traces the influences these proto-Zionists had on her work and asserts that most of her writing is derivative.⁴³ What is important here is not that Emma borrowed from others or that she used their writings as proof-text but that she took it upon herself as a prominent American Jew to articulate and communicate what she saw as a solution to the Jewish Problem. The Jewish community saw Emma Lazarus as a celebrity of sorts because of the high status she enjoyed in the Christian world. Because she was so well thought of in both, her words would be read.

In earlier essays Emma refers to Jews as “they”; in the Epistle she refers to them as “we.” As Zeiger notes, “Throughout she speaks as a Hebrew to Hebrews.”⁴⁴ While her essays in the Epistle, written for a Jewish audience, are preachy and patronizing, Emma clearly places herself as leader of her people, us against the Christian community.

Our adversaries are perpetually throwing dust in our eyes with the accusations of materialism and tribalism, and we, in our pitiable endeavors to conform to the required standard, plead guilty and fall into the trap they set.⁴⁵

Lazarus' attitude toward the Jews she wishes to save is informed as much by what she is against as by what she is for. She strongly disapproves of orthodoxy in both Judaism and Christianity, each of which has degraded her East European people, who have entrenched themselves “behind a Chinese wall of petrified religious forms,” sunk in the “squalor and ignorance of ghetto-life.” They need to be taught the “Godliness of cleanliness, the dignity of womanhood, the delights of reason, the moral necessity of a broader humanity, the universal charity.”⁴⁶

Emma accepts the pejorative portrait even philo-Semites like Eliot had given Jews. In fact, she elaborates upon it. The flaws in the Jewish character are not due to race but to the unjust anti-Semitic legislation of the dominant culture as well as an obscurantist Judaism based, she believed, on superstition.⁴⁷ The healthy vitality of the Jewish people was “gagged and stifled, this useful productiveness was paralyzed by the tyranny of Christian legislation.”⁴⁸ She goes on to ask, “What shall be done for those unfortunate creatures who groan under the double tyranny of despotism and ignorance?”⁴⁹

But Emma's polemic is informed by more than sympathy. The specter of collective Jewish guilt haunts the pages of the Epistle.

The persistence of the Jewish type and the extremes of animosity and admiration which it still persistently excites, make it idle to repeat the hackneyed question whether Judaism be a race of a religion. It is both.⁵⁰

“Even in free America,” Emma writes, “we have not yet succeeded everywhere and at all times in persuading the non-Jewish community to accept or reject us on our personal merits.”⁵¹ Jews must

look into the mirror held up to us by well-wishers and enemies alike, to investigate coolly, rationally and impartially our situation and the nature of the reproaches that are cast upon us. Wherever a show of justice is to be found for these reproaches, we must shrink from no single or united effort to remove it.⁵²

Emma believes strongly, for instance, that Diaspora Jews need to train their children in the industrial arts and crafts. She feels that in the United States, “deliberately instilled” into the American mind is a “false pride that revolted at the very name of ‘servant,’ as derogatory to the dignity of a free-born American, and that despised the honorable claims of manual labor.”⁵³

“Antipathy to manual labor is one of the great social ills of our age and country, [upon] every Jewish school and asylum in the land, religious or secular, should be grafted a system of instruction in some branch of productive industry.”

This antipathy, “this unhealthy social tendency,” is an even greater danger to the American Jew than to the American Christian, for in a “materialistic” country like the United States Jews are “stigmatized with a reproach of materialism.” Because their

descent differs from that of the majority of their fellow-citizens, they are frequently taunted with alienism, in defiance of truth and history, and are thus made the convenient scape-goat for reproaches that justly belong to the whole nation.⁵⁴

The Epistle is a collection of poorly organized essays. Though they were published serially, each essay stands on its own. These highly emotional newspaper pieces were written by Emma as political propaganda in her campaign to gather support for her “scheme,” as she called it, to rescue the Jews of Eastern Europe as well as those in Central Europe who needed help. Collective guilt demanded collective responsibility by emancipated Jews for Jews in trouble, anywhere.

The real issue for Emma is not Jews in the Diaspora: her focus is on the Jews of Eastern and Central Europe who are subject to such relentless discrimination. She offers the following three remedies:

1. Internal reform based upon higher education. Emma called it “improvement” in naming her Society;
2. Emigration to more enlightened and progressive countries; and
3. Repatriation and autoemancipation in Palestine.

For Emma, internal reform is in reality religious and spiritual change. What is needed is

Education, Enlightenment, Reformation; a sweeping out of the accumulated cobwebs and rubbish of Kabala and Talmud, darkening their very windows against the day and incrusting their altars and their hearths with the gathered dust of ages.⁵⁵

On the question of emigration, “The New Colossus” notwithstanding, Emma, like Leon Pinsker, felt that while “enlightened” western countries would welcome “some” emigres from Eastern Europe, they would limit the number they would admit.

Their colonization in groups or en mass in the United States is impracticable. No nation in the world, however liberal its constitution, however hospitable its character, could absorb so immense a heterogeneous body as the Jews of the persecuted districts of Eastern Europe and Northern Africa would form.⁵⁶

Moreover, she asserts that East European refugees would be unable to adjust to modern American culture and end up creating regressive ghettos like those they had left behind in Russia: to “rationalize overnight a religious belief grown stagnant beneath the undisturbed superstitions of the medieval age, would be fatal, even if it were possible.”⁵⁷

“Of all the mad and hopeless projects that have been tried upon these unfortunate creatures,” she declared, surely the maddest was the one which assumed, that issuing in a helpless condition from the Oriental seclusion of Ghetto life they could adapt themselves upon touching American soil to the exigencies of “the most progressive country in the world.”⁵⁸

She says that Oliphant had pointed out that East European Jews were “unfit by nature and education for competition in the struggle for existence under American conditions.”⁵⁹ In Palestine they could gradually ease into religious reform to then become artisans, warriors and farmers.

However abstract her definition of Judaism might have been, repatriation in Palestine which would lead to autoemancipation was the concrete cornerstone of Emma's manifesto:

A home for the homeless, a goal for the wanderer, an asylum for the persecuted, a nation for the denationalized. Such is the need of our generation, and whether it be voiced in the hissing denunciations of Anti-Semitism, in the enthusiasm of helpful Christian advocates, or in the piteous appeal from Hungary and Galicia, from Bessarabia and Warsaw, the call is too distinct for misconstruction, and too loud to remain ignored and unanswered.⁶⁰

For Emma the only solution to the Jewish Problem was repatriation of East European Jews to a recolonized Palestine. This was not just emigration to a geographical space, it was a return to the land of their ancestors and would have the power of regeneration. Jews needed to look back to their biblical history, before the exile, when their forbears worked by the sweat of their brown and defended their country from harm.

The race of the Maccabees and of Bar-Kockba, in whose army no soldier was permitted who could not uproot a tree as he rode, the splendid race of scholars, warriors, artists and artisans, [had] dwindled into the pale and stunted pariahs of Ghetto and Judenstrasse.

The remedy, then, was “an instant and earnest return to the avocations of our ancestors in the days when our ancestors were a truly great and admirable people.”⁶¹

“It is clearly not the fault of the Jews,” she continues, “that they are today as a rule a ‘race of soft-handed, soft-muscled men.’” Life in exile had generated this condition where they were prohibited from owning land, and confined to mercantile pursuits.⁶²

A major piece of Emma's plan is the critical role Western Jews would have to play in the process. Her position on Western Jews is the most contradictory part of her thesis. On the one hand, we know that she wrote of American Jews who had been subject to stereotyping and defamation. As a matter of fact, Emma had drawn her own blemished portrait of her own Jewish countrymen flawed due to their position in a country dominated by Christians. On the other hand, she tells her reader that

there is not the slightest necessity for an American Jew, the free citizen of a republic, to rest his hopes upon the foundation of any other nationality soever, or to decide whether he individually would or would not be in favor of residing in Palestine. … From those emancipated countries of Europe and America where the Jew shares all the civil and religious privileges of his compatriots only a small band of Israelites would be required to sacrifice themselves in order to serve as leaders and counselors.⁶³

Emma probably took this position for several reasons. First, as discussed earlier, the question of double loyalty and patriotism needed to be dealt with. Second, and maybe most important, was the question of just which new Moses would lead this legion into the promised land. Emma agrees with her hero, George Eliot, that only a “Western Jew” who is emancipated, enlightened and acceptable in the eyes of the gentiles, will be suitable.⁶⁴

Third, Emma knew that without financial help from the West her goals would never be accomplished. The united effort of American and “free” European Jews was needed

in deliberating upon the ways and means of securing the proper asylum and contributing the sums necessary for its purchase and establishment, Here in America should be organized an energetic society of intelligent and patriotic Jews to act in concert with the Israelitish Alliance of Europe.⁶⁵

The last of the fifteen epistles appeared on February 23, 1883. On February 5 of that year Emma held the first organizing meeting for her Society. The Epistle was a blueprint for action. Unfortunately, Emma Lazarus was no Theodore Herzl. She had many of the right ideas, but despite the fact that her father might have given her an overweening image of herself, despite the fact that when she spoke people listened she was the wrong age, the wrong sex, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

The Epistle does not present its author in the best light. It reveals her as a judgemental, acculturated Jew who accepts at face value the Christian's portrait of her people, notwithstanding her apologia. Had Emma Lazarus ever really gotten to know and understand them, she might not have so readily stereotyped them. Her plans for her Jews are remedies for what she and others, like Pinsker, sees as a social disease. As emotional as is her rhetoric, in reality, Emma sees East European Jews as clay to be cast in her desired image: They would have no control over their own lives; she would mold them to her specifications.

The last meeting of the Society for the Improvement and Emigration of East European Jews was held in December 1884. It was a last gasp. In April of that year Emma had written to fellow member Edwin Robert Anderson Seligman:

Alas! alas! I fear the Society will never rise from its ashes—& it makes me sad to think of the high hopes with which I organized it a year ago. I am still awaiting a promised letter from Mr. Kann in reference to Baron Hirsch—But even this, I am afraid would not be insufficient to resuscitate our dispirited energies. The only thing we have proved is that the Western Jews have hard enough work on their hands in taking care of themselves, & that the Eastern Jews will have to look out for their own interests!⁶⁶

At the end of May 1885 five months after Emma's organization had failed, she sailed to Europe with her sisters. They planned to be away for eighteen months. In January 1887 she lay bedbound in Paris, too ill to move. In July her sisters brought her home. She died there on November 19, 1887. She was 38 years old.

Emma Lazarus' Jewish identity was conflicted at best. Her amorphous theology was matched by her ambivalent feelings about the Jews whom she desired to rescue. Her love for her people, expressed passionately in her poetry, was worship from afar. For those at hand it was anything but unconditional. With her insistence that the East European Jew be changed to fit the standards of the acculturated American Jew, Emma Lazarus was as narrow-minded as the Orthodox Jews she wished to change. She seems to have been motivated more by fear than by love.

Emma reflects the nativism of her time in her attitude to immigration to this country. She had little belief in the ability of the human spirit to adapt or change or in the ability of this country to absorb and use the talents of its newcomers.

Was Emma's commitment to her Jewishness only a phase, as her sister Annie suggested? Or would she have been a “presence” at the Basle Congress, as a recent Lazarus essayist has written?⁶⁷ There is no evidence to suggest that Emma Lazarus would have become a part of the Jewish community, notwithstanding her impressive Epistle. She set herself up as a leader, both in organizing her little Society and in her writings, not unusual considering the position in which her father has placed her. Emma was the only one of the seven children her father “groomed to be noticed.”

Had Emma Lazarus lived, would she have wanted to or have been able to recapture her status as a “Jewish celebrity,” to quote the London Chronicle, after her return from Europe? Finally, what would have been her Jewish agenda? Would she have followed the lead of a Henrietta Szold or of a Lillian Wald? Would she have felt compelled to play for higher stakes, in the world of men? Would she have been able to do so?

In some ways Emma Lazarus resembles Theodore Herzl, whose mother “crowned” him at an early age. He, too, saw himself as an aristocrat, a cut above, and separated himself from the people he wished to rescue. It will be remembered that he intended to proclaim himself king and demanded that German, not Hebrew, be the national language.

Because Emma Lazarus died so young and because her letters are so few, her diaries nonexistent, and information about her so sparse, her biography can end only with questions. What we do know is that she continues to be recognized as an American-Jewish heroine because of her immortal sonnet, a sonnet inextricably connected to the statue and the immigrant. Somewhere in her psyche Emma must have known the power of her words, because in 1886, when transcribing her poems into a notebook, she placed “The New Colossus” on the first page.⁶⁸ More impressive is the foresight Emma Lazarus exhibited in her perception that the reclamation of an ancestral home could change the way a people thinks about itself, that a pariah people could transform itself into a community of artisans, warriors and scholars, and could make a desert bloom.

Notes

1. Critic 26 (1887): 293-94.

2. Rose Hawthorne Lathrop to Helena deKay Gilder, n.d., Helena deKay Gilder Papers, Private Collection, Tyringham Mass.

3. Annie Lazarus Johnston to Bernard G. Richards, 25 February 1926, Papers of Bernard G. Richards, Jewish Theological Seminary Library.

4. Emma Lazarus, Songs of a Semite (New York, 1882).

5. [Josephine Lazarus,] “Emma Lazarus,” Century 36 (October 1888): 875-84.

6. Emma had a brother, Frank, and five sisters: Sarah, Josephine, Mary, Agnes and Annie. The unmarried sisters lived together until their marriages or their deaths.

7. See Emma Lazarus to Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, Letter 5, 23 August 1882, in Bette Roth Young, Emma Lazarus in Her World, Life and Letters (Philadelphia, 1995), 192. See also Emma Lazarus, “The Jewish Problem,” The Century Magazine 25 (1883): 602-11.

8. Epistle 9.

9. Emma's essay, “The Connecting Link between Science and Religion,” appeared in the New York Sun, 27 August 1882, and in the American Hebrew, 1 September 1882.

10. For a discussion of Emma's family see Young, 6-7, 43-45.

11. Emma met Emerson at the home of her father's banker, Samuel Gray Ward. Emerson was her mentor and friend until his death in 1882. Emma visited the Emerson family in Concord, Massachusetts, twice.

12. Emma Lazarus to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 27 June 1868, in The Letters of Emma Lazarus, 1868-1885, ed. Morris U. Schappes (New York, 1949), 391 (hereafter cited as Schappes).

13. For Emma's friendships with Turgenev and Salvini, see Letters to Emma Lazarus in the Columbia University Library, ed. Ralph L. Rusk (New York, 1939) (hereafter cited as Rusk), and Schappes. For a wonderful description of Emma's meeting with Rubenstein see Young, 49-50.

14. For a thorough rendering of Richard Watson Gilder and the Century Magazine see Arthur John, The Best Years of the Century: Richard Watson Gilder, Scribner's Monthly, and Century Magazine, 1870-1909 (Urbana, 1981). For information on the “Gilder Age” see Herbert F. Smith, Richard Watson Gilder (New York, 1970), 13.

15. The letters were located by the author in the attic of the Gilder summer home at Four Brooks Farm at Tyringham, Mass.

16. In Young see Emma Lazarus to Thomas Wren Ward, Letter 15, 181; and Emma Lazarus to Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, Letter 1, 187. See also in Young Emma Lazarus to Edwin Robert Anderson Seligman, Letter 5, 205.

17. Emma Lazarus, Poems and Translations: Written Between the Ages of Fourteen and Seventeen (Boston, 1867), 63-118.

18. Emma Lazarus, “In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport,” in Emma Lazarus, Selections from her Poetry and Prose, ed. Morris U. Schappes (New York, 1978), 32.

19. Heinrich Heine, “Donna Clara,” trans. Emma Lazarus, Jewish Messenger 929 (1876): 1. Emma's translations of Judah Halevi and Ibn Gabirol appeared on the front page of the Jewish Messenger every week from January 17 to February 14, 1879 and sporadically thereafter.

20. “Rashi in Prague” and “The Death of Rashi” appeared in the Independent on 25 March 1880 and 8 April 1880, respectively. Emma's work first appeared in the Independent in May 1876 when her poem “Vashti, a Fragment,” was published on page 1.

21. Songs of a Semite, 20-21.

22. “Sic Semper Liberatoribus, March 23, 1881,” Scribner's (June 1881): 178.

23. “The Banner of the Jew.” All three poems were included in Songs of a Semite.

24. See Emma Lazarus to Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, Letter 5, in Young, 192.

25. For more of Emma's involvement with her immigrants see the Memorial Issue of the American Hebrew, 9 December 1887.

26. See Henry James' letter to Emma Lazarus in Young, 210-17. For an interesting account of the sonnet's journey to the pedestal see correspondence between Georgina Schuyler, Richard Gilder and the Lazarus sisters, microfilm, Richard Watson Gilder Papers, New York Public Library.

27. For an account of the Seligman/Hilton affair see Young, 46-47.

28. See E. R. A. Seligman/Lazarus correspondence in Young, 201-9.

29. “Miss Lazarus's ‘Songs of a Semite,’” Century 25 (1883): 471-72.

30. Emma Lazarus to Robert Underwood Johnson, n.d., papers of Robert Underwood Johnson, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

31. Zenaide Ragozin, “Russian Jews and Gentiles from a Russian Point of View,” Century 23 (1882): 906-20.

32. Emma Lazarus, “Russian Christianity versus Modern Judaism,” Century 24 (1882): 48-56.

33. Emma Lazarus to Philip Cowen, Letter 54, in Schappes, 433.

34. For a discussion of Emma as others saw her, see Young, 44. For Henry James' impressions see Young, 210-17.

35. See letters to and from William Wetmore Story and Henry George in Rusk and Schappes.

36. See Young, Emma Lazarus to Helena deKay Gilder, Letter 27, 106; and Letter 29, 110.

37. For more information see the American Hebrew, 9 December 1887.

38. Young, 258-60.

39. Ibid., 202.

40. Ibid., 208.

41. Ibid., 203.

42. Emma Lazarus, An Epistle to the Hebrews (New York, 1987), 13 (hereafter referred to as Epistle).

43. See Arthur Zeiger, “Emma Lazarus: A Critical Study” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1951); and Arthur Zeiger, “Zionism and Emma Lazarus,” in Early History of Zionism in America, ed. Isadore S. Meyer (New York, 1958), 77-108.

    George Eliot, a British Christian, was one of the first Western thinkers to propose a return to a Jewish national home in her novel Daniel Deronda and in an essay, “The Modern Hep! Hep!” Emma read both and quoted from them extensively in her Epistle.

    Laurence Oliphant, another British Christian and an eccentric, espoused Jewish nationalism in several books as well as in essays published in widely read British journals. Emma corresponded with him and quoted him frequently in her work. For their correspondence see Rusk and Schappes.

    Leo Pinsker's Auto-Emancipation was published in Germany in 1882. Emma read it and quoted him as well. See the Epistle, 34.

44. Ibid., 77.

45. Epistle, 29-30.

46. Ibid., 74.

47. Eliot's portrayal of Jews in her essay, “The Modern Hep! Hep!” is apologetic but harsh. Like Emma she feels that their emigration in great numbers to any country would cause an anti-Semitic backlash and defends her position.

48. Epistle, 19.

49. Ibid., 79.

50. Ibid., 9.

51. Ibid., 78.

52. Ibid., 9.

53. Ibid., 17.

54. Ibid., 22.

55. Ibid., 74.

56. Ibid., 44.

57. Ibid., 76.

58. Ibid., 77.

59. Ibid., 76.

60. Ibid., 65.

61. Ibid., 20.

62. Ibid., 19.

63. Ibid., 41.

64. Ibid., 14.

65. Ibid., 45.

66. Young, 207.

67. Alan Appelbaum, “An American Zionist in the '80's,” unpublished manuscript.

68. Emma's notebook is located in the archives of the American Jewish Historical Society.