[In the following excerpt, Kessner focuses on the development of Lazarus's Jewish consciousness as reflected in her writing.]

… Emma Lazarus's early years did not suggest that she would become a prototype for the modern Jewish woman writer, nor that she would become a Jewish nationalist in her poetry, a proto-Zionist in her aspirations, nor a socialist sympathizer in her politics,¹ nor assertive in her self-confidence as a woman. She was born on July 22, 1849, to Moses Lazarus, a wealthy sugar industrialist of Sephardic background, and his wife, Esther Nathan Lazarus, who was of Ashkenazic background. Both sides of the family had been in America since the Revolution. The Lazarus family lived in a fashionable section of New York City and summered in the popular watering spot of Newport, Rhode Island. Emma was educated at home by private tutors, and studied the curriculum thought suitable for well-educated young American ladies of upper-class status. In the introduction to two volumes of selected poems published posthumously in 1889, two years after her death, Emma's sister Josephine tells us that in Emma's early years, Hebraism was only latent, and it was “classic and romantic art that first attracted her. … Her restless spirit found repose in the pagan idea—the absolute unity and identity of man with nature, as symbolized in the Greek myths.”² … [T]his is the very subject matter that was to be roundly rejected in “The New Colossus.”³ Certainly something profoundly transforming happened to Lazarus between the first volume of poems published privately in 1867 by her father, and Songs of a Semite: “The Dance Unto Death” and Other Poems, published in 1882, which has as its dedication: “In profound veneration and respect to the memory of George Eliot, the illustrious writer who did most among the artists of our day towards elevating and ennobling the spirit of Jewish Nationality.”

During the course of her career, Lazarus struck up tutelary relationships with male writers; the first and most influential was Ralph Waldo Emerson, but she also became acquainted with such figures as Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Ivan Turgenev, the naturalist John Burroughs, Edwards Clarence Stedman, and finally Henry James. All of these men encouraged her, yet most were honest enough to suggest that she needed to find her own voice. In 1871 she published Admetus and Other Poems. The major poems of this volume are both curious and suggestive—“Admetus,” “Orpheus,” “Lohengrin,” and “Tannhäuser”—comprising two Greek myths and two medieval German legends about women who sacrificed themselves for the sake of men, and three accounts of poetic singers. Emma, it appears, was struggling to find her own voice, but looking in the wrong place.

As time went on she began more and more to reveal an awareness of her own traditions. She studied the Hebrew language and Graetz's History of the Jews, translated the German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine and the medieval Jewish poets of Spain, and began writing a few poems on Jewish subjects. Still her commitment to Judaism was more historical than spiritual, as she wrote in 1877 to Rabbi Gustave Gottheil, who had asked her to contribute hymns to a new Reform hymnal he was preparing for publication: “I cheerfully offered to help you to the extent of my ability, and was glad to prove to you that my interest and sympathies were loyal to our race, although my religious convictions (if such they can be called) and the circumstances of my life have led me somewhat apart from our people.”⁴ In 1878, Lazarus began a correspondence with the naturalist and popular author John Burroughs on the subject of Matthew Arnold's Hellenism as opposed to Whitman's Hebraism, a topic of increasing interest to her. Burroughs wrote in response to Lazarus's claim that Arnold is cold and lacks spontaneity: “Yes, Whitman is Hebraic, so is Carlyle, so are all the more vital literary forces of our century, I think.”⁵ It is interesting to see a similar perception in Ozick's interest in the distinction between Hebraism and Hellenism in her famous remark that the nineteenth-century novel in its moral seriousness is a Judaized novel.⁶

At this very time in Emma Lazarus's life, when she was searching for an authentic way to express her increasing Jewish consciousness, two related events occurred to fire her poetic imagination and social conscience. These were the Russian pogroms of 1881, and the increasingly harsh and restrictive anti-Jewish Russian legislation, epitomized in the May Laws of 1882. The result was mass immigration of East European Jews to the United States. Until this moment, Lazarus's interest in Judaism was mainly philosophical, and there was no active cause to which she could attach herself. But at this crux in history she responded immediately and passionately, and she was drawn into active battle, fighting on three fronts as poet, as political essayist, and as social activist.

Yet the transformation of Emma's consciousness was not quite complete. There was to be a critical moment. In April of 1882 Emma Lazarus published an essay, “Was the Earl of Beaconsfield a Representative Jew?” in Century magazine. In this still cool, rationalist, universalist assessment of Benjamin Disraeli, she concludes that indeed he is a representative Jew, “but he is not a first-class man.” “His qualities,” she asserts, “were not those of the world's heroes; he possessed talent rather than genius. … Moses, Jesus, St. Paul, the prophets, Spinoza bear glorious testimony to the existence of first-class men. But centuries of persecution and the enforced narrowness of their sphere of action … have developed among the Jews a national character other than that of the above named scions of the race.”⁷ Lazarus's lament is for want of a great moral spiritual leader. She herself is on the threshold of accepting her own challenge. By some quirk of fate, in the same volume of Century there was to appear an article by Madame Z. Ragozin, a Russian journalist; Ragozin's essay was a defense of the mobs who were perpetrating the pogroms and a vicious attack upon Jewish character.⁸ Before printing this article, George Gilder, the well-known liberal editor of Century Magazine, showed it to Lazarus, who immediately wrote an outraged response for the May 1882 issue. Gone is the cool detachment of the Disraeli essay; in its place is moral passion, irony, caustic wit, superb scholarship, rhetorical strategy, and a clear expression of her own identification as a Jew connected to all other Jews.⁹ To Madame Ragozin's charge that there are two kinds of Jews, that a “vast dualism essentially characterizes this extraordinary race,” Lazarus answers: “The dualism of the Jews is the dualism of humanity; they are made up of the good and the bad. May not Christendom be divided into those Christians who denounce such outrages as we are considering, and those who commit or apologize for them? Immortal genius and moral purity, as exemplified by Moses and Spinoza, constitute a minority among Jews, as they do among the Gentiles.”¹⁰

Jesus and Paul are now absent from Lazarus's list of heroes; gone is her naive lament for the Jewish failure to produce “moral purity and immortal genius.” This essay, entitled “Russian Christianity Versus Modern Judaism,” is the first of a stream of polemical pieces in defense of her subject and in challenge to her people that Emma Lazarus would write over the next few years of her brief life. She had finally hit her stride, and she revealed it in a vigorous, muscular, prose—a prose style that elsewhere has been identified as the “rhetoric of zeal.”¹¹ This double-edged rhetoric, which alternates between an extravagance born of idealism and devastating rapier thrusts, is characteristic of the zealous writer from the biblical prophets through John Milton to the passionate polemicists of the 1960s. Only the idealist with a high sense of moral purpose can turn the carpet over to expose the rough underside of moral indignation; the cynic has only one texture.

This, of course, belies the words of so many of Lazarus' admirers, including her sisters, who insisted that she was the consummate shy, restrained Victorian woman. She was not. All she lacked was an appropriate object for the passion of her “late-born woman-soul,”¹² a legitimate focus for the intensity of her moral and aesthetic passion. She found it in the wedding of her identification with her people and her decision to speak and act for them. She embodied it in poetry that rejects the high diction of the past and is charged with the prophetic urgency of the call for return to the land of Israel, and in vigorous prose, especially in the series of fourteen essays ironically entitled Epistle to the Hebrews, written from November 1882 to February 1883, in which she undertook to “bring before the Jewish public … facts and critical observations … to arouse a more logical and intelligent estimate of the duties of the hour.”¹³

Lazarus's commitment toward social justice, however, was not expressed in words alone, for she involved herself in the practical task of helping the new immigrants to resettle, and she was responsible for the founding of the Hebrew Technical Institute for Vocational Training. Moreover, in a series of twelve letters written to the influential political economist E. R. A. Seligman just before her trip to England in 1883, Lazarus desperately tried to form a Committee for the Colonization of Palestine. Seligman was uncooperative, and the venture appears to have failed.¹⁴

Lazarus sailed to London in 1883, armed with letters of introduction from Henry James to well-placed people in England, Jews and non-Jews, who could help her in her work toward the establishment of a Jewish national homeland.¹⁵ Thus, a decade before Herzl's launching of political Zionism, Emma Lazarus would argue in a poetic voice of her own and in powerfully persuasive prose for the land of Israel as a safe haven for oppressed Jews everywhere. It should be noted, however, that at no point did Lazarus advocate resettlement for all Jews.¹⁶

Notes

1. In 1881 Lazarus wrote a sonnet “Progress and Poverty,” inspired by Henry George's book by that name; she spent a day with the socialist-craftsman humanitarian William Morris at his workshop in 1883, and in her essay, “The Jewish Problem,” The Century (February 1883), she wrote, “The modern theory of socialism and humanitarianism erroneously traced to the New Testament has its root in the Mosaic Code.”

2. The Poems of Emma Lazarus, ed. Josephine Lazarus, 2 vols. (Boston, 1889), 1:3. “The New Colossus” is found in Poems 1:202-3.

3. The rejection of “paganism” also became a major theme for Lazarus's literary “granddaughter,” Cynthia Ozick, whose fascination with the theme of Hebraism versus Hellenism was first announced in print in “America: Toward Yavneh,” Judaism (Summer 1970), 264-82, and later embodied in the title of her short story “The Pagan Rabbi.”

4. The Letters of Emma Lazarus, 1868-1885, ed. Morris U. Schappes (New York, 1949), 333.

5. Letters to Emma Lazarus in the Columbia University Library, ed. Ralph L. Rusk (New York, 1939), 30.

6. Ozick, “America: Toward Yavneh,” 272.

7. Reprinted in Emma Lazarus: Selections from Her Poetry and Prose, ed. Morris U. Schappes (New York, 1944), 60.

8. Madame Z. Ragozin, “Russian Jews and Gentiles,” Century Magazine 23 (1882), 919.

9. Analogous essays by Marie Syrkin and Cynthia Ozick include Marie Syrkin's rigorously argumentative “Who Are The Palestinians?” Midstream (January 1970), and Ozick's uncompromisingly tough “All the World Wants the Jews Dead,” Esquire (1974).

10. Schappes, Selections, 69.

11. Thomas Kranidas, “Milton and the Rhetoric of Zeal,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 6 (1965), 423-32.

12. The first seven lines of Lazarus's poem “Echoes,” Poems, 1:201, adumbrate the ideas in “The New Colossus”:

    Late-born and woman-souled I dare not hope,
    The freshness of the elder lays, the might
    Of manly, modern passion shall alight
    Upon my 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 fight.

13. Prospectus for the fourteen essays under the general title “An Epistle to the Hebrews,” American Hebrew (November 3, 1882).

14. Twelve unpublished letters from Emma Lazarus to E. R. A. Seligman held in the Columbia University Library.

15. Carole S. Kessner, “The Emma Lazarus—Henry James Connection: Eight Letters,” American Literary History 3:1 (Spring 1991), 46-62.

16. As she wrote in “Epistle to the Hebrews,” Schappes, Selections, 82: “For the most ardent supporter of the scheme does not urge the advisability of an emigration en masse of the whole Jewish people to any particular spot. 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.”