SOURCE: Lichtenstein, Diane. “Words and Worlds: Emma Lazarus's Conflicting Citizenships.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 6, no. 2 (fall 1987): 247-63.

[In the following essay, Lichtenstein considers Lazarus's identities as a marginalized Jewish-American and female writer.]

Unlike Virginia Woolf who proclaimed that as a woman she had no country and wanted no country,¹ Emma Lazarus believed passionately in her rightful place within the Jewish and American nations; even more passionately, she wanted to be counted among the citizens of the American literary nation. Despite her beliefs and wishes, however, Lazarus was an alien in the nations she fervently defended. As a woman in Victorian America, for example, she could not vote. As a Jew, she was vulnerable to anti-Semitism. And as a Jewish woman, she was not entitled to the privileges of men, according to Orthodox Jewish law. In spite of these actual and potential limitations on her freedom, Lazarus wrote poetry, essays, and fiction in which she strongly articulated her belief that she could and would be an American Jewish citizen.²

It is appropriate to reexamine Emma Lazarus's work this year, for 1987 marks the one hundredth anniversary of the author's death and follows by a year America's celebration of the Statue of Liberty, which has been empowered by Lazarus's poem, “The New Colossus.” Through this poem, the Statue has been glorified to articulate symbolically the ideals that America believes it represents. The poem itself transforms the outsider, the “homeless” newcomer, into an insider who brings new vitality to her/his adopted nation. And, in retrospect, the poet ironically became the insider she wanted to be by valorizing the outsider.

Lazarus deserves our attention for at least three reasons: she is an author whose work has been largely ignored at least in part because of her gender and religion; she provides us with an alternative model of women's lives because she used her words, rather than her assigned female roles, to affirm her American and Jewish citizenships; and she provides us with a vivid example of how women, Jews, and other “outsiders” have had to struggle to belong to the American nation, and, more particularly, the American literary nation.³

As numerous critics have pointed out, this struggle to belong to literary America was not unique to Jews or women. As Alfred Kazin has explained, modern American writers felt alienated on their own native ground, experiencing a “nameless yearning for a world no one ever really possessed.”⁴ However, Kazin and others have not noticed that a writer such as Emma Lazarus, who because of her gender and ethnicity could not take a “native ground” for granted, would never find easy access to the dominant American literary culture.

Lazarus was born into an old, wealthy Jewish American family on July 22, 1849. Her father, Moses, was descended from a Sephardic (Spanish or Portuguese) Jewish family, and her mother, Esther Nathan, was the daughter of respectable German Jews.⁵ Moses was a successful sugar merchant who made sure that his family was comfortable in the fashionable sections of New York and Newport, Rhode Island. He also made sure that his seven children received rigorous educations. Although there are few direct references to her education, Emma, the fourth child, probably was tutored in mythology, music, American poetry, European literature, as well as German, French, and Italian.

As an assimilated American Jewish woman, Lazarus was powerfully affected by the dominant white, middle-class, Christian American culture, as well as by the Sephardic and German Jewish American cultures. More specifically, she was affected by ideals for women that not only established correct behavior but also defined their citizenship. The “True Woman,” the idealized Christian Victorian woman, whose “sphere was the hearth and nursery,”⁶ served her country by keeping her corruptible men uncorrupted and by rearing the next generation of “moral, trustworthy statesmanlike citizens.”⁷ The “Mother in Israel,” the idealized Jewish woman who was modeled on Deborah in the Old Testament (Judges 5:7), also reigned over the home. However, she served her Jewish nation by creating in that home a refuge where the family could keep Kosher and celebrate holidays such as Passover without apology or fear, as well as by instilling in her children the knowledge of customs and pride in ancient traditions, all of which would offer protection against anti-Semitism and insure the survival of the Jews.

Although she was affected by these female ideals, Lazarus did not demonstrate her citizenship through them. With her proud belief that as an American she was privileged to enjoy many freedoms and that as a Jew she had a rich ancient heritage, she chose to include herself in both her nations through her words. She was not the only Jewish woman who wrote, but she was one of the only ones who was not a writer and a wife, mother, educator, or caretaker. Like Deborah, she would fight against those who sought to annihilate the Jews. Yet unlike the more conventional Mother in Israel, she would fight with words, aiming her attack at Christians who did not understand or accept Jews and against Jews themselves who had become complacent and therefore vulnerable to anti-Semitism. In the context of her social world, her decision to write and not to act as a mother or a wife was defiant.

Although Lazarus did not often make the home, or women, the subject of her writing, she shared with the Protestant “literary domestics” “an identity in common with other women … even though their experiences were uncommon.”⁸ However, unlike these “literary domestics,” described by Mary Kelley in Private Women, Public Stage, Lazarus exhibited very little conflict about stepping into the public world of letters; she knew, with surprising sureness, that she wanted to be a citizen of the American literary nation.

She also knew that such citizenship was difficult to obtain. In her poem “Echoes,” she acknowledged the difficulty inherent in being a female author:

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;
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.(9)

The speaker of the poem, who recognizes the disadvantage she is under by not sharing “dangers, wounds, and triumphs” of battles with men, turns her own experiences into assets, valorizing “elf music” and the “echoes” that the female poet sings. However, as is too often the case with women's art, the valorization seems like a poor rationalization for limitations. The word “veiled” in line five suggests the way in which women were “screened” by their domestic duties, as well as the need for a female artist to hide her work and even conceal her true story in a palimpsest, as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have argued.¹⁰ Moreover, the title of the poem, “Echoes,” suggests the subterranean nature of women's writing. An echo's sound is an after-effect, a by-product, whose tone grows fainter with each repetition. With this speaker, Lazarus admitted that women artists must compromise in order to be heard at all. Yet she did not compromise in her belief that she could and would be an American author. Behind the veil and screen of Lazarus's womanhood surged a compelling confidence.¹¹

Lazarus's only two works of fiction, Alide: An Episode of Goethe's Life (1874) and “The Eleventh Hour” (1878), articulate the same tensions and frustrations that the author experienced as a woman artist. Alide is based on Goethe's autobiographical writing in which the author chronicled his experience of falling in love with a country woman, Fredericka Brion (Alide Duroc in the novel). Goethe and his lover part after they realize that she is not his spiritual or intellectual equal. Lazarus develops Goethe as a “great” man whose “simplest action [is] fresh and original,” who is “generous of … soul,” and who “shed[s] a peculiar glory upon whatever claims [his] regard.”¹²

We can feel Alide's pain in giving Goethe up, and yet it is Goethe, the man, with whom Lazarus seems to have sympathized and identified. Goethe had the ability and the right to break earthly bonds in order to find the fulfillment of his artistic capacities. It is the “great” male writer, whose calling was so powerful and privilege was so sure, whom Lazarus admired and envied.

“The Eleventh Hour,” which was published in Scribner's magazine, traces the alienation and bewilderment of a young Romanian artist who has left his European home to experience the American liberty he had dreamed of. Once again, Lazarus's sympathies lie with the male artist who, in this case, is also an alien because of his nationality and temperament. Sergius is disappointed not only by the seeming sham of American freedom, but also by the state of art in this young nation. Dick Bayard, the husband of one of Sergius's art students, tries to explain, “‘America is a country where art and beauty must and will thrive, though in the present transition-period of upheaval and reconstruction, it is impossible to discern what forms they will assume.’”¹³ Through Dick, Lazarus urged herself and other American artists to be patient and, more subtly but more importantly, to cultivate America's unique artistic expression.¹⁴

Lazarus had little liking for the women in the story, as we see in her treatment of Ellen Bayard. The author called her an “arch-woman, simple and cunning, vain and disinterested, noble and petty, capable of entering with ardent enthusiasm into the thoughts and feelings of others, yet always retaining in the fervor of her generous emotion an undefined pleasant consciousness of her own sympathetic qualities” (p. 244). And still she is better than most of her wealthy New York sisters who also dabble in art. Lazarus seems to have needed to distance herself from Ellen, from the woman she might have become, who used her creativity not to paint or write seriously, but to spin fantasies of her power over men. Lazarus did not want to be the dabbler in art or the manipulator of men. She wanted to be Sergius Azoff (or Goethe), who, despite his foreignness and differentness, could find a powerful outlet for his spirit.

Unlike her fictional character, however, Lazarus was a woman; to others, this meant that she was supposed to embody traits of the True Woman and the Mother in Israel.¹⁵ Even her sister Josephine, herself a progressive thinker and writer, called Emma a “true woman, too distinctly feminine to wish to be exceptional, or to stand alone and apart, even by virtue of superiority.”¹⁶ Josephine, as well as American literary notables such as John G. Whittier and John Hay, who commented on Lazarus's gentleness and retiring personality,¹⁷ seem to have accepted the persona Lazarus created in “Echoes.” Ironically, that persona permitted Lazarus entry into the American literary nation by “veiling” or protecting her. As long as the “screen” projected an image of propriety, Lazarus could write as she wanted to. For the first years of her career, she used male artists as role models in order to achieve a more powerful voice.¹⁸ Later, however, she dispensed with these straw men and discovered her own authority.

Although others saw her first as a woman, and then as a writer, an American, or a Jew, Lazarus viewed her identity as an author as primary, and it was through this role that she both came to accept herself as a Jew and affirm her Americanness. Many scholars have debated when and why Lazarus became a public spokesperson for Jews. Some claim that she always had a Jewish consciousness,¹⁹ while others argue that the Russian Pogroms of the early 1880s incited her to reclaim her Jewish identity.²⁰ However, the significant question is not when Lazarus embraced a public Jewish persona; it is, rather, how she used words to create a compromise among her Jewish, American, and female citizenships and, especially, to enfranchise herself.

An early poem that exhibits Lazarus's process of using words to establish national loyalties and mediate conflicts is “In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport” (1867). Lazarus's poem echoes Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport,” following, as it does, the same meter and stanzaic structure. It is clear that the eighteen-year-old Lazarus was inspired more by a male American poet's words than by heartfelt devotion to her people. Lazarus emulated Longfellow's poem in order to validate her own American literary voice. In addition, she felt more comfortable approaching a Jewish topic after a venerated American poet had blessed it, and she could keep some distance from the Jewish subject by describing it through an acceptable American literary form.

Yet it is this Longfellow poem that attracted Lazarus's attention. And where Longfellow's speaker stands in “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport,” contemplating the demise of the Jewish nation, Lazarus's speakers stand “In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport,” in the “sacred shrine” that is “holy yet.”²¹ The Jews and their “consecrated spot” are still living, still powerful. Even at this young age, Lazarus was modifying traditional American literature, embarking on a literary career that would eventually find its greatest strength in a symbiosis of American and Jewish forms and subjects.

A decade after Lazarus wrote “In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport,” Gustav Gottheil, the Rabbi of Temple Emanu-El in New York, asked Lazarus to translate and write hymns for a new collection. Lazarus translated “three of the Hymns,” but, she concluded, “As for writing hymns myself, ‘the flesh is willing, but the spirit is weak.’ I should be most happy to serve you in your difficult and patriotic undertaking, but the more I see of these religious poems, the more I feel that the fervor and enthusiasm requisite to their production are altogether lacking in me.”²² In writing these hymns, Lazarus was following formulae but was not infusing the words with feelings. She still found it more comfortable to keep some distance from her Jewish identity.

The disparity between exterior and interior would shrink in the next decade, as we can see in “The Dance to Death,” a five act poetic tragedy published in 1882 but, according to Lazarus, written “a few years” earlier.²³ Although the tragedy is an imitative dramatization of Richard Reinhard's prose narrative, Der Tanz zum Tode (1877), it “implie[d] rare gifts of sympathy and discernment,” according to a contemporary review in Lippincott's.²⁴

“The Dance to Death” tells the story of the Jews who were condemned to die in Nordhausen, Germany, in 1349, for an outbreak of the plague. What makes the drama so powerful is the courage and dedication of the Jews. When they realize that the edict for their death will stand, they ask their assassins to build a pyre, upon and around which they will dance as they burn to death. In Act V of the poem, these defiant Jews will die proclaiming their devotion to God:

                                                                                                    Ours is the truth,
Ours is the power, the gift of Heaven. We hold
His Law, His lamp, His covenant, His pledge.
Wherever in the ages shall arise
Jew-priest, Jew-poet, Jew-singer, or Jew-saint—
And everywhere I see them star the gloom—
In each of these the martyrs are avenged!

(II, 165)

Lazarus is one of these “Jew-poets” or “Jew-singers,” seeking revenge for the medieval Jews of Nordhausen. By writing “The Dance to Death,” she took on the responsibility for avenging the unwarranted deaths of countless Jews, and she thereby became a part of Jewish history and affirmed her citizenship in the Jewish nation. Lazarus had written to “the Editors of the American Hebrew” on May 25, 1882, that she thought “it would be highly desirable” to publish “The Dance to Death,” “now, in order to arouse sympathy and to emphasize the cruelty of the injustice done to our unhappy people.”²⁵ Lazarus's words were her form of action as well as her passport into the Jewish nation.

Three essays, which appeared over a ten month period in The Century, crystallize the way in which Lazarus used her words to become a public spokesperson for Jews. In the first of these, “Was the Earl of Beaconsfield a Representative Jew?” (April 1882), Lazarus discussed Herr Georg Brandes's study of Benjamin Disraeli. Brandes had decided that Disraeli was not a representative Jew because “‘the Jewish mind has revealed itself in far more affluent and nobler forms than in Disraeli's comparatively limited mental range.’”²⁶ Lazarus contested Brandes's argument with her own definition of “representative,” suggesting that it did not mean the greatest example of a Jew, but rather the “epitome of the race features common to both [Spinoza and Shylock]” (p. 939). Disraeli, who was not a “first-class man,” was actually narrow, ignorant, arrogant, and ambitious, but also intelligent, morally courageous, talented, and energetic, according to Lazarus (p. 942). Embodying the worst and the best of Jewish traits made Disraeli “representative.”

The two essays that followed were less equivocal. Instead of apologizing for Jews, Lazarus began explaining and defending them. In “Russian Christianity vs. Modern Judaism” from the May 1882 issue of The Century, she responded to an essay by Madame Z. Ragozin, a Russian woman. Ironically, Ragozin's article, “Russian Jews and Gentiles,” which blamed the Jews for their own persecution in Russia, had appeared in the same issue with Lazarus's “Was the Earl of Beaconsfield a Representative Jew?”

Throughout her refutation of Ragozin's arguments, Lazarus controlled her anger: “Of these horrors [heard from Jewish immigrants to America about pogroms and life in Russia], no one in whose veins flows a drop of Jewish blood can speak with becoming composure.”²⁷ Lazarus was making a personal plea for an accurate understanding of Russian Jews and their situation, and she was publicly including herself among those who could feel the agony of her fellow Jews.

In the third Century essay, “The Jewish Problem” (February 1883), Lazarus was even more forthright in her conviction that she was a spokesperson for Jews. The “problem” is that “this scattered band of Israelites, always in the minority, always in the attitude of protestants against the dominant creed, against society as it is, seem fated to excite the antagonism of their fellow-countrymen.”²⁸ The “problem” is “as old as history and assumes in each age a new form,” Lazarus informed her Century audience (p. 602).

The solution? The founding of a state in Palestine for Jews by Jews. Lazarus stressed, however, that she was talking about a global (particularly Russian) problem; American Jews had been accepted in their adopted nation, for the most part, and would have no need to leave for Palestine. It was actually incumbent upon these privileged Jews to help their less fortunate coreligionists find a new home.

Despite her proclamation that American Jews were relatively safe and secure, Lazarus recognized, in the third Century essay, that

even in America, presumably the refuge of the oppressed, public opinion has not yet reached that point where it absolves the race from the sin of the individual. Every Jew, however honorable or enlightened, has the humiliating knowledge that his security and reputation are, in a certain sense, bound up with those of the meanest rascal who belongs to his tribe, and who has it in his power to jeopardize the social status of his whole nation.

(p. 608)

Lazarus expected more from America than narrow-mindedness and found it difficult to accept anti-Semitism from the American citizens she respected. Yet the new vision she gained from learning about the Russian pogroms forced her to reassess her own status in America, and she found it vulnerable.

Clearly, Lazarus came to accept her Jewish identity through writing about Jews. In reaction to Brandes's and Ragozin's words, she became a more outspoken Jew. And with her own words, she would continue to fight in behalf of Jews and claim her rightful place in the Jewish nation. Ironically, her strategy for declaring citizenship in the Jewish nation should have made her more of an alien. It was through acting as a Mother in Israel that she should have been granted citizenship. But Lazarus stretched the parameter of this role, playing the part of Deborah, with her pen as a weapon. She also played the part of the Mother in Israel by using her pen as an instrument of education and mediation. For the predominantly non-Jewish readers of the three Century essays, Lazarus articulated careful, logical arguments to explain and ameliorate the negative stereotypes of Jews.

In her role of educator, Lazarus also felt compelled to address other American Jews, to enlighten them about both their privileged status in America and their vulnerability. She spoke to American Jews in her series An Epistle to the Hebrews, which appeared in The American Hebrew between November 1882 and February 1883, the same period during which the Century essays were published. In the fifteen Epistles, Lazarus appealed to American Jews to reflect upon their history and to understand their present and future conditions so that they might preserve their special identities.

In letter number five, she explained that Jews needed to understand their history because without accurate information, they would have no grounds upon which to refute Christian prejudices and would therefore believe negative stereotypes. Lazarus pointed out in this same letter that many Jews wished to conform to standards set by Christians, but that they did so at great cost. In the preceding letter, she had stated that Jews are the “Intensive form of any nationality whose language and customs they adopt. … Whether owing to our circumstances or our character, we reflect the general color of the people who surround us, and usually succeed in giving it a shade deeper dye.”²⁹ The author warned that such complete assimilation could be detrimental if Jews also conformed to the anti-Jewish sentiments of the adopted nation. Jews, she said, actually need to be more tribal, not, as many had suggested, less: “we have not sufficient solidarity to perceive that when the life and property of a Jew in the uttermost provinces of the Caucasus are attacked, the dignity of a Jew in free America is humiliated. … Until we are all free, we are none of us free” (p. 30). The implicit message to Lazarus's Jewish readers was to conform but not to forget. This was a warning that Lazarus herself had recently begun to heed.

Throughout the Epistles, Lazarus used the pronoun “we” instead of the “they” she had used in her other essays. This was an obvious rhetorical strategy, useful in convincing the Jewish readers of The American Hebrew to listen to her, one of their own. The “we” was also a signal that Lazarus was surer of her Jewishness and eager to claim it as her own.

The same new confidence is evident in the volume of poetry that was published by The American Hebrew in 1882. Songs of a Semite included “The Dance to Death,” as well as seven original poems, one translation and two imitations of Heinrich Heine, and translations of three Spanish Hebrew poets. The title of the volume and the publisher were public proclamations that Lazarus wanted to be identified as a Jewish poet.

In several poems from the collection, Lazarus translated historical Jewish figures and past glories of the Jewish people into contemporary situations in order to inspire nineteenth-century Jews to fight new battles against Russian pogroms and worldwide prejudice. “The Crowing of the Red Cock” suggests a way for Jews to fight these battles—not with swords, but with the courage to forget. The Jew is not a coward,

          Who singly against worlds has fought,
For what? A name he may not breathe,
          For liberty of prayer and thought.
The angry sword he will not whet,
His nobler task is—to forget.

(II, 3-4)

What the Jew must forget is the pain of the “lust of mobs, the greed of priest, / The tyranny of kings, combined / To root his seed from earth again” (II, 3-4). Lazarus herself seems to have wanted to forget this history in order to reconcile her Jewish consciousness with her secular outlook, but to forget she first had to remember.

“The Choice,” which was first published in The American Hebrew and reprinted in The American Israelite in May 1884, reveals Lazarus in the act of remembering. Dreaming, the speaker of the poem hears a phantom say:

                                                                                                                        “Soul, choose thy lot!
Two paths are offered; that, in velvet-flower,
Slopes easily to every earthly prize.
Follow the multitude and bind thine eyes,
Thou and thy sons' sons shall have peace with power.
This narrow track skirts the abysmal verge,
Here shalt thou stumble, totter, weep and bleed,
All men shall hate and hound thee and thy seed,
Thy portion be the wound, the stripe, the scourge.”

(II, 15)

The spirit who chooses the “grim path,” turns toward the speaker and reveals himself as “Disgraced, despised, immortal Israel.” He has chosen the “narrow track” to bear witness to God's Law and light. Lazarus conveyed here not only the pain and trials Jews have suffered throughout the centuries in the name of God and for their beliefs, but her own difficult journey as well. Having followed the easy path of the assimilated, wealthy, insulated Jew in the early part of her life, she could appreciate how hard it was to turn later into the more dangerous fork of publicly avowed Judaism. The poem articulates both the private “choice” Lazarus made as well as the collective choice made by Jews.

There is no question that by the 1880s, Lazarus considered herself a citizen of the Jewish nation; this citizenship had become a subject of her poetry as well as a major focus in her life. Despite the thirty-five-hundred-year-old Jewish traditions and laws that “exempted women from all positive religious obligations, like communal prayer,”³⁰ Lazarus did earn respect from Jews for her writings in behalf of Jews. Cyrus L. Sulzberger, a prominent Jewish philanthropist, expressed a common feeling when he wrote,

no words of praise can be too great for one who … voluntarily returns to the old household, publicly proclaiming herself one of its members, and bringing to it not alone a heart filled with sympathy, but the pen of a prophet to arouse the moral sense of Jew and Gentile. It was an act of heroism on the part of Emma Lazarus, performed at a cost she alone could know—thus to put herself at the head of a cause which was so unpopular in the general world.³¹

Although Lazarus met Eastern European Jewish immigrants at Ward's Island and helped establish agricultural communities as well as the Hebrew Technical Institute, it was with her pen that she fought most valiantly in behalf of Jews; her pen was also her most effective means of including herself in her Jewish nation.

We must remember, however, that Lazarus's “interest in literature was not limited to Jewish topics even after she became ‘all Israel's now.’ She was a stout advocate of an American national literature.”³² A self-identified American writer on the one hand and an increasingly outspoken Jew on the other, Lazarus could not ignore either nationality: she had to cultivate each to its fullest. She would not have been as effective in behalf of Jews if she had not believed deeply in America's freedoms or if she could not have expressed herself as a writer, and she could not have been as moving a writer if she had not discovered how important her Jewishness was.

Because she understood herself as an author, not as a True Woman—a mother or a wife—Lazarus sought access to the American nation through the world of American letters. The figure from whom she requested the most help in her difficult journey was Ralph Waldo Emerson.³³ The two probably met soon after the appearance of Lazarus's first volume of poetry, Poems and Translations, Written between the Ages of Fourteen and Sixteen, in 1866. Between 1866 and Emerson's death in 1882, the two corresponded. In two early letters, dated February 24 and April 14, 1868, Emerson established himself as Lazarus's mentor; in the first letter, he wrote that her poems had “important merits,” and in the second, “I should like to be appointed your professor” in both reading and writing.³⁴ For the next few years, he carried out his role, advising the young poet about what to read and how to improve her poems.

For her part, Lazarus admired Emerson for his embodiment of the American spirit, and she respected the influence he had had on American literature. As she wrote in her 1882 Century essay, “Emerson's Personality,” Emerson was

the antithesis of all that is mean and blameworthy in our politics and pursuits, for he also is the legitimate outcome of American institutions, and affords an eternal refutation of the fallacy that democracy is fatal to the production and nurture of the highest chivalry, philosophy, and virtue.³⁵

Two years later, in 1884, Lazarus wrote a sonnet for the opening of the Concord School of Philosophy.³⁶ In the poem, she named Emerson “Master and father” and called herself one of his “children.” The first eight lines detail the impact Emerson had on Lazarus and other American writers:

As, when a father dies, his children draw
          About the empty hearth, their loss to cheat
          With uttered praise and love, and oft repeat
His own familiar words with whispered awe,
The honored habit of his daily law—
          Not for his sake, but theirs, whose feebler feet
          Need still his guiding lamp, whose faith, less sweet,
Misses that tempered patience without flaw—

His disciples miss his guidance and patience, but because his “presence [is] in the sacred air,” they do not weep that he is gone. A daughter of this American spiritual father, Lazarus imbibed the sage's instruction on life, nature, and art. Like a dutiful daughter, she would continue to exalt the father's work and influence. To Lazarus, Emerson was the American spirit, and she revered him for this Americanness.

With these accolades on Emerson, Lazarus attempted to strengthen American literature itself and her own chosen vocation as an American author. But she also sought Emerson's approval to validate her identity as an American writer as well as to reassure herself that she was a worthy interpreter of American experiences. After all, if the American literary father thought highly of her work, then it must be “American” and valuable.

Lazarus's trust in Emerson was intricately connected to her identity as an American author and, therefore, as an American. Thus, his decision not to include any of her poems in his anthology Parnassus (1874) shook her confidence, as well as her attitudes about America.³⁷ Lazarus recovered her confidence, but her feelings for Emerson changed permanently; never again would she idolize her mentor as an infallible god. And, even more importantly, she would never again completely trust America's rhetoric of equality for all. In an indirect but powerful way, Emerson's rejection compelled Lazarus to see that she was different in the world of American letters, not so much because she was a woman, but because she was a Jew.

She never relinquished her strong belief in America's ideals or literature, however. In her 1881 essay “American Literature,” for example, which appeared in The Critic, Lazarus set out to defend American literature against George Edward Woodberry's claim (in the May issue of the Forthrightly Review) that America had no tradition and that America's poets had left no mark; Lazarus, who felt strongly that there were, indeed, an American tradition and respectable American authors, wrote that Emerson had given rise to an American “school of thought and habit of life.”³⁸ Writers who had been trained in this school included Hawthorne, Whitman, Lowell, Holmes, and Stowe. Lazarus concluded with the claim that “the literary history of the past fifty years compares favorably with the past fifty years in England—the only period with which it can, with any show of justice, be compared” (p. 164). Lazarus took a defensive stance in the essay, feeling compelled to prove the viability and worth of American literary figures, as well as of American values and experiences. In justifying American literature, she was justifying her own identity as an American author.

In this same period of fruitful Jewish and American literary production, Lazarus wrote an essay on Longfellow, which appeared in The American Hebrew in 1882, advised E. Clarence Stedman on the manuscript for his essay “Poetry in America” (Scribner's, August 1881), and corresponded with Thomas Wentworth Higginson to thank him for his appreciation of “American Literature.”³⁹ She also exchanged letters with John Hay to discuss her translations of Heinrich Heine⁴⁰ and with William James.⁴¹

When Lazarus died in 1887, many American literary figures wrote to The American Hebrew to express their sorrow and their admiration for the author. Obviously, Emma Lazarus the writer was known and respected. And yet, “being a Jew had certainly distinguished her in the literary world of Victorian America. She was that still exotic figure, that object of Christian curiosity, ‘the Jew’—and to descendants of the New England Puritans, straight out of their bible.”⁴² John Hay, for example, noted that Lazarus's death would be felt by Jews and American literary figures; he wrote that Lazarus's death “is not only a deep affliction to those of her own race and kindred; it is an irreparable loss to American literature … her place is already secure among our best writers. …”⁴³ John J. Whittier similarly praised Lazarus's talents as a poet, but at the same time stressed her Jewishness: “With no lack of rhythmic sweetness, she has often the rugged strength and verbal audacity of Browning. Since Miriam sang of deliverance and triumph by the Red Sea, the Semitic race has had no braver singer.”⁴⁴ To some American authors, Lazarus was unique because she was a Jew. In the early years of her career, she would have objected to the label. But in later years, she had come to value her Jewish identity as an integral component of her life and writing. Lazarus had transformed her differences from a barrier to a gateway into the nations she loved.

Lazarus achieved a resolution between her Jewish and American identities in the last decade of her life, when she wrote powerfully about Jews at the same time that she wrote about her belief in America and American literature. This resolution can be seen in her contributions to the Century magazine. “Emerson's Personality,” the eulogy for the dean of American letters, appeared in July 1882, “Was the Earl of Beaconsfield a Representative Jew?” in April, and “Russian Christianity vs. Modern Judaism,” in May. To regular readers of the magazine, Lazarus would have been known as an essayist concerned with Jewish issues as well as American literature. She had become an insider, contributing not only “Jewish” pieces to a mainstream periodical, but the commemorative piece on one of America's most venerated literary figures.

Her best known contribution to mainstream American literature is “The New Colossus,” which “represents a summary and a climax of Emma Lazarus's lifelong literary endeavors.”⁴⁵

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

(I, 202-03)

The famous Statue of Liberty becomes, through Lazarus's imagination, a symbol of what America has meant to Jews, as well as to other “huddled masses.” It also becomes a symbol of womanhood that defies traditional stereotypes of passivity and demureness. This “mother” is a “mighty woman” who promises not the easy comforts of gold-paved streets but the challenges of economic, political, and social freedoms. She is not the sentimentally glorified True Woman whose mothering took the form of gentle guidance and warm consolation but is, rather, the Victorian woman whose majestic strength supplied a nation with courage. She also personifies Deborah, the original Mother in Israel who valiantly defended her Jews, as well as the nineteenth-century Jewish woman who created for her family a refuge from a potentially hostile world. The Mother of Exiles is a regnant figure from whom both Americans and Jews could draw strength.

By glorifying America's welcome of the “homeless” and by combining the two images of ideal womanhood into a single, more powerful figure, Lazarus effectively reconciled her multiple nationalities. Clearly not a conventional Jewish or American woman, Lazarus did not define herself through the roles of wife or mother. As a woman who consciously chose a public Jewish identity, at the same time that she was known as an American author, she forged a unique model of the American Jewish woman who could use her words to legitimize her identities.

In contrast, because she was white, middle-class, and Christian, Virginia Woolf had a firm native ground upon which to stand when she loudly articulated her feelings that as a woman she was excluded from male activities and privileges. This native ground provided her with her own privileged position: being able to examine her society as both an insider and an outsider (a woman).

Lazarus, on the other hand, was not as secure in America as Woolf was in Britain and, therefore, could not claim her native ground with as much authority. As a result, Lazarus was concerned not only with her femaleness, but with other forms of marginality, other differences that made her an outsider in her nations. Being a woman made her by definition an alien, in American and Jewish ideology that define male as normative. To become an insider, Lazarus used powerful words to convey her deepest loyalty to the best of both nations and, ironically, strengthened her “outsider” status so that it would become valuable. “The New Colossus” is the culminating symbol of this process, valorizing as it does the status of the alien who finds in America a home, a native ground composed of many alien grounds.

Notes

1. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1966), p. 109.

2. In 1893, Mary M. Cohen wrote an essay entitled “Emma Lazarus: Woman; Poet; Patriot” (Poet-Lore, 5, 320-31). I am grateful to this early critic for her attempt to understand the major components of Lazarus's life and writing.

3. The “valued” literary world was not inhabited by popular writers such as sentimental poets, most of whom were women, but by the white men whose tastes and political views influenced what was to be considered “serious” literature. Many scholars have begun to examine this exclusiveness; see, for example, Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

4. Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1942), p. ix.

5. Samuel J. Hurwitz in Notable American Women (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971) states that both of Lazarus's “parents were descended from Sephardic Jews who had come from Portugal to the New World in the seventeenth century,” p. 377.

6. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Hysterical Woman: Sex Roles and Role Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America,” Social Research, 39 (1972), 656.

7. Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman's Sphere” in New England, 1780-1935 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 94.

8. Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. xi.

9. Poems of Emma Lazarus, 2 vols. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1888), I, 201. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text by volume and page number.

10. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).

11. Eve Merriam, in Emma Lazarus: Woman With a Torch (New York: Citadel, 1956), p. 12, says that Lazarus wrote this at the age of twenty-one. Dan Vogel, in Emma Lazarus (Boston: Twayne, 1980), p. 95, records the manuscript date as 10 October 1880, when Lazarus was thirty-one.

12. Emma Lazarus, Alide: An Episode of Goethe's Life (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1874), pp. 102-03.

13. Emma Lazarus, “The Eleventh Hour,” Scribner's, 16 (1878), 256. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

14. The poem “How Long?” also focuses on the need for America to develop its own unique literary forms. Poems of Emma Lazarus, I, 54.

15. H. E. Jacob, in The World of Emma Lazarus (New York: Schocken, 1949), stresses the daughter role of both of these ideals; Jacob bases his interpretation of Lazarus's life on his observation that she was overly attached to her father.

16. Josephine Lazarus, “Biographical Sketch of Emma Lazarus,” in Poems of Emma Lazarus, I, p. 9.

17. American Hebrew, 33 (9 December 1887), pp. 67, 70.

18. Although there were Jewish women writing in America before and during Lazarus's own lifetime, there is no evidence that she knew of or emulated these authors.

19. Critics who argue for Lazarus's early Jewish consciousness include: Albert Mordell, “The One Hundredth Birthday of Emma Lazarus,” Jewish Book Annual, 7 (1948-49), 79-88; Morris Schappes, Emma Lazarus: Selections from her Poetry and Prose (New York: Cooperative Book League, Jewish-American Section, International Workers Order, 1944); Dan Vogel, Emma Lazarus (Boston: Twayne, 1980).

20. Critics who argue for Lazarus's “conversion” include: Charles Angoff, who claims that it was George Eliot's Daniel Deronda that inspired Lazarus, Emma Lazarus: Poet, Jewish Activist, Pioneer Activist (New York: Jewish Historical Society of New York, 1979); Rachel Cohen, “Emma Lazarus,” Reform Advocate, 1927 (Chicago), pp. 184-89; Murray Frank, “Emma Lazarus: Symbol of Liberty,” Chicago Jewish Forum, 1948, pp. 251-56; Hertha Pauli, “The Statue of Liberty Finds Its Poet,” Commentary, 1 (1945), 56-64.

21. Emma Lazarus, “In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport,” Admetus and Other Poems (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1871), pp. 160-62.

22. Morris Schappes, ed., Letters of Emma Lazarus (New York: New York Public Library, 1949), pp. 19-20.

23. Letter to American Hebrew, 25 May 1882, in Letters of Emma Lazarus, p. 35. Lazarus dedicated the drama to George Eliot, “the illustrious writer, who did most among the artists of our day towards elevating and ennobling the spirit of Jewish nationality.”

24. Lippincott's, 31 (1883), 216.

25. Letter to American Hebrew, 25 May 1882, in Letters of Emma Lazarus, p. 35.

26. Emma Lazarus, “Was the Earl of Beaconsfield a Representative Jew?” Century, 23, (1882), 939. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

27. Emma Lazarus, “Russian Christianity vs. Modern Judaism,” Century, 24 (1882), 54.

28. Emma Lazarus, “The Jewish Problem,” Century, 25 (1883), 602. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

29. Emma Lazarus, An Epistle to the Hebrews (New York: Federation of American Zionists, 1900), p. 21. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

30. Charlotte Baum, Paula Hyman, and Sonya Michel, The Jewish Woman in America (New York: New American Library, 1975), p. 4.

31. Cyrus L. Sulzberger, “Emma Lazarus as a Jew,” American Hebrew, 33 (1887), 79.

32. Louis Harap, The Image of the Jew in American Literature (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1974), p. 297.

33. For a full discussion of Lazarus and Emerson, see Max I. Baym, “Emma Lazarus and Emerson,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, 38 (1948-49), 261-87.

34. Letters from Emerson to Lazarus, 24 February and 14 April 1868, in Ralph L. Rusk, Letters to Emma Lazarus in the Columbia University Library (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), pp. 3, 4.

35. Emma Lazarus, “Emerson's Personality,” Century, 24 (1882), 456.

36. Emma Lazarus, untitled poem for the opening of the Concord School of Philosophy on 23 July 1884, included in “Emerson and the Concord School,” The Critic, OS 5, No. 31 (1884), 55.

37. For Lazarus's response to Emerson, see Letters of Emma Lazarus, pp. 11-12.

38. Emma Lazarus, “American Literature,” The Critic, OS 1, No. 12 (1881), 164. Subsequent references will be cited in the text.

39. See Letters of Emma Lazarus, pp. 67, 29.

40. See George Monteiro, “Heine in America: The Efforts of Emma Lazarus and John Hay,” Turn-of-the-Century Women, 2 (1985), 51-55.

41. See Letters to Emma Lazarus, pp. 48-49.

42. Alfred Kazin, “The Jew as Modern Writer,” Commentary, 41, No. 4 (1966), 37.

43. John Hay, “An Irreparable Loss to American Literature,” American Hebrew, 33 (1887), 70.

44. John G. Whittier, “A Brave Singer,” American Hebrew, 33 (1887), 67.

45. Dan Vogel, Emma Lazarus, p. 159.