Emma Lazarus, Poet and Patriot

The most famous statue in the world stands on Liberty Island, in the New York Harbor. A gift from the French to the Americans in 1885, Lady Liberty has turned green from oxidation but remains crowned and holding a torch high in her hand.

The pedestal that holds the statue was constructed in New York, paid for by locals by various fundraising campaigns. Displayed inside it is Emma Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus”, written as part of a fundraising effort to get the pedestal built and the statue shipped over.

The poem contrasts the Colossus, the ancient Greek statue that towered over Rhodes – “Of conquering limbs astride from land to land” – with the statue of Liberty, “The mother of exiles”, the first sight welcoming immigrants to the Ellis Island immigration center. 

“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!”

Emma Lazarus wasn’t merely a poet or lyricist; she was a Jewish activist, a fighter for those huddled masses she so eloquently described, a proud American, and all-around a fascinating personality. 

Heritage of Hope

In 1654, a group of 23 Sephardic Jews sought to leave Spanish-occupied Brazil to escape the inquisition. They settled in New Amsterdam, where they founded Shearith Yisrael, the first American Jewish congregation. For much of the following century, the chazan and leader of the kehillah was Gershom Mendes Seixas, the first American-born Jewish religious leader in the USA and an ardent patriot. 

Her writings were unabashedly Jewish, rich with Biblical references and replete with its values. She romanticized the old world, the “towns and temples” of traditional European observance.  An 1866 poem she wrote after the assassination of Lincoln compares the killer, John Wilkes Booth, to Cain’s killing of his brother in Bereishit. The comparison is multi-layered and magnificent, and perfectly representative of her Jewish-American identity. 

Gershom deeply believed in the American ideal and relentlessly pursued the American dream, even in the eighteenth century. Mendes himself gave a rousing speech in August of 1776 when a fleet of British troops were arriving to squash the rebellion of the colonies. He even moved the shul out of New York when British forces took control, moving it temporarily to Connecticut. Gershom Mendes made history when he was invited to President George Washington’s inaugural address in April of 1789.

Congregation Shearith Yisrael remained a vibrant, close-knit epicenter for Sephardic Jewry in the United States. One of the young women being raised within its walls was Emma Lazarus, great-granddaughter of Gershom Mendes Seixas and descendant also of one of the 23 original settlers. Hers was a family who bore passionate gratitude for the miracles of tolerance and opportunity in America, and compounded with their strong Jewish identity, that pride set the stage for Emma’s own beliefs and accomplishments. 

Emma’s own parents, Moses and Esther Lazarus, loosened their grip on traditional observance in favor of assimilating as Americans. Nonetheless, they remained closely identified with the Jewish community and raised their seven children with solidly Jewish values. 

Gifted Words

Young Emma penned her first lyrics at eleven. At seventeen, her father published a collection of her writings, for which she was widely celebrated and praised. Within the year, she had a follow-up volume published professionally. Emma later sent her poetry to the prestigious poet of her day, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who encouraged the young prodigy and kept a regular correspondence with her for many years. 

Her writings were unabashedly Jewish, rich with Biblical references and replete with its values. She romanticized the old world, the “towns and temples” of traditional European observance.  An 1866 poem she wrote after the assassination of Lincoln compares the killer, John Wilkes Booth, to Cain’s killing of his brother in Bereishit. The comparison is multi-layered and magnificent, and perfectly representative of her Jewish-American identity. 

The poetry of medieval Jewish sages Rav Yehudah Halevi and Rav Moshe Ibn Ezra had been inaccessible to English readers up to this point. It was Emma who conceived of the English versions, upholding the sacred subtleties of the originals with her beautiful translations. 

Emma was a vociferous fighter of Anti-Semitism, both European and American. Her later activism is well foreshadowed in her 1883 poem, “1492”. Of Sephardic origin and actively American, Emma was in the ideal position to express the irony of the year marked by Jewish expulsion from Spain, but also the discovery of the Americas. A “two-faced” year she calls it, vividly depicting how the rejected Jews – “Prince, priest, and people” – were denied entry of comfort by the West and the East, until the two-faced year unveiled a place where “…falls the ancient barrier… race or creed or rank….”

Call to Action

1881 was the year thousands of Russian Jews finally had enough. Following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by a revolutionary group which included Jewish members, the bloodiest pogroms in Russia’s history were unleashed on Jews in 166 towns around the Pale of Settlement. The horrific violence began the mass exodus of Eastern-European Jews to America, a wave that brought over a million of Jews to American shores until the borders were shuttered in the 1920’s.

Ship after teeming ship of poor, desperate Jewish families landed on the shores of New York during that half-century. They needed education, employment, and community. The existing Ashkenazi infrastructure was largely of enlightened, secular German Jews, who found little in common with the destitute Yiddish-speaking newcomers. 

Young Emma Lazarus, though surely affluent and enlightened herself, saw the plight of the Jewish immigrants as the directive for her personal mission. It was at this moment that “The New Colossus” was written, the elegant expression of her empathy to Jewish immigrants and her appreciation for American tolerance. It remains her most well-known poem. 

Emma got involved with the Hebrew Emigrant Society and helped establish the Hebrew Technical Institute, which trained students in skills such as wood-working, pattern-making, metal-working and electricity, so they could be self-sufficient. She advocated for acceptance, tolerance, and unity. She wrote of the disconnect between the well-established Jewish community and the challenges of the immigrants, “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.” 

Legacy

Emma’s life and legacy epitomized the words of the Gemara: kol yisrael areivim zeh bazeh¹. She never established a family of her own, but her identity was firmly anchored in her collective Jewish family, where there were no divides. Her frustrations with the lack of integration between Jewish communities in the West eventually led her to promote Jewish settlement of then-Palestine, effectively making her a Zionist before Herzl ever came to his own aspirations. 

Emma left the world at 38, after being seriously ill for several months. She remains an iconic proud Jewish woman, creative and activist. Perhaps most telling is how she titled her 1882 anthology of writings: Songs of a Semite, because even with all her accomplishments, Emma Lazarus was firstly and lastly a Jew. 

Sourced from the book “Emma Lazarus” by Esther Schorr; Dr Henry Abramson ; and Rabbi Pinchas Landis. 

1. Shavuot 39a ↩︎