Linking âEgypt with Texasâ:
Emma Lazarusâs Jewish Vision
of American Democracy
David J. Peterson and Joan Latchaw
INTRODUCTION
Emma Lazarus was from a mixed Jewish heritage bridging the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in America. Her motherâs Portuguese Sephardic ancestors (Seixas and Nathan) emigrated to British colonial America before the 1750s, and her fatherâs Ashkenazic family left Germany for the United States in the 1790s. It was largely the Sephardic ancestry that conferred near blueblood status on Lazarusâs family. Her great-great-uncle Gershom Mendes Seixas, for example, led New York Cityâs Shearith Israel Synagogue, and her great-great-uncle Moses Mendes Seixas presided over the most fabled of all Jewish American places of worship, Newportâs Yeshuat Israel (later Touro Synagogue).
The correspondence between Moses Seixas and George Washington stands as a beacon to American liberty and civil rights. The newly elected president, along with a delegation that included Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, visited Newport in August 1790. Among the citizens who addressed the president was Seixas, who stated, âDeprived as we heretofore have been of the invaluable rights of free Citizens, we now ⌠behold a Government, erected by the Majesty of the Peopleâa Government, which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistanceâbut generously affording to all Liberty of conscience, and immunities of Citizenship.â1 In a letter written soon after the visit, Washington famously assured the Newport Congregation that ââthe children of the Stock of Abraham shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid,ââ an image Emma Lazarus would invoke in several of her poems.2
When Emma Lazarus was born in New York City in 1849, her immediate family was prominent in both the Jewish community and, due to her fatherâs prosperous sugar business, the upper echelons of New York society. Social connections further linked the family to Americaâs literary elite, enabling an eighteen-year-old Emma to send her first volume of poetry, Poems and Translations (1867), to Ralph Waldo Emerson. He enthusiastically offered to became her literary mentor, and he remained an important advocate of her work.3 With her familyâs support (and Emersonâs mentoring), she developed into a prolific writer, publishing six volumes of poetry and translations. In the early 1880s she became, moreover, a social advocate for the Russian Jews fleeing the pogroms. She wrote impassioned defenses of European Jews, along with proto-Zionist essays that appeared in prominent American periodicals such as Century Magazine and American Hebrew. She also volunteered for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and in 1883 organized the short-lived Society for the Improvement and Colonization of East European Jews, which promoted the settlement of Palestine.
Eulogizing Lazarus for American Hebrew after her untimely death at thirty-eight in 1887, Rabbi Sabato Morais, Orthodox hazzan [cantor] of Philadelphiaâs Mikvah Israel Synagogue, styled her the âpoetical Deborahâ of the United States, noting she âwould have reached a superlative degree as the poetess of the Jews in Americaâ had she lived.4 While Moraisâs praise for Lazarus asserts an uncomplicated understanding of her Jewish identity, contemporary Lazarus scholars note a sharp contrast between Lazarusâs early poetryâseen as more secularâand the later works that attack European Antisemitism or explore Jewish diasporic experiences, a shift they figure as reflecting an assimilated, secularized American who late in life comes to embrace a Jewish identity.
They further observe that Lazarus shared an uneasy, at times ambivalent, relationship with her Jewish heritage that guided her interest in Jewish philosophers and intellectuals (such as Baruch Spinoza, Heinrich Heine, and Benjamin Disraeli) who experienced similar conflicts between their ethnic and religious heritages and their attraction to a broader, more cosmopolitan world. Esther Schor asserts, for example, that Lazarus shared with Heine a strongly divided sense of self: his between Jewish and German-Romantic identities, and hers between âthe double life she was trying to live as an American and a Jew.â5 Indeed Lazarusâs own comments on Heine are frequently glossed as summing up her own sense of self: âHe was [writes Lazarus] a Jew, with the mind and eyes of a Greek. A beauty-loving, myth-creating pagan soul was imprisoned in a Hebrew frame; or rather, it was twinned ⌠with another equally powerful soulâproud rebellious, oriental in its love of the vague, the mysterious, the grotesque, and tragic with the two-thousand-year-old passion of the Hebrews.â6
Though her family was not religious, Lazarusâs Jewish heritage serves as an important touchstone in her writing, drawing on major Jewish figures (mostly Sephardic) from the medieval, Enlightenment, and Romantic periods. She celebrates luminaries such as Solomon ibn Gabirol, Maimonides, Abraham ibn Ezra, Rashi, Spinoza, and Heine for their contributions to both Jewish and European intellectual and artistic culture. Moreover, she herself often made statements that reveal her strong identification with her Jewish heritage even as she explicitly disidentified with the religious aspects of Judaism. Writing to Edmund Stedman, for example, she declares that she is âproud of my blood and heritage, but Hebrew ideals [i.e., religious principles] do not appeal to me.â7 Sending Reform Rabbi Gustav Gottheil (Temple Emanu-El, New York City) some requested translations of Gabirol, Judah Ha-Levi, and ibn Ezra, she notes, âI 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.â8
The hypothesis that she struggled with Jewish identity has even been used by some to explain the relative obscurity into which her poetry has fallen. Francine Klagsbrun goes so far as to claim that her writings â[reflect] the discomfort of a woman who was not totally at home in the Christian world she inhabited but had not quite found her footing in the Jewish one either. It has the feel of outsiderness, of a writer who held herself too much apart, too much above the people she sought to defend and counsel. The outsiderness has stood in the way of [her workâs] survival.â9 Ranen Omer-Sherman even argues that Lazarusâs Jewish-focused poetry tends to present Jewish faith traditions as parochial, comprising what Lazarus calls ââthe whole rotten machinery of ritualism, feasts and fasts, sacrifices, oblations, and empty prayers.ââ10 Moreover, Omer-Sherman asserts, Lazarus tends to contrast these insular seeming traditions to American democracyâs embrace of the âEnlightenmentâs universalizing discourse of rationalism.â11 According to Omer-Sherman, Lazarusâs dedication to such rationalism leads her to â[erase] Jewish differenceâ in favor of assimilation and to encourage âthe consolations of forgetfulnessâ12 whereby unenlightened Jews (especially Eastern European Ashkenazim) could move out of their primitive âOrientalâ past and into Enlightenment modernity.
Questions about her religious identity, degrees of assimilation, and commitment to Enlightenment universalism obscure, however, her role as both Jewish intellectual and poet of American democracy, roles highlighted in Rabbi Sabato Moraisâs eulogy. While Lazarus may have lacked strong religious convictions, she never lost her commitment to the intellectual, spiritual, artistic, and political legacies of her people. Indeed, she belongs in the company of other Jewish-American intellectuals, such as Isaac Leeser, Isaac Mayer Wise, Isaac Harby, and Morais, all advocates for a particularly American-inflected approach to the Jewish Enlightenment, an approach that positions the United States as a new homeland where Jews can enjoy religious, economic, and intellectual liberty.13 As Morais argues in his famous 1851 Thanksgiving sermon,
A century has nearly elapsed since the scattered children of Judah here found a home of security and peace; here they have thriven and acquired wealth; no internal adversary has ever molested them, nor has the rod of tyranny from without reached these shores; here they have but to prove themselves worthy, and they will rise as high as any free man can aspire; no disabilities, no legal impediments, militate against them; what a felicity is that of which you are made to partake! dear brethren, the boundless field of knowledge is unclosed to you, you may enter it, and freely gather its delightful fruits; you may give scope to your mental energies, for the advancement of your fellow-citizens and of mankind at large:âUnimpeded in the exercise of your religious duties, in accordance with the Jewish doctrine, you are not merely tolerated, but regarded with respect, for you also form a part of that glorious whole that constitutes the American Republic.14
Lazarusâs work reflects similar themes. In the subsequent sections of this essay we demonstrate how Lazarus draws on the dominant cultureâs tropes of universal rights to freedom, liberty, and opportunity to argue for and promote Jewish belonging. As we show in our discussion of poems such as âIn Exile,â she draws on discourses associated with Jeffersonian agrarian democracy to figure America as providing a new promised land for diasporic Jews. Moreover, her model of American democracy does not necessitate assimilation under the aegis of some universalized rationalism that requires Jewish citizens to forget either their ethnic and religious identities or their diasporic experiences. Nor does becoming, in the words of Morais, âa part of the glorious whole that constitutes the American Republicâ necessitate the surrendering of differences within the broader Jewish community. Indeed, as our discussion of âBy the Waters of Babylonâ suggests, Lazarus presents America as the location where all the âoutcasts of Judeaâ (Morais) may gather to reconstitute the âSoul of Israel.â Yet this rebirth cannot fully unfold, Lazarus argues, until the already established Jews of America (the Sephardic Portuguese specifically) are prepared to cast aside their antipathy toward Ashkenazic difference.
âIN EXILE,â RUSSIAN JEWS, AND FRONTIER
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
âIn Exileâ (Appendix 1) is a five-stanza poem that depicts idyllic, pastoral scenes wherein âsoft breezes bow the grassâ and Jewish comrades, unused to agrarian life, labor âbeneath the shadowing oak treeâ after âthe Southern day of heavy toil.â The poem opens with an epigraph that situates the poem on the American frontier. In the epigraph, an unidentified Russian correspondent declares that since their arrival in Texas âour life is one unbroken paradise. We live a true brotherly life. Every evening after supper we take a seat under the mighty oak and sing our songs.â We never learn with any certainty how these Jewish immigrants came to be in Texas. Perhaps they are pogrom refugees fresh off the boat, as it were, who were recruited by organizations such as the Alliance Israelite Universelle/Am Olam and sent West to become farmers. Or perhaps they are Russian exiles who brought with them plans to form agricultural utopian communities in the American West, yearning, as Herscher puts it, to âstrike roots in the American soil,â despite having little farming experience. According to Herscher, these Jewish idealists saw America as a democratic utopia, âa great and glorious land of liberty, whose broad and trackless acres offer an asylum and a place for ⌠courageous souls, willing to toil.â15 Lazarusâs exiles demonstrate similar yearnings. The poemâs images of âbrotherly lifeâ and âunbroken paradise,â a phrase repeated in the second stanza, link to a broader discourse about agrarian democracy and the American Frontierâs role in its development, as envisioned by founders such as Thomas Jefferson and extolled by writers and thinkers ranging from Henry David ...