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There were years in which the Jewish poet Emma Lazarus (1849-1887) came close to transcending her eventual canonical fate as a marginal figure in America’s Protestant literary culture. By the late 1870s and 1880s, luminaries such as Browning, Whitman, James, Emerson corresponded with the poet and praised her translations of Heine as well as her own verse that appeared in Lippincott’s and the Century. But she was fated to be memorialized exclusively for “The New Colossus,” her great paean to American largesse, and by Jewish Americans for the few years of poetry, essays and political activity dedicated to their cause. Representative of this trend, Henrietta Szold (1860-1945) would celebrate her as “the most distinguished literary figure produced by American Jewry and possibly the most eminent poet among Jews since Heine and Judah Loeb Gordon.”[1]

Yet in subsequent years her achievements were rapidly forgotten; among late twentieth century scholars, Lazarus’s role in Jewish-American history remains uncertain. Though Lazarus is often ignored in major studies of Zionism, I would contend that to fully understand the unusual literary and polemical pedigree of American Zionism, one must begin with Lazarus’s assimilationist strategies. [2] By far the most influential Jewish-American literary figure of the nineteenth century, Lazarus’s reflections on the status of the Jew in gentile society and on the question of the Jews’ return to Palestine offer a rich literary and historical context for examining later imaginative responses to the perpetually conflicted nature of Zionism in America. Previous studies have aptly highlighted this poet’s success in claiming a privileged cultural position as the reanimator of a tradition and of a people in decline. More recently, feminist critics such as Zierler, Lichtenstein, and Kessner have claimed Lazarus as a founding Mother of Jewish-American literature, unfairly neglected because of gender and religion.[3] This essay investigates a more neglected dimension of the poet’s work, namely her timely appropriations of Protestant conventions relating to the Hebrews and the Holy Land.

Anticipating the multiculturalist rhetoric of Horace Kallen in a later generation, Lazarus saw ethnicity, not religion, as the key to Jewish survival. Perhaps this was the way to translate the unchanging Jew into terms that would be the most palatable in the American milieu. To fully understand Lazarus’s role in shaping an “American Zionism,” it is necessary to consider another determining factor in her unique formulations of Jewish identity: the ways in which her poetry and prose corresponded to Christian America’s increasing interest in Palestine in the late nineteenth century. We can profitably read her poetry in relation to the typology of nineteenth-century nationalist movements that were committed to physical boundaries and containment as well as to linking the notion of “race” with organicity and authenticity. The tendency to identify contemporary Jews with popular images of a distant past was made more tempting by Christian discourse that identified Judaism not with living Jews but, whenever possible, with a distant time and place—the Holy Land of “Bible days.” Embracing the widely held Christian millennial dreams of a reborn Jewish nation, enabled Lazarus to create a bridge between the mystical, Christian-like Zionism of ante-bellum America and the practical platform of twentieth-century American Zionism. She repudiated the religion of living Jews and yet she thought that the act of claiming an ancient racial lineage—what she called “nourishing the sacred fires of ancient memory” (by which she meant a link to a sacred and distant landscape)—would somehow hold the key to acceptance in America. [4] In examining the real meaning of territorialism for this poet, we can begin to assess the nature of the strings that tie modern Jewish American writers to Jewish communal identity as well as the true significance of the gap that separates them from it.

Ironically, Lazarus’s fullest realization of the alienating dimensions of ethnicity was unexpectedly initiated by the great man of American letters whom she had trusted to welcome her into the American canon. It is impossible to overestimate Lazarus’s attraction to Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose approval meant far more to her than that of any rabbi. In 1868, after meeting Emerson at the home of Samuel Gray Ward, she sent a copy of her first book of poetry to him. Emerson was enthusiastic and the two enjoyed a warm correspondence between 1866 and the year of Emerson’s death, 1882, throughout which he encouraged Lazarus to think of him as her mentor: “I should like to be appointed your professor.”[5] Emma visited him on at least two ocassions, in 1876 and 1879. In her correspondence with friends, she frequently referred to him as the “Sage of Concord.” For years Emerson expressed enthusiasm for her poems, encouraging her to read more widely and making suggestions about how to improve her lyrical voice. Admetus and Other Poems (1871) was proudly dedicated to “my friend Ralph Waldo Emerson,” and in 1884 Lazarus wrote a sonnet on the occasion of the opening of the Concord School of Philosophy, where she names Emerson “Master and father” and refers to herself as one of his American literary “children.”[6] Reading Emerson’s great poem of medieval persecution, “The Rabbi of Bacharach,” had apparently inspired her own poems on the subject, “Raschi in Prague” (March 25 1880) and “Death of Raschi” (April 8), which were veiled indictments of modern European persecution. This evidence of their alliance underscores the depth of Lazarus’s shock when Parnassus (1874), Emerson’s encyclopedic volume of poetry, appeared containing none of the verses he had lavishly praised.[7] Profoundly hurt, Lazarus immediately wrote him a letter of protest, expressing her extreme disappointment at what appeared to be a public retraction of his once “extravagant admiration”(Vogel 51). For the first time in what even today reads as a remarkably close correspondence, Emerson chose not to reply.[8]

Like Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), the founder of modern political Zionism, Lazarus had not questioned throughout most of her life the natural progress of assimilation and American equality. But Emerson’s snub seems to have set in motion a radical reenvisioning of her precarious position in American letters. From this point Lazarus, now thirty-three, no longer presumed that a Sephardic Jewess might join the company of the New England men who had made use of European lore. Until this time her correspondents had been largely limited to a transatlantic group of literary luminaries. Now her attention shifted to Christian advocates of Jewish nationalism, such as Lawrence Oliphant. At the same time she became a startlingly productive poet. In the first fifteen years of her literary career she had produced just two books of verse, a few translations, a novel and a play, but in the monumental year of 1882 she produced nearly as much.

In a striking cultural coincidence, Lazarus’s marginality was made explicit to her just as the Jews of Eastern Europe unexpectedly began to make their presence felt in America. By the fall of 1882, she began to take an activist’s interest in the East-European immigrants. Besides teaching English to immigrant girls and working as a celebrity volunteer in the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society, Lazarus often visited Ward’s Island, where two hundred and fifty Jewish refugees were held, and was there the day a riot broke out in protest against inadequate food.

Strikingly less assimilated and “modern” than their American counterparts—indeed perhaps “beyond salvation’—the new exiles aroused anxieties across the spectrum of the established Jewish community. As early as 1872, a popular magazine article by an assimilated German-American Jew begged the public not to judge its Jews by the “ignorant…bigoted, and vicious” Poles and Russians who clustered around Chatham Street and East Broadway (Higham 126).[9] Nineteenth-century Jewish-Americans were vexed by the new/old risks of becoming visible to the surrounding culture. As an uneasy observer of the Jewish involvement at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair admitted: “We have no doubt, our congresses will be among the best attended by—non-Jews. For, there is no use denying it, for many thousands and thousands of non-Jews, we are a curiousity, a freak, an archaeological specimen.”[10] It is hardly surprising that the urban, Americanized, and comfortably established Sephardic and German Jews did not always welcome what Lazarus herself calls those who came “blinking forth from the loathsome recesses of the Jewry” of Russia and Poland in the eighties.

Lazarus’s first sustained assessment of this situation came in direct response to a Century article by a Russian writer, Madame Zinaida Alexeievna Ragozin, who justified the Russian pogroms.[11] “Russian Jews and Gentiles, from a Russian Point of View” argues that the violence must be looked at coolly and logically, “from a historical perspective”(Jacob 112). A recent immigrant herself, Ragozin served as the advance agent for an “informed” anti-Semitic movement. She charged that the Jews were secretly conspiring to engross the entire wealth of her mother country; the reason that people all over the world were turning against the Jews was because the Jews waged an interminable war against them. Since the parasitical Jews choked the life out of labor, commerce and industry, Russia was justified in doing whatever is required to exclude them. Ragozin implied that just as the Jews sought to destroy the Babylonian Empire by inviting the Persians into their country 2,500 years ago, they now conspired with foreign states to destroy Russia:

The Jews are disliked, nay, hated in those parts of East Europe and Russia not because they believe and pray differently, but because they are a parasitic race who, producing nothing, fasten on the produce and the land and labor and live on it, choking the life out of commerce and industry as sure as the creeper throttles the tree that holds it.[12]

And why did the Jews not “manfully” defend themselves when they were attacked? Evidently, the Jews’ money was more important to them than their manhood (115). According to Jacob, Ragozin was the author of books for juveniles that celebrated “Aryan heroes” such as Roland, and it is worth noting that she contrasts the unmanly, underhanded Jew with “that compound of Grecian refinement and Teutonic manliness which we call modern culture.” This stinging insult would have a profound influence on Lazarus’s own rhetorical strategies.

Conceding the “extremely medieval aspect” of these charges, the Century editor invited Lazarus to reply in the next number.[13] In her eloquent and spirited rebuttal (eventually encompassing three essays), exhibiting both historical knowledge and irony, Lazarus “proves” the Jews’ loyalty to their host nations by citing Biblical injunctions that command fidelity to ruling governments. She was also the first American writer to invoke Heine’s famous insight into the relation of Jews to their “host” country:

Was it not Heine who said: “Every country has the Jews it deserves”? Mme. Ragozin says the Jews are hated not because of different race, religion, dress, peculiar customs, etc., but because of their “servility, their abjectness, their want of manliness, their failure to stand up for themselves and resent injuries.” Any one who aims at being as strictly logical as Mme. Ragozin might know that it is in vain to expect the virtues of freemen from a community of slaves.[14]

Ragozin insists that she does not mean to attack well-behaved Jews: it is not the “Jews of the Bible” but the “Jews of the Talmud to whom we object.” Borrowing from the logic that informs Harriet Beecher Stowe’s rhetorical “apology” for the debased condition of black Americans in the present, Lazarus apparently concedes Ragozin’s point about the Jews in Russia in the passage quoted above. But she is quick to remind her readers that “it is the glory of America that she finds among the Israelites the purest and strongest elements of republican liberty.” This statement lends itself just as easily to an effacement of Jewish identity as it does to its validation, but it was also a reminder that, since the Pilgrim founders were spiritual descendants of the biblical Hebrews, almost “cryptic-Jews,” the Americanization of the modern Jew was almost an organic process.

In subsequent essays, Lazarus would express anxiety over the pitiful condition of her East-European co-religionists: “We read of the Jews who attempted to rebuild the Temple using the trowel with one hand, while with the other they warded off the blows of the molesting enemy. Where are the warrior-mechanics of today equal to either feat?” Not only do the Jews of the present age fail to measure up to this messianic struggle, but their “body has been starved, and has become emaciated past recognition.” Describing them in apologetic terms as “a race of soft-handed, soft-muscled men,” she insists that they return to the “avocations of our ancestors in the day when our ancestors were truly great and admirable.” Lazarus’s emphasis on manual labor as the elect path to redeem the Jewish body and provide the masses with the necessary means for participating invisibly in the demanding modern market economy was soon taken up by others. In fact, Max Nordau’s famous advocacy of “muscle Judaism” at the Second Zionist Congress of 1898 strikingly echoed the terms of Lazarus’ proto-Zionism.

Lazarus followed the Century essays with the first of her lyrical attempts to supplant Old World religion with modern nationalism. “In Exile,” the most triumphal poem of Songs of a Semite, is set within an idyllic return to a masculinized agrarian folk-life. Years before the Zionist congresses would highlight the Jews’ return to the body and nature by displaying postcards and posters contrasting virile young farmers in Palestine with old and decrepit Orthodox Jews, Lazarus sought to build a new Jew with muscles. The lyric begins with a few lines from a letter written to Lazarus by a grateful Russian refugee in Texas: “now our 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” (II,5). This vision strikingly anticipates the utopian self-representation of the early kibbutz movement that will follow a mere generation later. Acutely aware of rabbinical Judaism’s opposition to European romantic notions of masculinism, Lazarus nevertheless reconfigures the Jew as thoroughly Westernized, singing of a mystic symbiosis of redemptive agrarian life, proud Sephardic assertiveness, and American democracy that would be

This poem’s pivotal image of the “perpetual lamp” links it to numerous other lyrical narratives by Lazarus, including The Dance to Death, “The Choice,” “The Feast of Lights” and “Gifts.” Throughout these compelling lyrics this trope establishes the universality, or at least the American values, of the essential Jewish consciousness. But at the same time these lyrics seem to withhold something, as if exhibiting America’s own confusion in relating to itself as the new Zion while becoming increasingly interested in the rebirth of Palestine. Though the Russian Jewish family has left behind the sheltered ignorance of the shtetl, to follow the rejuvenating sun to a farm in Texas, it seems likely that Lazarus was already speculating on a return to Zion:

The poem’s hook of course is that these “tanned herdsmen” of the pastoral lyric are startlingly revealed to us as a family of East-European ghetto Jews. Lazarus dwells reverently on their transformed physical health, vigor, and well-being, which have been nurtured by a new landscape of the benevolent “broad prairie.” The “exiles” have discovered the new Eden, an “unbroken paradise.” They are the very model of Lazarus’s rehabilitated Jewish body:

This quintessence of manliness now exhibits a classical, almost Grecian physiognomy at home in the pastoral world of the prairie. Like Antaeus in the Greek myth, the Jew’s return to the land, whether Zion or the American prairie, restores vigor. Lazarus transfers the Jew’s fabled intellect from the stereotypical “coffee-house Jew” into a new robust body.[15] Ironically, much like the anti-semitic tradition she struggled against, Lazarus inscribed an inherent relationship between a healthy public mind and the healthy body.

As the later Zionist movement would, Lazarus replaced the link to the historical, immediate past with a utopian bond to a distant mythological past; she calls upon all Jews to become farmers, masons and carpenters like the ancients who had rebuilt and defended the Temple. This is a two-pronged struggle, which articulates a response to the prevailing anti-Semitic rhetoric of her age and at the same time issues a challenge to Lazarus’s coreligionists. For Lazarus, the German-romantic model of culture that later influenced Zionism’s development, posited an ideal of nation-building founded on homogeneous culture. This beleaguered inner essence is commemorated in “The Banner of the Jew”:

Ironically, the essential terms of Ragozin’s slur are embedded here, for Lazarus predicates the renaissance of the Jewish “nation” on martial heroism and melodramatic identification with a mythic victory. In Jewish literature, the God-intoxicated prophet, the teacher, and even the law-giver are the traditional ideals of Jewish manhood. In various circumstances each of these can redeem the collective, but for Lazarus, conforming to the norms of western culture, only a hyper-masculinity suffices.

Lazarus perpetually vacillates over the Jews’ potential for reinvention. On the one hand: “A race whose spiritual and intellectual influence upon the world has been universally accounted second to none, and whose physical constitution has adapted itself to the vicissitudes of every climate, can be whatever it will”(Epistle VI, 35). But elsewhere she hastens to qualify her visionary proposition: “for the mass of semi-Orientals, Kabalists and Chassidim, who constitute the vast majority of East-European Israelites, some more practical measure of reform must be devised than their transportation to a state of society utterly at variance with their time-honored customs and most sacred beliefs”(Epistle XIV, 77). Inevitably, Lazarus’s efforts to legitimize her “race” as a homogeneous entity meant also that she also must confront the problem of difference, the problem of irrepressible visibility which marked the Jews in a hostile Gentile culture. The decoding of this difference is the challenge that we must consider in the following analysis.

When the wave of Jewish refugees began to pour out of Europe, Lazarus used their experience less as an affirmation of her own Judaism than as a vehicle to illuminate universal ideals of the nation-state. Like Herzl in later years, Lazarus saw the Jewish collective return to a lost sovereignty as deeply rooted in the interests of the family of nations. Accordingly, the most advanced ideals of modern Europe would be realized in the Jewish homeland once the Jews extracted themselves from the traditions of the European Diaspora. Though her rhetoric states unequivocally that “all suggested solutions other then [national restoration] of the Jewish problem [are] but temporary palliatives” (Schappes 76), Lazarus’s late Jewish lyrics are marked by her ambivalence in pursuing the answer.

Lazarus’s earnest struggle to confirm the “universality” of the Jew’s mission is evident in “The Crowing of the Red Cock,” a lyric also notable for its timeliness in denouncing the Czarist pogroms. Written shortly after her editorial for Century, the poem’s sentimental piety accompanies a sense of mourning rather than the immediacy of a living connection:

In her lyrical response to crisis, Lazarus, like later Jewish-American poets such as Karl Shapiro and Charles Reznikoff aspired to form a powerful linkage to an ancient literary tradition whose style could glide fluidly between lamentation and assertion. Besides the “lachrymose” perspective that Lazarus articulates—Jewish history is Galut, not “Diaspora”—there is also a hint of the direction she would soon take in “The New Colossus,” the fullest expression of her revival of the myth of America as a refuge for the oppressed. She has begun to erase Jewish difference by portraying the enemy of the Jew as the enemy of “mankind,” or rather Americans, singling out the tyrannical figureheads of priest and king from which America differentiates itself, deriving its national legend and universalistic sense of national identity. In her eagerness to universalize the Jewish religion, Lazarus frequently turned to the figure of Jesus, even making reference in Epistle to the Hebrews to the contemporary artist Mark Antolsky, whose Ecce Homo portrays Jesus in ancient Hebraic dress, with semitic features, side curls and skullcap. Here, as in “Crowing of the Red Cock,” Lazarus inaugurated a new symbolism that would preoccupy later generations of Jewish poets. Particularly in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Jesus would be seen as the ironic symbol of contemporary Jewry, “suffering and yet rising.”[16]

Appropriating the Christological motifs of “wound, stripe and scourge” to convey the present suffering of living Jews is daring enough, but even more innovative is the pre-echo of a familiar trope introduced in the lines that immediately follow:

The “lamp for light” would eventually be magnified in her famous sonnet as the “beacon-hand” that “[g]lows world-wide welcome” and illuminates America’s ever-hospitable “golden door.” Significantly, years before Lazarus linked the Jewish Question to this universal trope of Enlightenment, Reform rabbis in America explored similar strategies, already emphasizing Judaism’s essential compatibility with the gentile Nation, describing it as a mission with a universal message in their rhetoric. Of equal importance to her claim that the Jews were more “Christian” than their persecutors, is her insistence that Judaism “is at one with the latest doctrines of science”(Ibid.). So it seems strange that, as if in counter-argument to her prose works, her lyrical voice concretizes and sustains the Jews’ relation to antiquity. There are striking parallels between the embedded logic of Lazarus’s proto-Zionist lyrics and the new racist, now genuinely anti-Semitic, virulence of the 1880s. Both posit the Jews’ immutable characteristics.

Generations of scholars of nascent nationalisms—from Hans Kohn to Boyd Shafer to Eric Hobsbawn—have shown that activists of nineteenth-century political movements unfailingly devoted their energies to the construction of a past, frequently an ancient past, to validate their struggle.[17] Only then could the assimilation of a diverse population be solidified as a monistic identity organized around a territorial ideology. In view of Lazarus’s attraction to the ancient Hebrews, her discomfort with the modern Jewish body, her apparent acquiescence to certain anti-Semitic myths, her rebellion against religion, her yearning for ancient myths and legends, Lazarus may profitably be read as a sort of literary foremother of the Zionist “Canaanite” movement (“Young Hebrews”), which notoriously distanced itself from the older generation of European Jews that it saw as weak and rotting.

Just as most national movements in the nineteenth century (and certainly Fascism in the early twentieth century) have also stressed bodily rejuvenation, Lazarus’s proto-Zionism was driven by the virile image of ancient culture. In “The Test,” the poet “brood[s] upon the Passion of Israel,” conjuring up a tableau of proud prophets, poets, and princes: “These I saw…the monumental dead and the standard-bearers of the future,” only to suffer a rude awakening: “suddenly I heard a burst of mocking laughter, and turning, I beheld the shuffling gait, the ignominious features, the sordid mask of the son of the Ghetto” (Poems II, 63). In her bold articulation of practical and wholly secular goals via mythological argumentation and a romanticized antiquity, contradictions arose in which Lazarus herself would eventually recognize a fatal schism—between what American Jews hoped to become and the destiny she prescribed for the atavistic Ostjuden masses.

In 1890, the American journal The Missionary Review of the World reported with great excitement that there were twice as many Jews in Palestine as the number who returned from Nebuchadnezzer’s Babylonia (Plesur 62). This mirrored a time of a growing certainty among a number of American Christian movements that the Jew was destined to return to Palestine. Lazarus wrote for an era in which Protestant and Jewish nostalgia for Palestine coexisted, which sometimes meant that Protestant desires for the restoration of Palestine took the form of sympathy for the Jews. Lazarus recognized that the “Jew” would never be free from the impact of Christian beliefs concerning the destiny of the Holy Land and its eventual restoration. More importantly, this traditional association could work to the advantage of homeless Jews.

In “The World’s Justice,” (November 1882), one of Lazarus’s most scathing lyrics, she condemns the world’s aversion to validating the Jewish nation’s revival:

In its ingenious reference to Pharaoh’s vanquished civilization, the lyric underscores the phenomenal endurance of the tribe of slaves who have outlived Empire. Lazarus could not have found a more resonant religious theme to persuade Americans that the Jews’ modern Exodus warranted their attention. By the time Lazarus entered the scene, this millenarian-fermented century, whether expressed as the intellectualized pilgrimage of Melville’s Clarel or in sentimentalized travel narratives, had produced a variety of texts looking toward Palestine and the restoration of Israel. To understand the essential relation of Lazarus’s proto-Zionist poetry to her age, the commanding features of this millenarian treatment of Palestine warrant closer attention.

In his two early works on the role of what he calls “The Myth of America” in American cultural rhetoric, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (1975) and The American Jeremiad (1978), Sacvan Bercovitch stresses how the Puritan writers justified their undertaking in America by appropriating Hebraic topoi and Jewish messianism, thus raising America into redemptive history. Decades earlier, Samuel H. Levine observed that the symbology of early American literary culture had been informed by “the meta-physical transference of Holy Land specifics to New World identities.”[18] Beginning in the colonial era, Americans sought to understand themselves in relation to the Holy Land in ways that sometimes obfuscated distances of time, space and national identity.[19] In a similar vein, the framers of the Declaration of Independence never referred to the Holy Scriptures in the past but as part of their own living struggle with reality.[20]

Lazarus’s mission to link the present to antiquity was surely given impetus by the fact that the position of “Zion” in the American imagination intensified in the mid-nineteenth century as the technology of photography and new modes of travel brought it closer to the American mind: “From tourism to political activism, from personal memoirs to large public events, from the creation of religious articles to the mass production of Palestine images, Americans fashioned new connections with the Holy Land. Christians were often at the forefront of Holy Land travel, research, and exploration.”[21] In Lazarus’s time, the Middle East became dramatically more accessible via steamships and railways. In the late nineteenth century, the steady growth of income (particularly in the post-Civil War years), together with the advent of a highly competitive worldwide tourist industry, made American travel to Palestine affordable. A proliferation of artifacts proved the vitality of the past: “While Christian travelers might bring back bottles of water from the Jordan River, religious Jews often returned home with bags of Holy Land soil, designed for use in Jewish burial, as a way of preparing for the messianic age of restoration in the Land of Israel” (Shandler and Wenger, 19). In addition, the authors of literary works on the Holy Land included William Cullen Bryant, John Ross Browne, George William Curtis, John W. De Forest, Herman Melville, John Lloyd Stephens, Bayard Taylor, and Mark Twain.[22] Past-oriented and messianic all at once, Americans renewed a collective Holy Land image as a frame of reference that could provide a receptive stage for the emergence of American Zionism, even in this arguably “pre-political” era of American relations with modern Palestine.

To secure the support of her non-Jewish friends, Lazarus circulated among them Laurence Oliphant’s philosemitic article the “Jew and the Eastern Question” and The Land of Gilead. Her own essay, “The Jewish Question,” reveals the impact of Oliphant’s territorial thinking, his insistence that the “racial” genius of the Jews can reach its potential only on their native soil. But Lazarus sought to link the spirit of Hebraic messianism to American national identity. In an essay idealizing Bar Kochba’s revolt against Rome, she writes: “In that little Judaic tribe, I see the spiritual fathers of those who braved exile and death for conscience’s sake, to found upon the New England rocks, within the Pennsylvania woods, over this immense continent, the Republic of the West” (Schappes 103). Beyond her rhetorical strategy of reclaiming the typology usurped by the Puritans in the shaping of their cultural identity, we can see the crucial role Lazarus performed in bridging the gap between the role for the Jews prescribed by nineteenth-century Christian millennialism and the practical political Zionism of Brandeis and Kallen; both would do much to justify the Jew to America.

This happy confluence of American, Christian and Hebraic identities achieves particular resonance in a prose poem written in the year of her death, at the age of thirty-eight; called “The Exodus (August 3, 1492),” the poem links the historical expulsion from Spain to redemption in the New World. The lyric opens on a scene of “dusty pilgrims”making their way through a hostile landscape. No sooner does the speaker’s gaze penetrate the multitude than it uncovers a “youth with Christ-like countenance,” who though “his own heart is broken” manages to bring comfort to “father and brother, maiden and wife.” Lazarus’s vacillation between Christian American and Zion-based identities is again visible. Not only do the exiles exhibit Puritan-like productivity and agrarian values; their lingering biblical identity is also apparent as the lyric underscores “the grape, the olive, and the fig; the vines they planted, the corn they sowed…the altar, the hearth, and the grave of their fathers” (II 59). In its striking allusion to the Spanish Expulsion, this late lyric also reveals Lazarus’s Sephardic awareness of her genealogical relation to exile. Issuing a prophetic call, the poem links Columbus, that “world-unveiling Genoese”—a foundational figure in America’s myth—with the nation-less people: “O bird of the air, whisper to the despairing exiles, that to-day, from the many-masted, gayly-bannered port of Palos, sails the world-unveiling Genoese, to unlock the golden gates of sunset and bequeath a Continent to Freedom!”(II 60).

The problem remains that Lazarus was still writing for a society that, though willing to embrace the attractive image of itself as asylum, was not yet sure how to accommodate difference. Her conflation of “Hebraic” and “Christian” reveals a poet far more comfortable with a Christological motif than with a pronounced otherness trespassing on the present scene of American culture.

V. “the shadows of their Oriental temperament:” Lazarus, Daniel Deronda, and ‘race’

Lazarus’s proto-Zionist imagination was largely determined by her reading of an English novelist’s representation of the Jewish future in Palestine. Daniel Deronda (1876) is the most conspicuously philosemitic literary text of the nineteenth century, a crucial influence that has been largely overlooked by other Lazarus scholars. George Eliot’s last novel weaves a narrative of Jewish characters around a Protestant eschatological vision of history. The deliverer Daniel is portrayed as a redeemer, bearing striking resemblance to Renan’s 1863 portrayal of Christ.[23] The critical commonplace that Eliot’s representations of Jews are “almost entirely approving,” even idealizing, has persuaded generations of readers. The novelist’s success in projecting the collectivist-romantic ideal of a Jewish national state into the main currents of Jewish political and cultural discourse cannot be overestimated; Daniel Deronda remains one of the indisputable influences on the doctrine that would coalesce in Herzl’s Jewish State twenty years later. The sheer utopianism of the narrative’s Jewish plot, its Germanic ideal of organic totality, proved irresistible to other early European Zionists such as A.D. Gordon and Peretz Smolenskin, who quoted from it in their Hebrew polemics.[24] Nahum Sokolow, another early activist, testified that,

“Daniel Deronda” was in reality a literary preparation for the “Balfour Declaration”—and looking back on its characters after half a century of Hibbath Zion and Zionism one cannot fail to be impressed by its truthfulness to life and nature…[George Eliot] paved the way for Zionism.[25]

Eliot’s novel would eventually inspire both the linguist Eliezer Ben Yehuda in his revival of Hebrew as a “living” language and the Hoveve Zion pioneers who went to Palestine. But it is important to know that the immediate political impact of Daniel Deronda was limited to Eastern Europe, where Zionism was celebrated by some Jews as a way to create their own cultural modes.

In sharp contrast to its reception among East European Jews, the novel provoked severe consternation among the cosmopolitan Jewish communities of England and America. Even among the Jews of Europe, its Zionist agenda would not gain wide appeal until the pogroms of the 1880s. Certainly this is due in part to Eliot’s relentlessly romantic dichotomizing between noble Jews and Jewesses and their malignant shop-keeping brethren, but undoubtedly these populations were also upset by the novel’s strident advocacy of Jewish separatism. After all, when Daniel Deronda was written, it was the British government, not the Jewish community, that promoted Jewish settlement in Palestine. Britain had long sought to control the fading Ottoman Empire by sponsoring settlement activity in the Middle East.[26] As Susan Meyer notes, these proto-Zionists were often antisemites of the “defensive” variety. Lord Ashley, “the most eminent of the proto-Zionist Evangelicals,” had delivered a speech in the House of Commons in 1847 opposing Jewish emancipation and affirming Arnold’s perception that “[the Jews] are voluntary strangers here and have no claim to become citizens but by conforming to our own moral law, which is the Gospel” (Meyer 749). This notion of the English Jews’ essential apartness was surely strengthened by the fact that, like France and Russia, which prudently secured their interests in the Ottoman empire by becoming “protectors” of the Catholic and Greek Christian communities, Britain sought a “protégé population of its own.” Thus when it established a British consulate in Palestine, the latter had the ostensible function of extending “protection and patronage” to the local Jews.[27] Conveniently, Britain’s imperial ambitions were supported at this time by its population of Protestant Evangelicals, whose millennialist vision looks toward the return of the Jews to the Holy Land, the requisite conversion of the latter, and the Second Coming: “British Evangelicals particularly cherished the idea that God had chosen Britain to be his instrument in achieving this result” (Meyer 748). But in the 1880’s British and American Jews alike were still exclusively concerned with assimilation and securing civil rights at home.

For these readers, Eliot’s attempts to counter Jewish secularization by recasting the Jew as a separate race held little sway because her novel underscored the Jews’ unsuitability for shouldering the burden of modernity. Nevertheless, I am proposing that the novel’s influence on Lazarus’s desire to heal the radical division between the ancient Hebrews and modern Jews cannot be overestimated. Michael Ragussis ably demonstrates that throughout the novel Deronda constantly measures the modern living Jew against the antiquated sublime, and it is the former who is constantly found wanting. For instance, in the figure of Mordechai, Deronda recognizes “such a physiognomy as that might possibly have been seen in a prophet of the Exile, or in some New Hebrew poet of the medieval time,” whereas another character who falls under his gaze is “the most unpoetic Jew he had ever met with in books or life: his phraseology was as little as possible like that of the Old Testament; and no shadow of a Suffering Race distinguished his vulgarity of soul.”[28] The novel’s noble Jews uphold “what the liberal, tolerant Christian requires” and are not granted their “own reality,” their own interiority (Ragussis,278- 279).

Lazarus’s own acute self-awareness may have derived from Eliot’s representation of a pivotal but often neglected character. Amanda Anderson describes Leonora Halm-Eberstein, the Jewish mother who has abandoned Deronda, as “a willfully cosmopolitan woman”(42); Ragussis goes even further, to suggest that she is represented as “the mother who is seen as squelching his life, in some sense murdering him”(284). It seems clear that Leonora is a surrogate for the larger question posed by assimilation and Jewish tradition. Like Lazarus (in the latter’s exchange with Gottheil), Leonora’s encounter with Jewish tradition results in her renouncing much of her heritage. But instead of approving Leonora’s feminist disavowal of patriarchy, Eliot apparently associates her with what she calls “the more extreme dangers of modern detachment”(52). It seems worth speculating on the likely effects of Eliot’s incendiary representation of this culturally opportunistic character on Lazarus’s changing awareness of her own ambiguous situation. In contrast to the saintly Mirah, whose “religion was of one fiber with her affections, and had never presented itself to her as a set of propositions” (Daniel Deronda 410), the “lapsed” Leonora embodies Eliot’s negative representation of “absolute detachment from the affective ground of community that she, as Jewish daughter…ideally should represent”(53).

Leonora threatens the affective bonds of the nation in its familial and social forms and perhaps also poses the threat of miscegenation. Basing my perceptions on Anderson’s insights into the novel’s tactics, I am proposing that Lazarus's earlier repudiations of a fixed Jewish identity and transatlantic forays into the world of English letters is followed by a remorseful "recognition" of Eliot’s rootless cosmopolitan. Not unlike Lazarus, Leonora is “a hypermodern subject” whose successful evasion of the inhibitions of her traditional heritage casts her adrift; her sole bond has been with “the transnational force of art”(53).

After years of participating in the modern, autonomous world of American arts and letters, she had thought to have earned her sense of belonging, but then Emerson’s snub, followed by the Jewish exodus from Europe, led to a cathartic moment, relieving what must have been an incessant crisis of identity. In the wake of her disillusionment with Emerson, it seems likely that the novel’s language of spiritual missions and organic connections to culture produced a stirring encounter with the limitations of Lazarus’s own detachment from the tribe. Consider this: in Eliot’s novel, the untethered Leonora bluntly confesses to Deronda, “I did not wish you to be born. I parted with you willingly. When your father died, I resolved that I would have no more ties, but such as I could free myself from.” And on another occasion: “I was to care for ever about what Israel had been; and I did not care at all. I cared for the wide world, and all that I could represent in it”( 697, 693 emphasis mine). But the messianic Deronda sternly instructs Leonora to cease her futile struggles against the legitimate claims of the past:

The effects prepared by generations are likely to triumph over a contrivance which would bend them all to the satisfaction of self. Your will was strong, but my grandfather’s trust which you accepted and did not fulfill—what you call his yoke—is the expression of something stronger, with deeper, farther-spreading roots, knit into the foundations of sacredness for all men. (727)

All along we have seen the evidence of Lazarus’s fierce attachments to the past. But now, from this text’s inscribed ethic of care and duty, specifically through Deronda’s organic imagery of the deeply rooted ethnic tree, Lazarus might well have derived the communal mission that would preoccupy her throughout her remaining years. Mordechai’s appealing vision of restoration and wholeness is worth our attention. He conjures up a seductive organicism, ironically expressed in almost Emersonian terms: “I believe in a growth, a passage, and a new unfolding of life whereof the seed is more perfect, more charged with the elements that are pregnant with diviner form”(585). When considering such seductive rhetoric, it hardly seems strange that—not unlike American Zionists of a later generation—Lazarus learned from a Gentile how to recast the Jews’ notorious reputation for insularity and narrowness as a virtue of national identity, in the very mold of European and American ideals of nationhood. It was also a way of no longer thinking about her problematic relation to the main current of American literary culture.

Eliot’s positing of the need for a restoration of an “organic centre” to Jewish life rapidly became the basis for Lazarus’s evolving Zionist thought, for Zionism from its genesis required admitting that the Gentile is essentially right about the Jew of modernity. As Mordechai argues, fully accepting one’s Judaism means to embrace a reified narrative of nationalism: “Let us…choose our full heritage, claim the brotherhood of our nation, and carry into it a new brotherhood with the nations of the Gentiles”(598). Lazarus agreed. The compelling problem was that, as a “race,” the Jewish people suffered from a variety of losses, such as the deterioration of Jewish manhood, but each of these was invariably linked to the loss of geographical space: “When our race shall have an organic center, a heart and brain to watch and guide and execute, the outraged Jew shall have a defense in the court of nations, as the outraged Englishman or American.”[29]

There is an poignant resemblance between Lazarus’s need to derive consolation, even some sense of renewed purpose from her canonical exclusion, and the novel’s subtext: “Deronda, an Englishman descended from Iberian Jews, chooses to throw in his lot with his disenfranchised and oppressed people, rather than to climb to the highest rung of the ladder of English Protestant society” (Ragussis, 289. emphasis added). My point is that at the same time that Eliot’s Sephardic hero renounces his cosmopolitan identity and selflessly aids the suppressed, he also recovers a best self. Deronda’s greatest moment of personal triumph occurs at the moment that he publicly embraces a collective, Jewish identity. There must have been considerable empowerment for Lazarus in the English novel: identifying implicitly with Deronda she could simultaneously bid farewell to a form of cultural advantage that was apparently not hers anyway and, like the fictional Sephardi, claim the role of liberator of her humiliated people.

Still, Lazarus would hardly have embraced what Meyer insightfully exposes as the underlying agenda of Daniel Deronda’s proto-Zionism, “through which Eliot simultaneously expunges female impulses to transgress social boundaries and [also] expunges those who penetrate England’s national boundaries”(734). Eliot’s intention is to remove those “who have strayed and transgressed.” The novelist’s ideology of containment aspires to return the Jews, in the novel’s language, “safely to their own borders”(Meyer 735). The historical irony of Eliot’s vision is inescapable: at the very moment that the converted Sephardic Jew Disraeli attains leadership of Protestant England, Eliot’s novel features a converted and assimilated Jew who elects to depart from England for the sake of his “authentic” community. It is true that in foregrounding the oppressions that promote this separatism, Eliot appears friendly to the Jewish cause. But at the same time the Englishwoman is in deadly earnest that all true nations must defend themselves against the subversions of alien blood:

it is a calamity to the English, as to any other great historic people, to undergo a premature fusion with immigrants of alien blood; that its distinctive national characteristics should be in danger of obliteration by the predominating qualities of foreign settlers…I am all ready to unite in groaning over the threatening danger.[30]

On the surface it is not readily apparent that Eliot really desires to exile the alien Jews. She wants to “improve” them and transfer “their incommodious energies into beneficent channels (163).” But here, and as Meyer suggests, in the deepest logic of the novel, there is an inexorable push toward a final solution, “an ending that purges away the problem of otherness”(Meyer 745).

Notwithstanding the novel’s seeming repudiation of a Jewish presence in Western culture, Eliot’s interest in the political restoration of the Jews in a Palestinian commonwealth would surface as the crucial legitimizing referent of Lazarus’s argument a few years after the novel’s publication, in her own treatment of “The Jewish Problem”(1883):[31]

I am fully persuaded that all suggested solutions other than this are but temporary palliatives…The idea formulated by George Eliot has already sunk into the minds of many Jewish enthusiasts, and it germinates with miraculous rapidity. ‘The idea that I am possessed with,’ says Deronda, ‘is that of restoring a political existence to my people; making them a nation again, giving them a national centre, such as the English have, though they, too, are scattered over the face of the globe. That is a task which presents itself to me as a duty…I am resolved to devote my life to it. At the least, I may awaken a movement in other minds such as has been awakened in my own.” Could the noble prophetess who wrote the above words have lived but till to-day to see the ever-increasing necessity of adopting her inspired counsel…she would have been herself astonished at the flame enkindled by her seed of fire, and the practical shape which the movement projected by her in poetic vision is beginning to assume.[32]

Clearly the English novelist, whom Lazarus seems to have regarded as a sister-prophetess afforded Lazarus what might be called a voyage of self-discovery. As in her own case, Deronda’s highly cultivated cosmopolitanism inhibits his identification with the insular confines of tradition, even as he yearns to, if not truly “belong,” then at least intervene on behalf of an “authentic” community.

Yet it must be stressed that, in appropriating much of Eliot’s cultural logic, Lazarus did much more than repeat the novel’s aesthetics of expulsion on American soil. Though Eliot was an influence that must be reckoned with, there are signs that Lazarus was struggling to advance her own ambivalent, less coherent account of the Jewish cultural-national entity of the future. For at the same time that Lazarus surrenders something to Eliot’s yoke of organic mystification, Eliot’s narrative does not wholly persuade her, does not entirely remove the schism that had earlier existed between her and Judaism itself. In the end, Lazarus was not as eager as Eliot to divorce the Jew from the West. Whereas, as Meyer rightly argues, in Daniel Deronda, “the possibility of reconciling ‘otherness’ with English society is dismissed”(753), Lazarus, who anticipates so much of what was to follow in the Zionist movement, looked toward a future America-Zion nexus. A Golden Age of Jewish culture would flourish in the hills of Judea, but it might also coexist with Jewish dreaming under the skies of Texas. Torn between articulating a cosmopolitan, modernist conception of Judaism and adopting Eliot’s tendency to relegate Judaism to the place of time-bound tradition, like so many Jewish-American writers in the twentieth century, she struggled toward what might be called a reflective distance, a cool removal from the constraints of an imposed identity. Ultimately, Lazarus’s cosmopolitan imagination exceeds the English novelist’s because she envisaged two centers of Jewish continuity: Zion and America.

Noting how Lazarus’s literary inspiration, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, measured the decadent Jew of modernity against utopian accounts of the heroic Hebrews of antiquity, we must acknowledge taht Lazarus exhibits both these behaviors in her brief career. At the same time we should not underestimate the magnitude of the challenge she took up—to effectively recast the image of ghetto dwellers from the status of pariah to the living embodiment of America’s universal ideals.

It is not difficult to trace the influence of these ideals upon Lazarus’s famous “The New Colossus,” which was commissioned in 1883 to aid a fund then being raised to furnish the pedestal for the huge statue that the French people were preparing as a centennial gift to America. Intriguing intimations of the great sonnet appeared earlier in a much different, more particularizing mode in the prose-poem “Currents”:

From the far Caucasian steppes, from the squalid ghettos of Europe, from Odessa and Bucharest, from Kief, and Ekaterinoslav, Hark to the cry of the exiles of Babylon, the voice of Rachel mourning for her children, of Israel lamenting for Zion. And lo, like a turbid stream, the long-pent flood bursts the dykes of oppression and rushes hitherward. Unto her ample breast, the generous mother of nations welcomes them. (Poems II, 63)

In its emphasis on Jewish victimhood and a maternal host, the passage seems to form a palimpsest for what has long been America’s most famous public lyric. Reading it now, it seems clear that in the sonnet that followed, Lazarus strived mightily to encode the immigrant experience of a particular wave of Russian Jews within a flattering gesture toward America’s universal meaning. In what amounts to one of the most “public” American poems of the nineteenth century, Lazarus triumphantly links America to the former and Europe to the latter—to justify the Jewish immigrants’ dream of “home-coming.” The original name of the statue was “Liberty Enlightening the World,” but Lazarus ingeniously transforms the French gift’s rhetorical and symbolic function from that of a passive, austere symbol to a mission of active intervention on behalf of the oppressed in her image of the ”Mother of Exiles”:

From this moment Lazarus was fully determined to use the literary tools of acculturation to appropriate America’s rhetoric of equality and liberty in order to defend the Jews. In what has become America’s most famous public sonnet, Lazarus opposes the immigrant, ethnic character of America to that of the classical and imperialistic “storied pomp” of Europe. More significantly, as Lichtenstein rightly argues, her idealistic anthem to America’s welcome of its strangers exhibits a highly sophisticated sense not only of what exile felt like but of what it might be to poeticize a fully heterogeneous American landscape: “valorizing as it does the status of the alien who finds in America a home, a native ground composed of many alien grounds (“Words and Worlds,” 261). [34]

There is a compelling logic at work here. After all, the Puritan imagination had already identified itself with the struggles and visions of the Jews. Now Lazarus cannily reversed that appropriation for the sake of living Jews. At the same time, her great sonnet inaugurated a discourse that would culminate in the early-twentieth-century works of Mary Antin, Israel Zangwill, and Abraham Cahan, works in which, to varying degrees, the brutal history of the Jews in Europe is redeemed by the American melting pot. Yet whether this sonnet reveals to us a poet who also reclaims her Jewishness seems less certain. Much of the textual evidence suggests that Lazarus remained much more of a universalist than a particularist. At the same time that her lyrics sympathize with the immigrant’s plight, Lazarus positions herself at a great distance from the masses. It is important to remember that as late as 1878 she could write that, though “proud of my blood and lineage…my religious convictions…and the circumstances of my life have led me somewhat apart from our people…Hebrew ideals do not appeal to me.”[35] Hence I do not share the confidence of some critics that in the last decade of her life, Lazarus achieved a harmonious resolution between her Jewish and American identities. But it is probably also true that if Lazarus’s ambiguous relationship to her people conveys an unenviable sense of dislocation, that very distress provides a uniquely divided perspective that enhanced her writing.

Though her cultural, ethnic, and literary politics underwent a radical transformation, Lazarus was never confident of her position. The insult Lazarus felt she had received from Emerson severely diminished her claim to be counted among the creators of the American cultural canon, embodying the peculiar Jewish fate, that the ostensible homeland might turn inhospitable. Hence, in “The New Year,” the likelihood of future divergences and schisms remain important features of her relationship to Jewish nationalism:

In this Janus-faced lyric, we witness the tension between Lazarus’s own “nativeness” and her struggle to articulate the otherness of an inassimilable ethnicity. This lyric beats a hasty retreat from the literal as well as the collective aspects embedded in re-territorialization. Lazarus’s “divided streams” rhetorically anticipate the ambiguous strains that would accompany the ascendancy of Brandeisian Zionism well into the twentieth century, which saw Palestine as a place for some but not all Jews in the present, a haven for others, perhaps, in the future.

In the end, unlike Eliot’s Leonora Halm-Eberstein, Lazarus’s proto-Zionism would fail to resolve her own conflictual (and hopelessly intertwined) yearnings for universalism and nationalism, cosmopolitanism and tribalism: “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” (Epistle to the Hebrews 41).[36] There were to be two complementary, not competing, Zions. Her restoration program was simply not intended for American Jews, for “wherever we are free, we are at home” (Epistle 72), but rather for inassimilable Others, for whose sake she struggled to establish the short-lived “Society for the Improvement and Colonization of East-European Jews.”

Though no immigrant herself, Lazarus’s is one of the first attempts to grapple—albeit reluctantly at times—with the possibilities of extending America’s proud notion of “newness” to those who truly were new Americans. In this sense, she must be credited with founding a new textual dynasty of ethnic voices who still seek, even in the final years of the twentieth century, to assert their cultural heritage against the dominant culture. Her body of work beckons us to the possibility of a complex and multi-layered American identity, the messy and contradictory achievements of multiculturalism in our own time, the belated reconciliation with the inevitable hybridity of one’s present culture and tradition, which have been crucial in forming not only the Jewish but other hyphenated American writers’ identities as well. On the other hand, in responding to her culture’s obsession with the Jew by glorifying ancient martyrdom and martial culture, Lazarus reinscribed the dominant culture’s marginalization of those who did not conform to national ideals—in this case the ghetto Jews. The latter are intrinsically opposed to her projections of the model Jew of Zion’s future. Lazarus’s miraculous Hebrew is a being who serves her present in ways that are highly suggestive of later generations of American Jews; they too would insist on vicarious identifications with redemptive activity in the Holy Land, in spite of (or because of) its manifest distance from their own reality.

Lazarus’s poetry reveals the conflicts and contradictions of the creative effort to link self to collective and selectively reclaim a past confined within a contemporary ideological framework. Her individual confrontation with Jewish suffering was a to-and-fro movement, a process that took her deep into, and then in hasty retreat from, collective solidarity. Emma Lazarus can best be understood in relation to the rest of her generation—an acculturated population of Jews who willingly extended philanthropic aid to East-European Jews but at the same time feared contributing toward the growth of too-visible populaces in their midst. In spite of her vicarious commitment to Jewish rebirth and philanthropy, she distanced herself socially and symbolically from most American Jews, let alone the unsophisticated and impoverished immigrants from the shtetls of Eastern Europe. Yet in spite of the fact that this extraordinarily complex writer was unwilling to accept the totalizing grip of an identity that is fully underwritten by the bonds of the past, she willingly determined a narrative for others that would bind them to collective identity, the remedy that Eliot had prescribed for Lazarus’s people: “ a great feeling that animates the collective body as with one soul.”[37] This is precisely the creative force of Lazarus’s enigmatic legacy; those divided streams are a harbinger of modern American Jewish life: its schizophrenic preoccupation between reclamation and territorial autonomy on the one hand, and cosmopolitanism and open-ended dialogue with the Jewish past on the other.

Lazarus engages in an extravagant recasting of tradition to enhance the exploits of ancient heroes and embellish the legendary successes of the race. This ideal vision that Lazarus’s poetry conjures bears little resemblance to the Jewish-American writing that was to come. Celebratory, epic, and even apocalyptic, her lyrics most resemble the kind of literature that would be valued by the early Yishuv, in which poets were expected to enact what Sidra Ezrahi calls “an aesthetics of the whole…a perfect fit between map and territory that excludes new narratives of longing, wandering or restlessness.”[38] Besides her unique position as the first Jewish-American writer to be canonized, Lazarus exemplifies the experience of the minority writer in democratic America, caught between complete assimilation into the public culture of letters and adherence to the self-compromising call of memory and ethnic identity. Lazarus’s life and poetry illuminate the personal anguish as well as the potential for an energizing response that the predicament of marginality would foster in Jewish-American writing for decades to come.

[1] Translator of Jewish classics and founder of the Jewish Publication Society (1888), Szold saw Lazarus as “a golden promise of that future when the old Jewish spirit—women of culture and refinement not disdaining to foster it tenderly—shall once more flame up with all the brilliancy of the Spanish period she so devotedly studied.” Quoted in Vogel, 24. In demonstrating that a reborn Israel might teach the world to bridge the Orient and the Occident, antiquity and modernity, Lazarus directly inspired Henrietta Szold and thus the Zionist fantasies of generations of Americans who would not dream of uprooting themselves. Szold founded Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America in 1912. By 1930 Hadassah had established numerous hospitals, clinics, and laboratories in Palestine. In 1933 she became director of Youth Aliya, an international rescue operation that brought young Holocaust victims to Palestine for rehabilitation.

[2] A Recent example is Howard M. Sachar’s monumental A History of Israel From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time (New York: Knopf, rev. ed., 1996), where Lazarus is not mentioned in over a thousand pages of text. Likewise, she is all but excluded from Gerald Sorin’s highly praised A Time for Building:The Third Migration, 1880-1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992).

“Proto-Zionism” seems the appropriate term for Lazarus’s views because, though she had a vision of political restoration, the term “Zionism” only began to appear in the press in the 1890s. In 1896, an article in Harper’s Weekly described the “Zionite Movement” as a “collection of movements” that shared consensus only on the necessary return to Israel. See Milton Plesur, “The American Press and Jewish Restoration during the Nineteenth Century,” in Isidore S. Meyer, ed., Early History of Zionism in America (New York: American Jewish Historical Society, 1977), 55-76.

[3] The most comprehensive treatments of Emma Lazarus include Dan Vogel, Emma Lazarus (Boston: Twayne, 1980) and Diane Lichtenstein, Writing Their Nations: The Tradition of Nineteenth-Century American Jewish Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992), ch. III. See also Lichtenstein’s “Words and Worlds: Emma Lazarus’s Conflicting Citizenships,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 6.2 (Fall 1987), 247-263, and Carole S. Kessner, “Matrilineal Dissent: Emma Lazarus, Marie Syrkin and Cynthia Ozick,” in Judith R. Baskin, ed., Women of the Word: Jewish Women and Jewish Writing (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1994), 197-215.

Feminists have struggled to enhance Lazarus’s reputation since the turn of the century. In an article published in the Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: Ktav, n.d., 7:652), Henrietta Szold declared that the poet was “the most distinguished literary figure produced by American Jewry.” The success of this act of recovery by late twentieth-century Jewish feminists is evident in Lazarus’s frequent appearances in recent anthologies of Jewish women. See Four Centuries of Jewish Women’s Spirituality: A Sourcebook, eds., Ellen M. Umansky and Dianne Ashton (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 68-70, 100-103, 110.

[4] The quoted phrase occurs in Emma Lazarus, An Epistle to the Hebrews (New York: Federation of American Zionists 1900); ed. Morris U. Schappes (New York: Jewish Historical Society of New York, 1987), 15.

[5] Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Letter to Emma Lazarus” (April 14, 1868), in Letters to Emma Lazarus, 4.

[6] After reading her epic Admetus, Emerson wrote “You have written a noble poem, which I cannot enough praise” (Rusk, 9).

[7] This exclusion from the American canon was first rectified by the Cambridge History of American Literature in 1920.

[8] Beyond her absence in Emerson’s canon, there would follow numerous posthumous ghettoizations of her literary identity. When John G. Whittier praised her lyrical voice in the year of her death, he chose to represent her solely as a “Jewish,” not as an “American,” poet: “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.” John G. Whittier, “A Brave Singer,” American Hebrew 33 (1887), 67. It seems ironic that in spite of her family’s committed immersion in American culture contemporary readers invariably associated her with a condition of “otherness.” Many of her admirers wrote to her, detailing the problems of identity and nationhood that imposed on their own lives. In 1883, James Russell Lowell (American minister to England), who had met Emma Lazarus during a London visit earlier that year, wrote to complain bitterly that he had been forced to resign from his elected post as lord rector of the University of St. Andrews because of his “extraterritoriality.” Lowell, and many others, seems to have anticipated sympathy from Lazarus, presumably because of her own insider/outsider position in society. See “Letter From James Russell Lowell,” ( 10 December, 1983), Letters to Emma Lazarus, 73.

[9] This rift (to which Lazarus herself contributed), between the established Jewish community and the Eastern European immigrants, would be readily exploited byAmerican Zionists such as Richard Gottheil, who in his Aims of Zionism (1898) exulted that the creation of the Jewish state would stem the tide of “Oriental” Jews whose visibility threatened the Americanized Jews.

[10] Editorial, The Reform Advocate (July 22, 1893), 441-42. Quoted in Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “A Place in the World: Jews and the Holy Land at World’s Fairs,” Encounters With the “Holy Land”: Place, Past and Future in American Jewish Culture, eds. Jeffrey Shandler and Beth S. Wenger (Hanover, NH: UP of New England, 1997), 60-82. Quotation appears on page 64. Emphasis mine.

[11] Some years later Madame Ragozin achieved greater fame as a collaborator on the first American edition of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

[12] “Russian Jews and Gentiles,” Century Magazine 23 (1882), 919. Also excerpted in Emma Lazarus: Selections from her Poetry and Prose,70-74. Subsequent references from the latter will be cited parenthetically.

[13] Her response appeared in the May 1882 number of Century as “Russian Christianity Versus Modern Judaism.”

[14] Emma Lazarus, “The Jewish Problem,” Century 25 (1883), 608.

[15] Even before the appearance of this sonnet, Lazarus was committed to a variety of educational projects that seem to offer potential for changing the image (and perhaps the essence) of the Jews as usurers and shopkeepers. She contributed to ill-fated projects such as the agricultural settlements founded by groups of young Jews from Southern Russia calling themselves Am Olam (Eternal People). These were established in New Jersey, Louisiana, Oregon and the Dakotas, but all failed by 1885. She was especially interested in the colony of Vineland, New Jersey, which she suggested should be renamed after George Eliot. See Simon Dubnow, History of the Jews, vol.5, trans. Moshe Spiegel (South Brunswick: T. Yoselof, 1973), 642-45.

[16] David G. Roskies describes the post-Enlightenment interest of Jewish writers and artists, from Sholem Asch to Marc Chagall, in a dechristianized Jesus as a mythic archetype, often as a suffering Jew martyred by gentile society in Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge: Harvard UP,1984), 264-281, 284-289.

[17] See Hans Kohn, Prophets and Peoples: Studies in Nineteenth Century Nationalism (New York: Collier Books, 1969); Boyd Shafer, Nationalism: Interpreters and Interpretations (New York: Macmillan, 1963); Eric Hobsbawn, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1992).

[18] Samuel H. Levine. “Palestine in the Literature of the United States to 1867.” Early History of Zionism in America, Ed. Isidore S. Meyer (New York: American Jewish Historical Society, 1958.

[19] For instance, Bercovitch notes the rhetorical power of Cotton Mather’s exclamation in 1690: “How Goodly are thy Tents, O New-England, and thy Tabernacles, O thou American Israel!” Sacvan Bercovitch, “The American Puritan Imagination,” in The American Puritan Imagination: Essays in Revaluation, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (London: Cambridge UP, 1974),16.

[20] Moshe Davis points out in America and the Holy Land (London: Praeger, 1995) that they describe their condition as “Egyptian slavery”:

King George III was Pharaoh; the Atlantic Ocean nothing other than the Red Sea; and Washington and Adams—Moses and Joshua. What could have been a more appropriate [national] seal for the underlying purpose of the Revolution, according to a committee composed of Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson, than the portrayal of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt? In the words of Thomas Jefferson: “Pharaoh sitting in an open chariot, a crown on his head and a sword in his hand passing thro’ the divided waters of the Red Sea in pursuit of the Israelites: rays from a pillar of fire in the cloud, expressive of the divine presence, and command, reaching to Moses who stands on the shore and extending his hand over the sea, causes it to overwhelm Pharaoh.(12)

[21] Jeffrey Shandler and Beth S. Wenger,“‘The Site of Paradise’: The Holy Land in American Jewish Imagination,” Encounters with the Holy Land: Place, Past and Future in American Jewish Culture, ed. Jeffrey Shandler and Beth S.Wenger (London: Brandeis UP, 1997),10-40. Quotation appears on page 12. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically.

[22] Their Holy-Land works included Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petrea, and the Holy Land (New York: Harper, 1838); Curtis’s The Howadji in Syria (New York: Harper, 1852); Taylor’s The Lands of the Saracen (New York: Putnam, 1856); Bryant’s Letters From the East (New York: Putnam, 1869); Browne’s Yusef; or, The Journey of the Frangi, a Crusade in the East (New York: Harper, 1853); Melville’s Clarel: A Poem and Pilgramage in the Holy Land, ed. W.E. Bezanson (New York: Hendricks House, 1960) and Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, cited above. American Presidents, including Ulysses S. Grant and Theodore Roosevelt, also visited, and Abraham Lincoln was said to have considered a journey before his assassination. See Lester I. Vogel, To See A Promised Land: Americans and the Holy Land in the Nineteenth Century (University Park: Pennsylvania UP, 1993), 42, 61-65.

[23] Brian Swann argues that Deronda is a “cultural fusion,” a “Protestant Jew, the realization of the Evangelical dream of conversion raised to universal meaning.” Brian Swann, “George Eliot’s Ecunemical Jew, or, the Novel as Outdoor Temple,” Novel (Fall 1974), 41.

[24] Gordon, and Smolensky, both once proponents of assimilation, became Zionists after the brutal massacres of the 1880s. For an account of their translation of Eliot’s novel see Solomon Hurwitz, “George Eliot’s Jewish Characters,” Jewish Forum 5 (1922).

[25] Quoted in Montagu Frank Modder, The Jew in the Literature of England (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1939), 124.

[26] Susan Meyer, “‘Safely to their Own Borders’: Proto-Zionism, Feminism, and Nationalism in Daniel Deronda,”ELH 60 (1993), 733-58. Future references will be cited parenthetically.

[27] Drawing from Ronald Sander’s The High Walls of Jerusalem: A History of the Balfour Declaration and the Birth of the British Mandate for Palestine, Meyer describes the British “aspiration to return the Jews to Palestine as one of ‘the persisting undercurrents of English political and intellectual life in the nineteenth century (748).”

[28] Quoted in Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: ‘The Jewish Question’ & English National Identity (London: Duke UP, 1995), 278. Daniel Deronda, 431.

[29] “Epistle to the Hebrews,” American Hebrew (November 1882), qted in “Emma Lazarus” (A Biographical Essay), The Poems of Emma Lazarus I, 28.

[30] George Eliot, The Impressions of Theophrastus Such (London: Everyman, 1995), 158.

[31] Lazarus’s first published reference to Daniel Deronda appears in November of 1882, her first “Epistle to the Hebrews,” a series written weekly over several months for the American Hebrew.

[32] Quoted in “Emma Lazarus” (A Biographical Essay), The Poems of Emma Lazarus I, 27-28.

[33] “The New Colossus,”Poems of Emma Lazarus, 2 vols.(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1888), I, 202.

[34] The Statue of Liberty was intended as a monument to friendship between France and America, not refuge as such. Interestingly, it was only in 1945, years after the nativist Immigration Act of 1924, which put an end to mass immigration (unfortunately at the dawn of Hitler’s Europe) that the poem was enshrined at the statue’s base. See John Higham, “The Transformation of the Statue of Liberty,” Send These to Me.

[35] Quoted in Saul S. Friedman, “Emma Lazarus: American Poet and Zionist,” Women in History, Literature and the Arts: A Festschrift for Hildegard Schnuttgen in Honor of Her Thirty Years of Outstanding Service at Youngstown State University (Youngstown: Youngstown State UP, 1989), 220-246. Quoted on page 221.

[36] She is unwilling to advocate mass migration of assimilated American Jews: “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.” Quoted in Eve Merriam, Emma Lazarus: Woman With A Torch (New York: Citadel Press, 1956), 104-105.

[37] From George Eliot’s “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” in The Impressions of Theophrastus Such (London:Everyman, 1995), 138.

[38] Sidra Ezrahi, “Israel and Jewish Writing” Religion and Literature (Spring 1999).