Emma Lazarus

Abstract

Emma Lazarus (b. 1849–d. 1887) was born New York City, Esther (Nathan) and Moses Lazarus’s fourth child of seven. Ashkenazic on Lazarus’s side and of mixed Ashkenazic and Sephardic background on Nathan’s, Lazarus’s ancestors founded in the seventeenth century the two oldest synagogues in the United States, Touro synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, and the Sephardic Shearith Israel Synagogue in New York. Moses Lazarus, a prosperous sugar refiner, established his family in fashionable New York City and Newport. Emma was rigorously educated by private tutors, an early foreign language prodigy. Among the secular Sephardic Jewish elite, Lazarus expressed her Jewishness less through religious orthodoxy than commitments to family, community, synagogue membership, and her writing, which reflected her early interest in Jewish history and culture. At seventeen, she published Poems and Translations (1866), primarily original poems, and translations of German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, Friedrich Schiller, Alexandre Dumas, and Victor Hugo. In 1868 Lazarus began a friendship-mentorship with Ralph Waldo Emerson, dedicating her second volume, Admetus and Other Poems (1871), to him, but that suffered after he omitted her work from his anthology, Parnassus (1874). Between 1874 and 1876, Lazarus published a novel Alide (1874), earning praise of Ivan Turgenev, and her first play. From 1876 to 1882, Lazarus shifted toward Jewish subjects, publishing translations of medieval Spanish, Sephardic Hebrew poets; acclaimed translation, Poems and Ballads of Heinrich Heine (1881); and Songs of a Semite (1882) on Jewish themes. She began work with newly arrived Russian Jewish refugees in 1882, and then published prose essays addressing modern antisemitism, Jewish immigration, and proto-Zionism, earning her respect and acclaim in both the mainstream and Jewish press. In her lifetime, American literary life shifted from New England to her native New York City, yet she cultivated friendships among New England’s literary elite (including daughters of both Emerson and Hawthorne). Non-Jewish friends apparently regarded her as “a Jewess,” but she maintained genuine friendships with the likes of Richard and Helena deKay Gilder, Henry and William James, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Robert Browning, and William Morris. In 1883, Lazarus wrote her most famous poem, “The New Colossus,” for a Statue of Liberty Pedestal Fund benefit auction. Traveling to England, she met prominent writers and artists, raised money for Jewish refugees, and advocated for a Jewish state. After showing signs of illness in 1884, and her father’s death in 1885, Lazarus returned to New York in 1887 and died of Hodgkin’s disease at age thirty-eight, perhaps the most critically acclaimed poet and Jewish writer in the United States. “The New Colossus,” installed on a plaque inside the Statue of Liberty pedestal in 1903, single-handedly transformed the statue’s meaning from a figure of enlightened democracy into one of “world-wide welcome,” solidifying Lazarus’s enduring legacy.