Emma Lazarus--The Poet of the New Colossus

 

                Emma Lazarus as a young woman.

Emma Lazarus was just 34 years old when she penned the lines that might be the most familiar verse to millions of Americans.  Odds were stacked against her ever achieving that kind of recognition.  She a woman at a time when most distaff poetry was confined to the pages of women’s magazines and the columns of newspapers desperate to fill inches at next to no expense.  Only a handful of women, almost unanimously WASP gentlewomen like Julia Ward Howe were taken seriously by the cultural guardians of the literary elite.

If that was not enough to overcome, she was also a proud and open Jew, which is to say a virtual automatic pariah.

Yet she was no product of the shtetel, one of the impoverished Eastern European refugees from pogroms who were beginning to flood American cities in 1883.  Indeed, she had deeper roots in the New World than most Colonial Dames.  On her mother’s side she was a Nathan, a Sephardic Jewish family with roots in Portugal via the Netherlands and Brazil who had settled in Manhattan when it was still Dutch Nieuw Amsterdam in the mid-1600s.  That side of her family was well established and prosperous and produced a distinguished line that included 18th Century poetess Grace Seixas Nathan and her distant cousin, Benjamin N. Cardozo, later a Justice of the Supreme Court.

The family of Emma father, Moses Lazarus, were German Jews who immigrated in the early 19th Century.  They did not come over in steerage.  They were middle class, well educated, highly cultured, and well assimilated in Germany.  They spoke German, not Yiddish.  In New York these Jews quickly established themselves as merchants, shopkeepers, and professionals.  These Ashkenazi assumed leadership of the still small Jewish community over the sometimes-resentful long time Sephardic residents.

That Emma, the fourth of seven children, was the product of both of the great lines of European Jewry was somewhat unusual.

The Lazarus summer home in Newport, Rhode Island.

She was born on July 22, 1849 in New York City, the year after a wave of European revolutions that sent another surge of Jewish immigrants to the city.  The family was upper-middle class, not terribly religious, and deeply interested in high culture.  They were comfortable enough to have a summer home at Newport, Rhode Island, home of the famous Sephardic Jewish Synagogue, the oldest in America, which later inspired one of Emma’s best-known poems.

At home they spoke English, which was her mother’s family language for generations, but she also became fluent in her father’s German.  He was eager to share with her all of the classics of German literature and of the Romantic movement.  Tutored privately, she also learned French and Italian and intently studied British and American literature.

Lazarus was writing poetry in her teens and published translations of German poets including the Romantics Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Heinrich Heine in the early 1860’s.  Her proud father arranged to have her first collection of original poems in 1866 and the next year Poems and Translations had a successful commercial publication.  That volume drew the approving attention of no less than Ralph Waldo Emerson for whom the German Romantics were an important early influence.

Over the next decade, Lazarus published a second volume of poetry, Admetus and Other Poems in 1871; the novel Alide: An Episode in Goethe’s Life in 1874, and a play in verse, The Spagnoletto, in 1876.  If not a literary celebrity she earned the attention and approval in cultivated circles.  But most of her readers were not aware that the youthful female poet was Jewish.  In fact, the name Lazarus, familiar from the Jesus miracle story in the New Testament, probably gave many the impression she was Christian.

                                           

                                                 Henry George was a major inspiration for Emma.

Like many of the Ashkenazi elite in New York, her father was a political liberal, ardent abolitionist and Union supporter during the Civil War, and open to new and radical ideas.  His daughter was an apple that fell close to the tree.  When Henry George published his hugely influential Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy in 1879, Lazarus became an early disciple and soon a close personal friend of the visionary author.  She plunged into spreading the word about George’s vision of a communal society supported by a single tax on land which rivaled Marxist socialism as a model for a new society among radicals.  In addition to a laudatory poem published in the New York Times she wrote, “Progress and Poverty is not so much a book as an event. The life and thought of no one capable of understanding it can be quite the same after reading it,” and even that reading it would prevent such a person, who also “prized justice or common honesty” from being able to ever again “dine or sleep or work in peace.”

Yet in all of this literary and political activity, Lazarus did not seem much interested in her Jewish identity or advancing Jewish causes.  She was occasionally stung by anti-Semitism but like many others believed that assimilation would eventually overcome prejudice.  

That changed when she got her hands on George Eliot’s 1876 novel Daniel Deronda which was not well known in America.  The social satire contained a moving description of the plight of European Jews and painted an idealistic picture of a young man out to right historic oppression and save his people.  Although it was the final work of an important Victorian novelist and therefore a somewhat unlikely source, the book inspired a generation on both sides of the Atlantic to become what is now recognized as proto-Zionists. That term Zionism was not yet invented or became a formal movement until launched by Theodor Herzl in 1897.

This interest was further stirred by the news of Russian pogroms that followed the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881.  That set off the first wave of massive Eastern European immigration of largely destitute refugees to the city.  While many of the established Ashkenazi elite were horrified by the crude peasants and laborers who they feared would evoke a harsh backlash from latent American nativism, Lazarus plunged into organizing aid and loudly advocating for the truly wretched refuse that were filling the tenements and slums.  It became the work of the rest of her life.

She wrote The Dance to Death, a dramatization of a German short story about the burning of Jews in Nordhausen during the Black Death.  In addition to articles published wherever she could place them, Lazarus published Songs of a Semite in 1882.

On a practical level Lazarus helped to found the Hebrew Technical Institute in New York to provide vocational training to assist destitute Jewish immigrants to become self-supporting and raised funds for other charities and relief programs.

The manuscript for the poem The New Colossus was offered in this auction catalog to raise money for the Statue of Liberty pedestal.

In that spirit she somewhat casually donated a new poem inspired by the French gift to an auction, conducted by the Art Loan Fund Exhibition in Aid of the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund for the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.  It was not until 1903 that the first verse of that poem, The New Colossus was installed on a bronze plaque on the pedestal it modestly helped finance.  The words subsequently reprinted in school textbooks and recited at patriotic gatherings became some of the most familiar and beloved lines of American poetry.

Lazarus traveled to Europe twice in in 1883 and again from 1885 to 1887 to learn more of conditions there and to contact Jewish intellectuals and leaders as well as leading radicals like William Morris.

The memorial plaque on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty was affixed there in 1903.

She returned from the second trip deathly ill.  Two months after she sailed past Lady Liberty which had finally been dedicated while she was abroad, Emma Lazarus died of what is now believed to have been Hodgkin’s lymphoma on November 19, 1887.  She was only 38 years old.

At the time of her death, she was still not well known to most of the American public.  She was eulogized most often in the Jewish and radical press, although due note was made in the New York Times which had published several of her essays over the years.  Many of her earlier admirers distanced themselves from her as she identified more urgently as a Jew.

She is widely recognized today mostly on the strength of The New Colossus.  She was honored by the Office of the Manhattan Borough President in March 2008, and her home on West 10th Street was included in a map of Women’s Rights Historic Sites. In 2009, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame and The Museum of Jewish Heritage featured an exhibition on her in 2012. 

Emma never got her own stamp, but her portrait adorned the First Day Cover for a Statue of Liberty stamp.

The Postal Service has never seen fit to issue an Emma Lazarus stamp, but it did feature her portrait on the first day cover card of a 1978 16¢ First Class Statue of Liberty stamp that quoted a line from her poem.

Here is that famous poem and two more samples of her work that deserve to be remembered as well.

The Statue of Liberty in New York harbor, 1910.

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

 

—Emma Lazarus

 

                                    

The Jewish Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island.
 

In The Jewish Synagogue at Newport

 

Here, where the noises of the busy town,

   The ocean’s plunge and roar can enter not,

We stand and gaze around with tearful awe,

   And muse upon the consecrated spot.

 

No signs of life are here: the very prayers

   Inscribed around are in a language dead;

The light of the “perpetual lamp” is spent

   That an undying radiance was to shed.

 

What prayers were in this temple offered up,

   Wrung from sad hearts that knew no joy on earth,

By these lone exiles of a thousand years,

   From the fair sunrise land that gave them birth!

 

How as we gaze, in this new world of light,

   Upon this relic of the days of old,

The present vanishes, and tropic bloom

   And Eastern towns and temples we behold.

 

Again we see the patriarch with his flocks,

   The purple seas, the hot blue sky o’erhead,

The slaves of Egypt,—omens, mysteries,—

   Dark fleeing hosts by flaming angels led.

 

A wondrous light upon a sky-kissed mount,

   A man who reads Jehovah’s written law,

‘Midst blinding glory and effulgence rare,

   Unto a people prone with reverent awe.

 

The pride of luxury’s barbaric pomp,

   In the rich court of royal Solomon—

Alas! we wake: one scene alone remains,—

   The exiles by the streams of Babylon.

 

Our softened voices send us back again

   But mournful echoes through the empty hall:

Our footsteps have a strange unnatural sound,

   And with unwonted gentleness they fall.

 

The weary ones, the sad, the suffering,

   All found their comfort in the holy place,

And children’s gladness and men's gratitude

   ‘Took voice and mingled in the chant of praise.

 

The funeral and the marriage, now, alas!

   We know not which is sadder to recall;

For youth and happiness have followed age,

   And green grass lieth gently over all.

 

Nathless the sacred shrine is holy yet,

   With its lone floors where reverent feet once trod.

Take off your shoes as by the burning bush,

   Before the mystery of death and God.

 

—Emma Lazarus

 

                                    

Jews lining up to board exile ships from Spain and Portugal in 1492.

 

    1492

 

Thou two-faced year, Mother of Change and Fate,

Didst weep when Spain cast forth with flaming sword,

The children of the prophets of the Lord,

Prince, priest, and people, spurned by zealot hate.

Hounded from sea to sea, from state to state,

The West refused them, and the East abhorred.

No anchorage the known world could afford,

Close-locked was every port, barred every gate.

Then smiling, thou unveil’dst, O two-faced year,

A virgin world where doors of sunset part,

Saying, “Ho, all who weary, enter here!

There falls each ancient barrier that the art

Of race or creed or rank devised, to rear

Grim bulwarked hatred between heart and heart!”

 

—Emma Lazarus

Woody Guthrie’s The Hanukkah Dance for the First Night of the Observance—Murfin Winter Holidays Music Festival 2025-26

                                                                 The Hanukkah Dance--Lyrics by Woody Guthrie performed by Nefresh Mountain.

Note--Another Winter Holiday two-fer.

It is the first night of Hanukkah.  The innovative folk and roots duo Nefresh Mountain—Doni Zasloff and Eric Lindberg and friends—has recorded two original Hanukkah songs by Woody Guthrie. They were composed in 1942 while Woody was living in Coney Island and learning Jewish culture and traditions from his mother-in-law and Yiddish poet Aliza Greenblatt. He was also spending a lot of time playing for neighborhood children. The songs were resurrected from Woody’s vast archives by his daughter Nora Guthrie and arranged by Lindberg. The Hanukkah Dance was recorded in the Chapel at Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn. 

Woody Guthrie, home from the Merchant Marine, singing to children in his Coney Island neighborhood in 1944.

Hanukkah, the eight-day Jewish Festival of Lights begins tonight at sundown, 25 Kislev in the Hebrew calendar.  The festival will run for eight nights until sunset December 22 or 2 Tevet.  But don’t look for it on these exact dates again anytime soon.  Because the Hebrew calendar is Lunar, the dates float in relationship to the Gregorian Calendar anywhere from late November to late December. 

Some Christians think of Chanukah as the Jewish Christmas because it occurs around the same time of year and involves gift giving.  Hell, a lot of Jews do too. This post is to clear up any confusion.  Jews who have been at all attentive will find nothing new in the explanation of the festival and its customs.  This one is for my fellow goyim.  

A Menorah burns in the window of a family home.

Between 175-163 BC Judea was under the sway of the Greco-Syrian Seleucid Empire ruled by Antiochus IV Epiphanes.  In Jerusalem and elsewhere there was split between a cosmopolitan elite of Hellenized Jews and traditionalists who hewed to the Law of Moses and the traditions of ritual purity set forth in their scriptures.  Antiochus, naturally supported the Hellenizers and replaced the “righteous” High Priest of the Temple, Yochanan, with his brother who adopted the Hellenized name Jason.  Then Jason was deposed in favor a still more compliant Priest, Menelaus.  With the king away making war against the Ptolemy Dynasty in Egypt, the traditionalists rose up, expelled the Hellenizers in what was essentially a Jewish civil war. 

In Egypt Antiochus responded to appeals for support from Hellenizers by sending an army against Jerusalem.  Accounts in the First Book of Maccabees say the Seleucid army fell upon the city and indiscriminately slew up to 80,000 “sparing not infants, virgins, or sages.”  The king essentially banned the practice of traditional Judaism, including keeping the Sabbath, observing dietary laws, and making required ritual sacrifice at the Temple.  He even erected an altar to Zeus in the Temple, profaning it, and ordered the people to worship it.  Resisters were hunted down and killed.  The army fanned out into the countryside and erected an altar in every village.  

In the village of Modin an elderly priest, Mattityahu slew a Hellenizer who attempted to worship at a pagan altar and his sons rose up and killed the Syrian officer in charge.  They took to the hills where others joined them in a guerilla style rebellion.  Eventually military leadership for the spreading rebellion fell to Judah the Strong and his brothers who were called the Maccabees meaning Who is Like You, O God. 

In today's lingo Maccabee religious fundamentalist terrorists waged a long, bloody guerilla war against the lawful Selulid Syrian rulers and after they captured Jerusalem  vandalized the Hellenistic altar in the Temple and replaced it with a symbol for their irrational primitive cult....Or they were freedom fighters and purifiers.  Pick your language, pick your poison.

For some years the Maccabees waged war, gathering the people repressed by the Seleucids to them.  They defeated host after host until they finally beat an army of 40,000 men under the commanders Nicanor and Gorgiash.  

Entering Jerusalem, Judah and his brothers cleared the Temple of the profane altars and performed ritual cleansing to make it satisfactory to the Lord for the resumption of rituals.  They found that the traditional seven-branched golden candelabrum called the Menorah had been looted from the Temple along with the rest of its treasure.  They constructed a new Menorah from less expensive metal but found only enough ritually purified olive oil to keep the fires of the lamp burning for one day. 

Miraculously, the fire burned for eight days, long enough to purify more oil.  In commemoration of the miracle Jewish sages decreed an annual festival of thanksgiving in which lights would be ignited for eight nights in remembrance. 

Details of the celebration evolved over time.  The Hanukkah Menorah, later called chanukkiyah in Hebrew, differs from the Menorah of the Temple.  It has eight branches of equal height and a ninth shamash or worker candle set higher than the rest and used to light the others.  There was an early dispute about whether it was proper to light all of the candles on the first night of the festival and one less each night or one candle the first night and an additional one until all eight blaze on the final night.  That dispute was settled by the great Rabbi Hillel who sided with those adding a candle each night. 

Hanukkah is a home ritual.  The fire is to be re-kindled in each Jewish home, and in some traditions a separate Menorah is used for each member of the family.  In addition to the ritual lighting, there are prayers and readings from scripture.  Hanukkah is also one of the few rituals in which even Orthodox women are allowed to participate because “women, too, were part of the miracle.” 

The private celebration of Chanukah even in times of oppression and peril has added significance to the ancient story.  Here Jews in the Camp Westerbork in Holland in 1943 light the Menorah.  Most in this photo would be transported to eastern extermination camps and be dead by the end of the war.

Because it is not described in the Torah or prescribed in ancient Law like Passover, Yom Kippur, and Rosh Hashanah, Hanukkah is officially considered a minor Jewish holiday.  But its cultural importance is far greater even than its religious significance.  Because of the many persecutions of Jews through the centuries and because the ritual could safely be performed in the privacy of the home and away from prying eyes, Hanukkah became a celebration of hope for deliverance from oppression as the Maccabees delivered the Temple from the defilers.  Stories about observances even in Nazi extermination camps have added special significance to the holiday for many. 

Outside of the religious ritual, many cultural aspects have been attached to the holiday.  Those we see most commonly in the United States derive mostly from the Ashkenazi traditions of Eastern Europe.  First is the singing of the hymn Ma’oz Tzur, six stanzas which praise God for his protection, and which recount the persecutions from the time of the Babylonian Captivity.  Other songs and Psalms and songs are sung depending on various traditions.  Traditionally children were given small bags of gelt—toy coins or chocolate coins wrapped in golden foil. In much of the West, and now more frequently in Israel, small gifts are also given children each night.  

Children often use their gelt to play a gambling game with a traditional toy top—a dreidel, imprinted on each of its four sides with a Hebrew letter. These letters are an acronym for the Hebrew Nes Gadol Haya Sham—“a great miracle happened there.” 

The addition of Cheese to the Hanukah table in some traditions incorporates the older story of defiance and resistance--the beheading of the invading Assyrian general Holfernes by the pious widow Judith.  It was a popular, if gory subject for Renaissance artists. This one is by Florentine Cristofano Allori in 1613.

The holiday is also celebrated with special foods.  Because oil is central to the story, foods fried in oil are traditional, most notably latkes—potato pancakes—and sufganiot—deep fried doughnuts.  Some traditions also eat cheese in commemoration of Judith, a pious widow who saved her village by plying Holofernes, an Assyrian general, with cheese and wine and then cutting off his head.  This older story is associated in some branches of Judaism with Hanukkah because Judith is believed to have been the aunt or great aunt of Judah Maccabee.