Lazarus, Emma
Emma Lazarus
Born July 22, 1849
Died November 19, 1887
New York, New York
Author of the famous poem that appears on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, and Jewish rights advocate
"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…"
I f Emma Lazarus had done nothing else in life, writing the poem "The New Colossus" would have preserved her name in American history. Engraved on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty (see entry in volume 2) in New York Harbor, the poem seems to capture the spirit of the woman holding a torch aloft, as if to light the way for the flood of European immigrants streaming into the United States when the lines were written in 1883: "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." The facts that lie behind the poem, and its author, reveal the much greater complexities of immigration to the United States.
Growing up in New York
Emma Lazarus grew up in a privileged household in New York City. Her family was descended from Sephardic Jews, a large community that lived in Spain and Portugal during the Middle Ages (about 500–1400). In 1492, the same year that Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) discovered the Western Hemisphere on a voyage paid for by the king and queen of Spain, the Jews were expelled from Spain, part of a program by the Catholic Church to ensure that everyone accepted the same religion. At first, some Jews went to neighboring Portugal, but they were also expelled from that country. Eventually, some Sephardic Jews traveled to the Portuguese colony of Brazil, and from there some made their way to New York years before the American Revolution of 1776.
In Spain, the Sephardic Jews had been integrated into the larger society, unlike Jews in northern Europe, notably Germany, who had been forced to live apart from the Christian population. One result was that Sephardic Jews expected to participate in the society around them, and Emma Lazarus's family was no exception. Her father, Moses Lazarus, was a wealthy businessman who had friends in the upper class of New York City society. He belonged to exclusive social clubs, such as the Union Club, and built an elaborate summer house in Newport, Rhode Island, where other socially prominent New York families also owned homes.
Emma Lazarus did not attend school; her education was provided by private tutors hired by her father. She grew up in a family that valued culture—painting, music, and literature—and she took pride in her heritage, which reached back to a time when Spain was a scientific and cultural leader. But as she was growing up, winds of change were blowing across the Atlantic and through the streets of New York.
The surge in immigration
Starting just a few years before Lazarus was born, a new surge of immigrants had started coming to the United States, and to New York in particular. These were Germans who had been hurt by both widespread crop failures and by political unrest that resulted from the rapid growth of industry in Germany. From Ireland came another enormous wave of immigrants, driven from their land by the failure of the potato crop, the main source of food. Unlike most earlier immigrants to the United States, Protestants who had come from England and Scotland, many of the new immigrants in the 1840s and 1850s were Catholics. Most were poor. In the case of the Irish, some families had spent their last money on buying tickets to sail to New York in order to escape death by starvation. This new wave of poor, Catholic immigrants disturbed some Americans, who feared that the Catholic Church would try to exert influence over American politics by directing the votes of Irish immigrants who became citizens. Anti-Catholic riots occurred in several East Coast cities, and Catholic churches were attacked and burned.
A movement of native-born Americans who called themselves Know Nothings (because, when asked about their movement, they replied: "I know nothing") began campaigning for restrictions on immigration, a much longer waiting period to become a citizen, and a ban on foreign-born people holding public office. In California, where large numbers of Chinese had arrived looking for gold during the California Gold Rush of 1848, similar anti-immigrant sentiments arose, directed against the Chinese.
In most respects, Lazarus was little affected by the rising tide of religious intolerance. Most of her friends were Christians, and her immediate family was even shunned by other members of the Sephardic Jewish community for their failure to observe the practices and customs of Judaism (the religion of Jews, who believe in the Old Testament of the Bible). In the meantime, Lazarus was building a reputation as a writer and a poet. When she was sixteen, her father paid to publish a collection of her poems, Poems and Translations Written Between the Ages of Fourteen and Seventeen. Critics kindly described the poems of the sort often written by young women of Lazarus's age. Nevertheless, the self-confident Lazarus sent a copy to Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) in Concord, Massachusetts, who was one of the most prominent American poets then living. He replied, and Lazarus and Emerson maintained a long correspondence, marked by at least two invitations by Emerson for Lazarus to visit him at his home.
Lazarus published a second book of poems, Admetus and Other Poems, in 1871, and it received more positive reviews. The Illustrated London News said she was "a poet of rare original power." Lazarus continued publishing books, including a novel, Alide: An Episode in Goethe's Life, published in 1874, as well as a steady stream of poems published in popular magazines. In 1876, Lazarus completed a play, The Spagnoletto, which was privately published but never performed. In addition to her collections of poems, Lazarus also published magazine articles about the arts and literature. She occasionally toured Europe. Her name was well known and respected among the important writers of the era.
Despite her success and acceptance, she was aware of a social undercurrent of anti-Semitism, or anti-Jew, an attitude that came to the surface in the summer of 1877. In Saratoga, New York, a fashionable summer resort for New Yorkers, the owner of the Grand Union Hotel refused to accept as a guest Joseph Seligman (1819–1880), a well-known Jewish banker from New York. The hotel owner, Judge Henry Hilton (1824–1899), explained that he thought Christians did not want to stay in the same hotel as Jews, and that this was hurting his business. It was an era before laws prohibited discrimination, and although the hotel owner insisted that his policy was really aimed at Jews from Germany, rather than the long-established Sephardic Jews, the incident marked a turning point in the life of Lazarus. Although her family had not been turned away, the hotel's policy showed that Jews were not regarded in the same light as others in society. Lazarus later wrote to a friend that she was "perfectly conscious that this contempt and hatred underlies the general tone of the community towards us [Jews]."
Advocate for Jews
Lazarus had never made any secret about her religion, and she had often written about Jewish themes. In the 1880s, the topic of Jews and their treatment by society became her principal theme, sparked in part by a wave of organized massacres—called "pogroms"—of Jews in southern Russia. For the last eight years of her life, Lazarus became one of the leading American writers on the subject of anti-Semitism and abuse of Jews. She wrote about the subject both in popular magazines and in publications read by Jews. Lazarus was among the first writers to urge Jews fleeing persecution in Europe to go to Palestine and establish a new Jewish nation on the site of ancient Israel. The idea of establishing a separate Jewish nation later came to be called Zionism and eventually resulted in the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1947.
Lazarus also took direct action to help Jewish refugees. She visited camps set up for Jewish refugees on Ward's Island, in New York Harbor, and volunteered at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a group dedicated to assisting Jewish immigrants. Her writings led to the establishment of the Hebrew Technical Institute, designed to teach Jewish immigrants skills as mechanics. In 1883, she organized the Society for the Improvement and Colonization of East European Jews and tried to raise money from wealthy Jews in Europe to support it. After a year, the organization disbanded for lack of funds, however.
In 1883, in the midst of her work with Jews fleeing persecution in Russia, Lazarus submitted a poem as part of a fund-raising event designed to pay for the pedestal to be built under the Statue of Liberty. Earlier, France had announced that as a token of its friendship with the United States, it would donate a huge statue by sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi (1834–1904) to sit in New York Harbor, but it expected the United States to provide a base. The statue, which eventually became one of the most widely recognized symbols of the United States, was modeled after Bartholdi's mother (the face) and wife (the arms). In one arm, the tall figure of a woman held a tablet on which was engraved "1776," a reference to the year the Declaration of Independence, the document that declared that "all men are created equal," was signed and the United States became an independent republic ruled by the will of the people, overthrowing the rule of the British king. The other arm was holding a torch, symbolizing the freedom gained with the declaration of a republic. It was only later that the Statue of Liberty came to symbolize a beacon light for immigrants arriving from Europe.
"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, 1883
The title of Lazarus's poem was "The New Colossus," and her reference to "the brazen giant of Greek fame, / With conquering limbs astride from land to land" recalled the Colossus of Rhodes, a statue built on the Mediterranean island
of Rhodes in 282 b.c.e. That statue of Helios, the Greek god of the sun, stood with one foot on either side of the entrance to the harbor of the island; its size made it one of the so-called ancient wonders of the world. (An earthquake brought down the original Colossus of Rhodes fifty-six years after its construction.) In mentioning the statue, Lazarus also meant to evoke the grandeur and ideals of ancient Greece, which included the democratic form of government, in which people vote for their leaders, while at the same time reminding the reader that this statue was a "new Colossus," symbolizing the break with the ancient world represented by the United States.
Lazarus wrote the poem at a time when she had become deeply involved with the plight of Jews in Europe affected by the Russian pogroms, which had touched off a wave of Jewish immigration to the United States. At about the same time, poor, landless peasants from Italy were also starting to arrive in New York, a southern European version of the flood of Irish immigrants of the late 1840s and 1850s. It was to these arriving immigrants that Lazarus referred when she wrote of "your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me…."
Although her poem would later come to be associated with the Statue of Liberty, the association did not take place in Lazarus's lifetime. The statue was erected in 1886, just one year before Lazarus died, of cancer, at age thirty-eight. The poem lay forgotten until 1903, when the last five lines were engraved on a plaque and affixed to the statue's base.
With the addition of Lazarus's poem, the Statue of Liberty took on a new meaning. Rather than a monument to the republican form of government, as intended by its original French sponsor, it became a monument to the mass wave of migration that was, in 1903, delivering an unprecedented number of Europeans onto American shores. The poem symbolized for Americans and immigrants alike the image of the United States as a refuge.
That image of the United States was not to last. Beginning in 1921, the United States passed a series of laws that made it much harder for immigrants to enter the country. A 1924 law sharply reduced immigration from Europe by restricting the number of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. The same concerns that had sparked the Know Nothing movement of the 1840s and 1850s had been renewed seventy years later.
—James L. Outman
For More Information
Books
Hayden, Richard S. Restoring the Statue of Liberty: Sculpture, Structure, Symbol. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986.
Jacob, Heinrich Eduard. The World of Emma Lazarus. New York: Schocken Books, 1949.
Merriam, Eve. Emma Lazarus, Woman with a Torch. New York: Citadel Press, 1956.
Young, Bette Roth. Emma Lazarus in Her World: Life and Letters. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1995.
Periodicals
Bodnar, John. "Symbols and Servants: Immigrant America and the Limits of Public History." Journal of American History (June 1986): p. 137.
Kleiger, Estelle F. "'I Lift My Lamp Beside the Golden Door!'" American History Illustrated (June 1986): p. 30.
Web Sites
"Emma Lazarus, 1849–1887." Jewish Women's Archive.http://www.jwa.org/exhibits/lazarus/el1.htm (accessed on March 18, 2004).
Lazarus, Emma. "The Poems of Emma Lazarus (Volume 1: Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic)." Project Gutenberg.http://digital.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=3295 (accessed on March 18, 2004).