By-paths in Hebraic bookland

by Israel Abrahams

THE POEMS OF EMMA LAZARUS

Affixed to the colossal monument, which dominates and ennobles the entrance to New York harbor, is, as all the world knows, a poem by Emma Lazarus (1849-1887). It commemorates her and her genius. Liberty, “a mighty woman with a torch,” stands there as the “Mother of Exiles,” crying with silent lips to the older world:

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.

This sonnet expresses both sides of the writer’s idealism: her devotion to America and her love for the Jews. She wrote much as a Hellenist, but her genuine outbursts were stimulated by two crises: the American War of North and South in the sixties, and the Russian Persecutions in the eighties. In a sense it is unfortunate that the May Laws came so late. Emma Lazarus had but few years to live after the promulgation of the legislation which sent forth, from their country, those myriads of Russian Jews, whose presence has so profoundly altered Jewish conditions in various lands. Her Jewish poems are full indeed of fire, but it is the fire of an immature passion. When she died, she had only begun to find herself as the singer of Israel’s cause.

Even so, however, her songs will not die. For she realized that Israel is “the slave of the Idea.” She did not fully grasp what the Idea was, however. Israel’s migrations—including those from Russia to Texas—were all, she felt, towards a destined end, and that end—Freedom:

Freedom to love the law that Moses brought,
To sing the songs of David, and to think
The thoughts Gabirol to Spinoza taught,
Freedom to dig the common earth, to drink
The universal air—for this they sought
Refuge o’er wave and continent, to link
Egypt with Texas in their mystic chain,
And truth’s perpetual lamp forbid to wane.

Freedom is part of Israel’s Idea; it is not the whole of it.

EMMA LAZARUS

In her new-found enthusiasm for the Hebrew language she translated much from the medieval poets. But she will always come to one’s mind as the bard of Hanukkah. There she comes nearest to the Idea of which Israel is the missioner. Cheyne, in one of his finest works (The Origin and Religious Contents of the Psalter, pp. 18, 104), quotes two stanzas from her Feast of Lights as an apt commentary on Psalms 79 and 118, contrasting the desolation of Zion and the re-dedication:

They who had camped within the mountain-pass,
Couched on the rock, and tented ’neath the sky,
Who saw from Mizpah’s heights the tangled grass
Choke the wide Temple-courts, the altar lie
Disfigured and polluted—who had flung
Their faces on the stones, and mourned aloud
And rent their garments, wailing with one tongue,
Crushed as a wind-swept bed of reeds is bowed,
Even they by one voice fired, one heart of flame,
Though broken reeds, had risen, and were men,
They rushed upon the spoiler and o’ercame,
Each arm for freedom had the strength of ten.
Now is their mourning into dancing turned,
Their sackcloth doffed for garments of delight,
Week-long the festive torches shall be burned,
Music and revelry wed day with night.

One could quote much else from Emma Lazarus; her pagan poems written under classic and romantic influences; her renderings of Heine; her historical tragedy, the Dance of Death, dedicated to George Eliot; her prose epistles, in one of which occurs her famous use of a Hebrew grammatical form. In the Hebrew verb there is an intensive voice, and so the Jews are the intensive form of any nationality whose language and customs they adopt. Or again, one might cite her New Ezekiel, her Bar Kochba, her Talmud Legends, her Rashi in Prague, or, better still, her lines from Nahum’s Spring Song:

Now the dreary winter’s over,
Fled with him are grief and pain;
When the trees their bloom recover,
Then the soul is born again!

But her hand is always firmest when her theme is the Maccabæan heroism. This subject gave her the opportunity which her nationalistic mood needed. We have read part of one of her poems on the subject, let us read another in full, though it is perhaps the most familiar of her compositions. Its title is “The Banner of the Jew.” While it repeats the thought and almost the phrases of the Feast of Lights, it has more of the lyric lightness of touch. It runs thus:

Wake, Israel, wake! Recall to-day
The glorious Maccabean rage,
The sire heroic, hoary-gray,
His five-fold lion-lineage:
The Wise, the Elect, the Help-of-God,
The Burst-of-Spring, the Avenging Rod.
From Mizpeh’s mountain-ridge they saw
Jerusalem’s empty streets, her shrine
Laid waste where Greeks profaned the Law,
With idol and with pagan sign.
Mourners in tattered black were there,
With ashes sprinkled on their hair.
Then, from the stony peak there rang
A blast to ope the graves: down poured
The Maccabean clan, who sang
Their battle-anthem to the Lord.
Five heroes lead, and following, see
Ten thousand rush to victory!
Oh for Jerusalem’s trumpet now,
To blow a blast of shattering power,
To wake the sleepers high and low,
And rouse them to the urgent hour!
No hand for vengeance—but to save,
A thousand naked swords should wave.
O deem not dead that martial fire,
Say not the mystic flame is spent!
With Moses’ law and David’s lyre,
Your ancient strength remains unbent.
Let but an Ezra rise anew,
To lift the Banner of the Jew!
A rag, a mock at first—erelong
When men have bled and women wept,
To guard its precious folds from wrong,
Even they who shrunk, even they who slept,
Shall leap to bless it, and to save.
Strike! for the brave revere the brave!

This is bold and moving, but the reader cannot fail to observe that the metre and the passion are derived from Byron’s Isles of Greece. The Hebrew’s protest against Greece must, forsooth, owe its form and sentiment to the Saxon’s plea for Greece! The Jewish muse is still in leading strings. The true, full song of Israel’s hope is yet to come. None the less, the genius of Emma Lazarus struck truly the key-note to that song. We hear its echo still.