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: