Immigration and Human Rights: “1492”

Despite the substantial social and religious differences between Lazarus and the Russian Jewish immigrants that she championed, Lazarus could find grounds for empathy with Russian refugees in the deep history of her own family as members of the Jewish diaspora. This becomes especially clear in her sonnet titled “1492,” which reads

In the events of 1492, identified by Lazarus in the poem as a “two-faced year,” Lazarus found precedent for the pogroms that contributed to Russian Jewish immigration during her adult life, and she also found profoundly personal connections to her own family history. As a Jewish woman of Sephardic descent, Lazarus could claim ancestry from Jewish people expelled from Spain after the Christian reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula, and so the story of 1492 is an intensely personal one for her. The year 1492 was also one in which Columbus made landfall in Hispaniola, meaning that one avenue of escape for Jewish exiles was to the Americas. The year 1492 is “two-faced” for Lazarus in that it was both a disaster for Spanish Jews and the opening of a new possibility. Lazarus does not, unfortunately, acknowledge the ways in which 1492 could be seen as a year of catastrophe for both the indigenous peoples of America or for Africans who would be enslaved in the Western Hemisphere, but she does offer a sense of the complexities of the year’s events from the specific perspective of the Sephardic Jewish community. She particularly emphasizes the idea that immigration to North America could offer possibilities that were unavailable in Christian-dominated Europe and Muslim-dominated North Africa.

Lazarus’s depiction of American identity in “1492” is aspirational, even prophetic. When she attributes words to the year, they echo the words of the prophet Isaiah from the Hebrew Bible: “Ho, all who weary” resembles in subject matter and cadence the opening verse of Isaiah 55 in many English-language translations. She imagines the Western Hemisphere as a place where racial and religious bigotry can be deprived of their power, and she looks to an egalitarian, pluralistic future in which “race or creed or rank” can no longer provide grounds for discrimination. Even though Lazarus’s own family’s immigration to North America preceded the American Revolution, she still can find grounds in that past immigrant experience for supporting the aspirations of nineteenth-century Russian Jewish immigrants who in many ways bear little resemble to an elite Sephardic New York poet.

Immigration and Exile in Texas

Perhaps one of Lazarus’s most curious poems of the immigrant experience is her depiction of a Russian Jewish immigrant family in Texas, a state that Lazarus never visited. Lazarus’s poem “In Exile” has been praised highly for its lyricism by John Hollander, the literary critic who edited the most readily available edition of her poems, even as it has been criticized by Lazarus’s biographer Esther Schor for what Schor regarded as some clumsy archaisms (Hollander xviii). The poem begins with what Lazarus calls an “Extract from a letter of a Russian refugee in Texas”: “Since that day till now our life is one unbroken paradise. We live a true brotherly life. Every evening after supper we take a seat under the mighty oak and sing our songs” (77). The quotation is completely idyllic in its description of the immigrant experience: the new immigrants in Texas have found relief from prior sufferings, and Texas itself seems to have become a sort of promised land for these immigrants, who maintain their distinctive religious traditions by “singing [their] songs” in exile.

This extract leads into a poem that is a mixture of conventional post-romantic nature poetry and a reflection on both the sorrows of exile from one’s homeland and the hope of a better future in a hostland that seems rich with promise. The opening stanza of “In Exile” could have been written by virtually any post-romantic poet, and it is rich with the sensuousness that students of British romanticism would associate with the poetry of John Keats. The stanza sets up an agricultural scene that speaks to each of the five senses:

Lazarus provides a scene that is full of visual, sonic, and tactile elements, and she even invokes the smell of the earth that her Russian immigrants in Texas are tilling. Archaisms like “kine” and “glebe,” in tandem with the rich natural description in the scene, make clear that this is pastoral poetry, even as the epigraph has already indicated that Lazarus is concerned with the current situation of immigrants to the United States.

The second stanza turns from the scene itself to the subjective feelings of the immigrants, who find that Texas has offered them a kind of agricultural paradise.

The Jewish immigrants in Texas are here presented as farmers who have, by means of vigorous labor, made the land yield sustenance. The expression “unused tillers of the soil” points to the fact that this runs counter both to stereotypes about Jewish immigrants and to the past of ghetto life in Eastern Europe. It also serves to reassure Lazarus’s non-Jewish readers, and indeed Jewish readers from Lazarus’s own social class and cultural background, that the aspirations of Russian Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution in Russia are ultimately similar to those of other Americans.

The third stanza makes a significant turn from the peaceful pastoral imagery of the first two stanzas. Now the profound experiences of loss and pain that have brought these immigrants to the United States during the nineteenth century come to the fore.

Lazarus’s dictum that “surcease of pain” is “Life’s sharpest rapture” is heightened by the idyllic descriptions that make up the opening stanzas. Lazarus builds to this observation through a series of examples that reveal that these exiles have been hunted in their homelands, and therefore have a tremendous experience of pain from which to recover in their new hostland. They are like the “hounded stag” that escapes, the bird that has become “unimprisoned,” the martyr for an unspecified faith, who is “granted respite” from torture, and the pardoned prisoner previously condemned to die. Each of these images builds in emotional power upon those that precede it, and Lazarus’s description of the suffering of the Jewish minority in Russia provides an explanation of why exhausting manual labor in the hot Texas sun could seem like paradise.

After suggesting that the Russian Jewish immigrants she describes share similar aspirations with earlier generations of migrants to North America, she then acknowledges the religious and cultural differences between these new immigrants and those who had come previously:

This stanza is the first point at which the Jewish identity of Lazarus’s exiles is made explicit. Notably, Lazarus ties the necessity of a welcome to Jewish immigrants from Russia to the brutal history of Christian anti-Semitism and asks her readers, whether elite Jewish Americans of Sephardic and German descent or non-Jewish Americans, to admire their courage in the face of persecution, a quality for which some of the earliest migrants to North America—New England Puritans and French Huguenots—had been praised by American Protestant writers.

This invocation of shared persecution turns directly into an invocation of religious liberty. Lazarus identifies what the Jewish immigrants in Texas most desire:

A powerful aspect of Lazarus’s account of Judaism is that it includes Spinoza, a secular figure, alongside Moses, the central religious figure in the faith. Lazarus includes the Texan immigrants in a Jewish national and intellectual tradition that is related to Judaism as a system of religious belief, but also highly independent of such a system, as Spinoza was expelled from the Jewish community in the Netherlands for his heretical religious beliefs. For Lazarus, what ultimately defines the desires of these immigrants is a combination of religious and intellectual freedom: the freedom to practice Judaism according to the Law of Moses and the freedom to deviate from religious tradition by following one’s own intellectual and moral compass, like the great secular Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza.

In her conclusion, Lazarus returns to the emotional complexity of the immigrant experience: so much has been gained for these refugee farmers, but they still bear in mind what has been lost: a homeland in which their ancestors had lived for centuries. As a result, the triumph of these immigrants, as expressed in their songs, is tinged with melancholy:

Lazarus delves deeply into the psychology of the Russian Jewish immigrant experience here: their experiences in Texas represent a profound rupture with their life in Russia, but also a continuation of the broader experience of Jewish exile in the world of the diaspora. In this sense, the Jewish American immigrant experience as discussed by Lazarus is a continuation of a longer experience of displacement that has characterized the Jewish diaspora, even as it offers the hope that here the old story of exile can be re-written.

Lazarus’s Poetic Monument: “The New Colossus”

“In Exile” is not, of course, the poem about immigration for which Lazarus is most remembered. That honor goes to “The New Colossus,” the poem that appears on the base of the Statue of Liberty. Like “In Exile,” “The New Colossus” is a poem that rewards close reading. In her most famous poem, Lazarus writes

When Lazarus published a collected version of her poetry near the end of her life, as Schor points out, she chose to begin that volume with “The New Colossus,” and it is, in many ways, the purest expression of her emphasis on exile and migration in her poetry. John Hollander has described this poem as an exceptionally well-crafted sonnet, in addition to its powerful cultural resonance. The poem, commissioned as a verbal companion to the Statue of Liberty, begins by distinguishing that statue from the Colossus of ancient Rhodes. Her size makes the comparison inevitable, but she offers a striking contrast: as a woman, as a token of welcome rather than conquest, she signifies a rejection of the idea that national greatness is defined by military prowess, suggesting instead that a nation that binds together immigrants can be more powerful than a nation that conquers foreign lands. The crucial epithet in Lazarus’s presentation of the statue is “Mother of Exiles.” As a representation of the United States, the Statue of Liberty for Lazarus represents the possibility that a nation can achieve greatness by nurturing diversity and showing compassion for those who are displaced. The words attributed to the statue, asking for the “tired,” “poor,” “huddled masses,” the “tempest-tost” and “homeless” make the American experience synonymous with the immigrant experience, and they explicitly defy any invidious comparisons between worthy and unworthy immigrants. If Lazarus’s poem has become so familiar as to be a cliché, its familiarity can obscure the power of the statement that it makes about what it means to be an American and what it suggests about the meaning of national greatness. Centrally, Lazarus’s sonnet represents the United States as being distinctive precisely insofar as it welcomes immigrants of all socio-economic statuses, religious backgrounds and beliefs, and places of national origin. Lazarus’s patriotism is thus defined by inclusion rather than exclusion, by a sense of the value of diversity rather than by an impulse toward homogeneity, and by a devotion to the possibility that divergent cultures and religions can strengthen American identity.

Immigration and the Living Jewish Experience in the United States

Perhaps the poem that most defines Lazarus’s status as a poet of immigration is neither her celebration of Texas from the standpoint of Russian refugees nor her iconic celebration of the United States as a welcoming hostland. Rather it is a poem that she wrote directly in response to a poem by one of her most revered older contemporaries, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

In his poem, “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport,” Longfellow had written about one of the oldest Jewish communities in the United States, one that pre-dated the American Revolution and that had famously received an affirming letter from George Washington, the first President of the United States. Washington had written to address precisely the concerns about religious discrimination that Longfellow and Lazarus would discuss in their poetry. Addressing the community at Newport as a whole, Washington wrote:

This letter is frequently remembered as a landmark in the history of religious tolerance and even pluralism in the United States, but it also constitutes a gesture of welcome to a community that, while it was already present in the United States at its founding, was nonetheless frequently treated as falling outside an American mainstream that, especially in its early years, was defined religiously by Protestantism. Washington’s usage of direct quotation from the Hebrew Bible alongside his denunciations of persecution and discrimination make the letter especially powerful.

In many ways, Longfellow’s treatment of Judaism is quite sympathetic, even affirming, and it echoes the sentiments of Washington’s famous letter to the community. This is not an entirely surprising dimension of Longfellow’s poetry, as Longfellow belonged to one of the most theologically liberal and welcoming of Protestant denominations in the nineteenth-century United States, the Unitarian Church, and his tendency to be ecumenical in religious matters is characteristic of many nineteenth-century American literary figures. Longfellow shows considerable respect for the rich intellectual history of Judaism, and he deplores the bigotry that forced Jewish people from Spain and Portugal to leave their homes in Europe for the prospect of a new life in the Americas. Indeed, Longfellow’s discussion of Christian bigotry against the Jewish people can be quite biting, and he leaves no doubt where his sympathies lie:

(336, l. 29-43)

Longfellow dramatized precisely the intensity of anti-Semitic prejudice in Europe to which Lazarus would respond in her sonnet “1492.” He forcefully rebukes “Christian hate” and “persecution, merciless and blind,” and he makes clear that he sides with the “Ishmaels and Hagars of mankind,” who have been driven from their native lands, against their persecutors. Moreover, he invokes the language of the Hebrew Bible and the practices of Jewish sacred observances as he catalogues the persecution that Jewish people had faced. Despite his sympathy, Longfellow’s conclusion to the poem was grim.

Longfellow wrote with considerable sympathy for the Jewish victims of Christian anti-Semitism, but the sympathy he offered was compromised by the suggestion that Jewishness was a dying identity. This attenuated sympathy was precisely what led Lazarus to respond so forcefully.

Lazarus’s response to Longfellow’s seeming failure to acknowledge the flourishing of Jewish life in the United States was impassioned. In her poem “The Jewish Synagogue at Newport,” Lazarus engaged many aspects of Longfellow’s poem: its frank acknowledgment of the history of Christian anti-Semitism; its connection of the history of American Jewish people to the long history of Judaism around the world and in sacred texts; and, perhaps most importantly and contentiously, its implication that Jewish life was fading in the United States. This last premise Lazarus rejected forcefully. The concluding stanza of Lazarus’s poem emphasizes that Judaism is a living tradition in the United States:

Lazarus’s conclusion represents a powerful reversal of Longfellow’s image of Judaism as a vanishing religion. For Lazarus, as for Longfellow, the long historical past of Judaism is an important part of the story, but Lazarus emphasizes the ways in which this long past remains full of life in her own present time. As Esther Schor aptly notes, “Between this poem and Longfellow’s lies the difference between an elegy for a ‘dead nation’ and a song of praise, an authentic legacy of devotion” (20). For Lazarus, the “burning bush” of Jewish religion and self-understanding remains as vital in her own lifetime as it had ever been. As a result, Jewish immigration to the United States becomes framed as part of the worldwide history of the Jewish diaspora, and Lazarus is able to identify in a profound way with her impoverished and oppressed coreligionists seeking refuge in the United States. Through this identification with Jewish refugees, exiles, and migrants around the globe, Lazarus is able to create a profound sense of communion with the immigrant experiences of the multi-religious, transnational tide of migration to the nineteenth and early twentieth-century United States.

Notably, Lazarus’s response to Longfellow was not a confrontation with nativism, an impulse that she certainly had to struggle against, given the fact that in the years surrounding Lazarus’s birth in 1849, one of the most influential political parties in the United States was the virulently anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party, and that in the years following her death, the Ku Klux Klan was reconstituted as an anti-immigrant organization that garnered widespread support among white Protestants (Bennett 105-117; 208-214). Lazarus’s response to Longfellow is so fraught precisely because he was not a bigot, but rather a poet of broad sympathies who acknowledged the shameful history of Christian anti-Semitism and denounced it, as his most recent biographer, Charles Calhoun, has shown (200). Responding to the Know-Nothings and the Klan would have been pointless: given their bigotry, the only response possible to them was steadfast resistance. But Longfellow, as a sympathetic religious liberal, someone whose views on many issues and on the nature, value, and importance of art came quite close to those of Lazarus herself, required a response. If ecumenically-minded Unitarians like Longfellow viewed Jewish identity as a relic of the past and Judaism as a dying faith, then the task of defending Jewish immigrants in Lazarus’s present would be undermined. Lazarus’s response to Longfellow, then, is to emphasize that the Jewish community in the United States was alive, robust, and flourishing, and, therefore, not in need of elegies but of allies. As Lazarus’s career continued, more and more of this robust lived Jewish experience in the United States would be as a result of Jewish immigration.

Lazarus thus bridged an important gap between new immigrants and Americans who had been in the country for generation but had not forgotten their immigrant ancestors. Lazarus was sufficiently ensconced in the Anglo-American literary elite that she could argue with Longfellow in print and maintain friendships with Ralph Waldo Emerson (to whom Lazarus dedicated a poem, “To R.W.E.”) and James Russell Lowell in the United States and make connections with Robert Browning and William Morris in England (Young 24, 108, 234, 111). In some ways, her elite status constituted an obstacle to her sympathies with Russian Jewish immigrants who lacked her educational background, but it also meant that she was able to communicate her support for newer immigrants in ways that resonated across American society. Ultimately, her increasing support and advocacy for immigrants increased her appreciation for the complexities of Jewish history and of the lived community of Jewish people in the nineteenth-century United States, as illustrated in her response to Longfellow.

This emphasis on the living Jewish experience relates closely to Lazarus’s understanding of the immigrant experience in the United States. Lazarus was not just a mournful chronicler of the challenges that immigrants faced, but rather a vigorous champion of their rights and their potential. Moreover, Lazarus did not imagine immigrants as simply fading into the background of American culture and society, but rather as helping to create a new picture of the society that they joined. As part of the Jewish minority in the United States, Lazarus vigorously defended, not just the rights of Jewish people, but the sense that the nation became morally and intellectually better and stronger by embracing its Jewish minority. As Schor argues in the concluding pages of her biography, Lazarus does not just defend the rights of immigrants to assimilate to the culture of their new country, she also insists on the ways in which the country can grow and prosper by assimilating itself to the values of its newest citizens.

Works Cited