Early Jewish Singers of the American Dream

Rather than discuss how America treated the Jews, I’ve decided to address how Jewish speakers, Jewish singers, and Jewish poets treated America.¹

In 1883, a campaign was under way to raise funds for the base of a giant statue to be placed in Bedloe’s Island, at the mouth of New York Harbor. The statue, a gift from the Franco-American Friendship League, was the work of renowned sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi. Its theme was “Liberty Enlightening the World” and was intended as a tribute to world friendship and liberty. At the suggestion of Ralph Waldo Emerson, an American Jewish poet named Emma Lazarus submitted a poem which raised $2,500. The statue was completed in 1886, installed, and dedicated by President Grover Cleveland. The poem was entitled “The New Colossus.” In 1903, a plaque containing Emma Lazarus’s poem was placed on the statue’s base. As a preface to our theme let us review its immortal words:

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 lightening, 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!”²

The title is a reference to the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. The “imprisoned lightening,” which is the statue’s flame, refers to the biblical general Barak, whose name means lightening and whom the prophetess Deborah urged to fight the Canaanite Sisera in Judges 4:4–7. The Hebrew description of Deborah—Eishet Lapidot, “wife of Lapidot”—also means “woman with a torch.” In Judges 5, Deborah is referred to as a Mother in Israel. Emma Lazarus suggested subtly—but in terms that no educated nineteenth-century American could fail to understand—that the prophetess Deborah was a fit symbol for American Liberty. Emma’s dream of America as a homeland for all the tired, huddled masses, yearning to breathe free, the homeless wretched refuse of all the ancient lands of the entire world, echoed an ancient Jewish dream. Ever since the days when the exiles of Israel sat down by the waters of Babylon and wondered, How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? they have expressed their yearning for God’s kingdom here on earth in poetic expressions, poems, speeches, and songs.

The Jews in Early America

The Jewish immigration to America from 1654 (or perhaps 1492) onward is no exception. I want to share with you some of the literary fruits of that encounter of the Jewish people with America. The theme of this exploration attempts to establish the obvious generalization that American Jewish literature in its early years identified the new world with God’s promised kingdom in the days of the Messiah. Emma Lazarus closes this period, but in a sense, she also opens it, for she was born to Moses and Esther Nathan, a prominent fourth-generation Jewish family, one of the oldest in New York City. The Lazaruses proudly traced their genealogical roots back to the original immigration of Jews to the New World when, in 1654, twenty-three Jewish refugees landed in Dutch New Amsterdam. They were fleeing from Brazil, which had just been reconquered by the Portuguese, thereby reintroducing the dangers of religious oppression. Although these twenty-three Jews were Dutch subjects with civil rights in Holland, the New Netherlands governor, Pieter Stuyvesant, did not want to accept them. Those twenty-three struggled for the right to trade and practice Judaism. By 1657, they were able to carry on due to vigorous intercession on the part of Amsterdam Jewry, Dutch fear of English competition, and the imperatives of mercantilism. In a very few years, however, the new Jewish community began to fade because of larger opportunities, especially in the West Indies. By 1660, the community was moribund.

In 1664, the English eliminated the Dutch wedge between Long Island and Maryland. New Amsterdam became New York. Under the English, synagogue communities were established in six towns: Montreal, Newport, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, and Savannah. By 1700 there were two to three hundred Jewish communities in the country. By 1776, there were twenty-five hundred. Until 1720, most were of Sephardic origin. After that year, central and eastern European Jews predominated. By 1700, under the English, Jews were permitted to sell at retail, to practice crafts, and to worship openly.

Some colonial Jews engaged in trades apart from the norm: a number were artisans, tailors, soap makers, distillers, tobacconists, saddlers, bakers, silversmiths, and farmers. Francis Salvador was a planter; some in Georgia ran cattle in the pine barrens. The economic aristocrats among the Jews were the army purveyors who provisioned the British armies on the North American continent. During the frequent wars of the eighteenth century, Jews also engaged in privateering. These economic activities were exceptional.

The typical Jew in the coastal colonies was a small shopkeeper selling hardware, dry goods, and liquors. If successful, he became a merchant or shipper. As an exporter, he might exchange American raw materials for English consumer wares. A merchant shipper (such as Aaron Lopez) was also an industrialist, contracting for anything from a work apron to a ship. A number of Jews were members of the United Company of Spermaceti Chandlers, the first American organization to attempt to control the production and price of candles. Some of the candle manufacturers sent out their own whalers. A few entrepreneurs were engaged in the slave trade. Most Canadian Jews were in the fur trade.

In the colonial period, the typical Jewish shopkeeper was an immigrant devoted to Judaism. He established a Kehilla, a congregation. Discipline, especially in matters of kashrut (dietary law), was constantly exercised but oftentimes ameliorated by the need not to offend, for there were too few Jews. Permanent cemeteries were established in 1678 in Newport and in 1682 in New York. No synagogue in North America had a rabbi until 1840, but each employed a Hazan (cantor), a schochet (slaughterer), and a shamash (servant). On occasion, the first two roles were combined in that of a Mohel (circumciser).

A sizable portion of the budget in these communities went for charitable works. Itinerants were constantly arriving from England, Europe, and Palestine. Impoverished members were granted loans, the sick and dying were provided for, and the community saw to burials. Rebbes (private teachers) were always available. By 1731, a school building had been erected in New York—Gershom Sexias, the first native-born American Hazan, received his education there. (His son, Joshua, taught Hebrew to a young man named Joseph Smith in Kirtland, Ohio.)

The typical American Jew of pre-Revolutionary America was of German origin, a shopkeeper, hard working, enterprising, religiously observant, uncouth, and untutored, but with sufficient learning to keep his books and write a simple business letter in English. By 1776, he had brought with him from Europe a sense of Jewish communalism, and he kept his congregation alive. He tended to be careless in matters of ritual. He seems not to have been in exile. America was home to him.

When the Revolution broke out in 1775, most Jews were Whigs. They had few ties to England and were determined to become first-class citizens. Many were fascinated by the Declaration of Independence. Quite a number were in the militia, and some served in the Continental Army as line soldiers and officers. Three officers attained relatively high rank. Jewish merchants ventured into privateering and blockade running. Most provided consumer goods during the British blockade. The most notable Jewish rebel was the Polish immigrant Hayim Solomon, who served as an underground agent for the American forces while working for the British. When discovered, he fled to Philadelphia, where he became a bill broker. As such, he made available to Robert Morris, superintendent of finance, the funds for the successful expedition against Cornwallis.

Jews Embrace the New Republic

Independence did not at once improve the political status of the American Jew. In 1787, the Northwest Ordinance guaranteed that the Jew should be on the same footing as his fellow citizens in all new states. The Constitution, adopted a year later, gave him equality on the federal level. But most of these rights were still resident in the states. As late as 1820, only seven of the original thirteen states had recognized the Jews politically. Ultimately, men of talent who were Jews were appointed or elected town councilors, judges, and members of state legislatures.

Eventually, the synagogues were enlarged, and the status of the Hazan was elevated to that of the Christian minister. The Revolutionary period saw special organizations arise to care for the poor, the sick, and the dead. Jews became planters, merchant shippers, and land speculators. The firm of Cohen and Isaacs of Richmond employed Daniel Boone to survey their holdings in Kentucky. Jews went from banking and money lending to the stock exchange. By 1820, they were in law, medicine, engineering, education, and journalism. Many Jews in the post-Revolutionary period, especially in South Carolina, were people of education and culture. Some were artists or playwrights; all were cultural nationalists. Patriotism was no guarantee against Judeophobia and anti-Semitism, which increased as the Jews rose in wealth, prominence, and visibility. Those who entered politics and joined the Jeffersonians were vilified in the Federalist press. Jews seeking public office, and even Christians of Jewish descent, were frequently and viciously attacked. In 1760, two English translations of Hebrew prayer books appeared. After the Revolution, there were printed sermons, eulogies, a Hebrew grammar, and by 1820 a rather good polemic entitled Israel Vindicated.

The typical American Jew of the post-Revolutionary period was native born and completely acculturated. Intermarriage was not uncommon. While he was nominally a follower of tradition, he was often indifferent to the practices of his religion. Basically he was loyal to his Jewish community, attached to American and world Jewry by a strong sense of kinship. By 1820, there were about four thousand Jews in the United States. Even distant St. Louis had some Jews. Many of these were recent German immigrants who had drifted in after the Napoleonic wars. By the turn of the eighteenth century, central Europeans had already started a little Ashkenazi synagogue in Philadelphia. Within a generation, Ashkenazi culture dominated the American Jewish scene.

Reviewing their past, the early American Jews came to see their immigration to this new world as part of God’s divine plan for them. In 1784, David Franco Mendes wrote A History of the Great Men of Israel, which describes the early colonial period in biblical terms:

And it came to pass in the year 5414 (1654) that the Portuguese came back to Brazil, and from the Hollanders took their land by force. And God had compassion on his people, granted them favor and grace. . . . And all our people went down to the sea in ships, and spread sail and God led them to their destination to this land, and they . . . reached the end of the inhabited earth called New Holland. (1784)

And everywhere this new community went, it sang the glories of the New World.

The Sheftalls were a prominent family in Savannah, Georgia, in the eighteenth century. Mordecai Sheftall’s father, Benjamin, had emigrated from London in 1733 with the first group of Spanish Portuguese Jews. Benjamin Sheftall struggled to feed his family. Mordecai, however, became a well-to-do merchant. He used his substantial community influence and assets to secure land for the first Jewish cemetery in Georgia and later contributed heavily to the building of the first synagogue in the state. The Sheftalls organized the colonists’ cause in their community. All the men of the family joined the Continental Army. At the fall of Savannah to the British in late December 1778, Sheftall and his sons were taken as prisoners of war. After their release, he sent one of his sons back to England to trade, but urged his return, upon the Continental victory, in the following letter:

My dear son: . . .

What my feelings are on the occassion is easier immagined than described. For it must be supposed that every real well wisher to his country must feel him self happy to have lived to see this longe and bloody contest bro[ugh]t to so happy an issue. More especially, as we have obetained our independence, instead of those threats of bringing us with submission to the foot of the throne whose greatest mercies to Americans has been nothing but one continued scene of cruelty, of which you as well as my self have experienced our shares.

But thanks to the Almighty, it is now at an end. Of which happy event I sincerly congratulate you and all my friends. As an entier new scene will open it self, and we have the world to begin againe, I would have you come home as soon after the [Passover] holidays as possibly you can.³

In 1790 the first president of the United States paid a visit to Newport, Rhode Island. On that occasion, the Jewish community there sent the following message to George Washington:

Sir,

Permit the Children of the Stock of Abraham to approach you with the most cordial affection and esteem for your person and merits—and to join with our fellow-citizens in welcoming you to New Port.

With pleasure we reflect on those days—those days of difficulty and danger, when the God of Israel, who delivered David from the peril of the sword—shielded our head in the day of battle:—And we rejoice to think that the same Spirit, who rested in the bosom of the greatly beloved Daniel, enabling him to preside over the Provinces of the Babylonish Empire, rests, and ever will rest upon you, enabling you to discharge the arduous duties of the Chief Magistrate in these States.

Deprived as we have hitherto been of the invaluable rights of free citizens, we now, (with a deep sense of gratitude to the Almighty Disposer of all events) behold a Government, [(] erected by the Majesty of the People) a Government which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance—but generously affording to All liberty of conscience, and immunities of citizenship—deeming every one, of whatever nation, tongue, or language equal parts of the great governmental machine. This so ample and extensive federal union whose basis in Philanthropy, mutual confidence and public virtue, we cannot but acknowledge to be the work of the Great God, who ruleth in the armies of Heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth, doing whatsoever seemeth him good.

For all the blessings of civil and religious liberty which we enjoy under an equal and benign administration we desire to send up our thanks to the Ancient of days, the great Preserver of Men—beseeching him that the Angel who conducted our forefathers through the wilderness into the promised land, may graciously conduct you through all the dangers and difficulties of this mortal life—and when like Joshua, full of days, and full of honor, you are gathered to your Fathers, may you be admitted into the heavenly Paradise to partake of the water of life and the tree of immortality.

Done and signed by order of the Hebrew Congregation in New Port, Rhode Island, August 17th, 1790.

To which Washington replied in echoing words and then added his own laconic blessing: “May the children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants, while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig-tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”⁴

And so the American Jewish community set about the task of building itself both materially and spiritually. In many of their earlier efforts, they viewed the new United States as part of God’s redemptive plan for the world. So in 1784, Manuel Josephson petitioned the Philadelphia Congregation to build a Mikve, a ritual bathhouse.

It having pleased the Almighty God of Israel to appoint our lot in this country, the rulers where of he has inspired with wisdom and a benevolent disposition toward us as a nation, whereby we enjoy every desirable privilege and great preeminence far beyond many of our brethren dispersed in different countries and governments, and in order to manifest our gratitude for those peculiar favors and blessings, we ought in a very sincere manner, observe a strict and close adherence to those laws and commandments ordained by Him and delivered to our master Moses, of blessed memory, which have been handed down to us in a regular succession to the present, wherein we are told that the almighty has made choice of our nation in preference of all others, on condition that we hearken unto his voice, and observe his covenants; . . . (so) we should endeavor with all our might to regulate our conduct in every respect conformable to His Holy Law, rectify every deviation there from and supply every omission so far as in our power, . . . In order thereto, we, the subscribers having taken these matters to heart, we find one matter which strikes us most forcibly and cannot but affect astonishment and horror every judicious and truly religious mind. This is the want of a proper Mikve or bathing place according to our Law and institution . . . so that the Almighty may look down in mercy upon us and send the redeemer to Zion in our days. Philadelphia 21 May 1784, Rosh Hodesh Sivan 5524.

Of course, the Mikve was built.

In Joseph’s letters and thenceforth in American Jewish literature, the tension between Jewish and American life was identified from the start of our odyssey in this country. The twin dangers of assimilation and populist anti-Semitism were documented in a letter dated 1791 that Rebecca Samuel wrote to her parents back in Germany, the old country:

One can make a good living here, and all live at peace. Anyone can do what he wants. There is no rabbi in all of America to excommunicate anyone. This is a blessing here; Jew and Gentile are as one. There is no galut [“exile”—rejection of Jews] here. In New York and Philadelphia there is more galut.⁵

Soon the new Jewish community sought the right to fight in the militia and to hold public office despite state rules which mandated a Christian oath to secure these positions. In doing so, they appealed to the religious ideals which permeated the American value system. “If a man fulfills the duties of that religion which his education or his Conscience has pointed to him as the true one; no person, I hold, in this our land of liberty, has a right to arraign him at the bar of any inquisition,” fulminated Jacob Henry in North Carolina in 1808.⁶ He prevailed, as the Bill of Rights became a part of the law of the land. This newfound liberty was glorified in sermons delivered in synagogues throughout the country. A typical example is the 1821 discourse of Dr. Jacob De La Motta, a friend of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson:

Here, a liberal and tollerant [sic] spirit, pervades every individual. Here, unbiased protection, and friendly co-operation are alike extended, without consideration or reference to particular faith. Here, Justice presents her scale to public view, and guards its preponderance from the touch of illeberality [sic]. Here, a union of friendship and fellowship is promoted and encouraged. . . . It is here, that we are reasonably to expect the enjoyment of those rewards for our constancy and sufferings, as promised by the word of God, when he declared that he would not forsake us.⁷

Penina Moise

This history paved the way for the publication of the first book of poetry by an American Jewish author. In 1833, Penina Moise of South Carolina published Fancy’s Sketch Book. Among her predecessors were Grace Sexias Nathan, Adah Isaacs Menken, Octavia Harby Moses, and Rebekah Hyneman. All of these were women who wrote salon pieces for reading in private parlors; many of their poems were later published in popular magazines. (Menken created another career as a flamboyant and controversial actress.) Penina was the child of French refugees who had fled from Haiti after the slave insurrection of the 1790s. She was born in Charleston, South Carolina, where she spent most of her life. She worked beginning at the age of twelve making lace and embroidery. Many of her eighty-three years were spent in genteel poverty. Hardship and deprivation were as common among antebellum Jews as they were later among the Eastern European émigrés. She was active in the Jewish life of her synagogue, serving as director of Beth Elohim’s Sunday school. During the Civil War she went blind and contracted neuralgia. After the war, she ran a small private school for girls. She wrote hymns for synagogue use, including one which incorporated wording of the Declaration of Independence:

O God! to Thy paternal grace
That ne’er its bounty measures.
All gifts Thy grateful children trace,
That constitute Life’s treasures.

Light, being, liberty, and joy,
All, all to Thee are owing;
Nor can another hand destroy
Blessings of Thy Bestowing. . . .

Protector of the quick and dead
Thy love this world o’erfloweth:
And when the “vital spark” hath fled,
Eternal life bestoweth.⁸

In this hymn, Penina echoed the preamble of the Declaration that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

This poem by Penina appeared in the wake of the 1819 riots in Germany:

If thou art one of that oppressed race,
Whose pilgrimage from Palestine we trace,
Brace the Atlantic—Hope’s broad anchor weigh,
A Western Sun will gild your future day.⁹

Isaac Mayer Wise

It was left to a single-minded organizational genius to take all of these pious and patriotic energies and mold them into a movement for a uniquely American Judaism. Though Isaac Mayer Wise is heralded as the founder of American Reform Judaism, he eschewed the word “reform,” preferring to look upon himself as the crusader for American Judaism. Born in 1819 in Bohemia, he studied in European Yeshivas (schools) and then came to America in 1846. Forced out of his pulpit in Albany, New York, Wise moved out west to Cincinnati, where he founded a weekly English-language newspaper as well as an organization of rabbis and congregations and a school for the training of rabbis. He edited a prayer book and wrote voluminously. What was his passion? Hear his sermon written in honor of the Fourth of July 1858:

Next to the Passover feast, the fourth of July is the greatest, because it is a memorial of the triumph of liberty. . . . The fourth of July tells us the glorious story of the second redemption of mankind from the hands of their oppressors, the second interposition of Providence in behalf of liberty, the second era of the redemption of mankind, the second triumph of right over might, justice over arbitrary despotism, personal and legal liberty over the power of the strongest and the most warlike. . . .

“Moses forms one pole and the American revolution the other, of an axis around which revolves the political history of thirty three centuries.” . . .

The spirit of God as revealed through Moses and the prophets as far as this earth is concerned, was incarnated in a modern and suitable form and destined to conquer the nations, to break the chains of servitude, dispel the clouds of despotism, conquer the night of prejudice and superstition, that every eye may behold the sacred sun of truth and be delighted with its glorious rays, that every mind perceive the great laws of God, the path of truth and salvation. Hallelujah! we exclaim, for the birth day of liberty, when man came to the conviction, “Have we not all one father, has not one God created us?” Hallelujah! for the day when God’s law was verified, “One law and one judgment shall be for all of you.” Hallelujah! for the day when man was restored to his rights, when conscience resumed its rightful throne and the dwarf of superstition was slain. Hallelujah, for the birth day of liberty to all nations!¹⁰

Ernestine L. Rose

No sooner did the Jewish people become established in the United States than they weighed in on all sides of the important issues of each age. Jewish literature boldly held a messianic vision of America up to scrutiny, weighed it in the balance, and found the reality wanting when compared with the American dream as they envisioned it based on their biblical heritage. Ernestine L. Rose, the most famous Jewish woman during the mid nineteenth century, provides an early example of the American Jewish prophetic spirit. After leaving Russian Poland, she wandered to England, where she became a disciple of Robert Owen, a Utopian Socialist. In 1838, she immigrated to America, where she became a temperance advocate, a suffragette, and an ardent abolitionist. When she gave this address in 1851, slavery was still in effect:

Even here, in this far-famed land of freedom and of knowledge, under a republic that has inscribed its banner the great truth that all men are created free and equal, and endowed with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,—a Declaration wafted like the voice of Hope on the breezes of heaven, to the remotest parts of the earth, to whisper freedom & equality to the oppressed and down trodden children of men, . . . yet in the very face of that eternal truth, woman, the mockingly so called “better half of man,” has yet to plead for her rights, nay, for her life. For what is life without liberty? and what is liberty without equality of rights? . . . Permit me to say that the slaves of the South are not the only people that are in bondage. All women are excluded from the enjoyment of that liberty which your Declaration of Independence asserts to be the inalienable right of all. The same right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that pertains to man, pertains to woman also . . . emancipation from every kind of bondage is my principle. I go for the recognition of human rights, without distinction of sect, party, sex, or color.¹¹

What a change in tone from the days of Peter Stuyvesant, when Jews modestly petitioned for the right to remain without pretending to be Christian. The only thing left was for an American Jewish poet to become a spokesperson for all of America.

Emma Lazarus

Born in 1849, Emma Lazarus was the daughter of a sugar merchant and the descendant of one of the original Sephardic families who established New Amsterdam. She was educated by private tutors. When she was seventeen, her father printed her first book privately. Soon after, she established a friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson, who became her mentor. The publication of poetry, essays, short stories, and even a novel followed. Emma was a vital part of the artistic climate in New York, writing articles on music, art, and literature that were published in the Century and the Critic. She was a welcomed part of the cultural elite and traveled extensively throughout Europe. After the Russian pogroms of 1882, she visited Ward’s Island, where hundreds of the victims of czarist persecution were waiting for admission to the United States. Immediately after this visit, Emma wrote a sharp response to an article in the Century that repeated traditional anti-Semitic canards. Her essay entitled “Russian Christianity versus Modern Judaism” launched her new path as one of the most outspoken Americans on Jewish issues. She used her celebrity to bring attention to the idea of the resettlement of Jews in Palestine. She created classes for Jewish immigrants and helped to find them housing in an overcrowded city. She started an organization called the Society for the Improvement and Colonization of East European Jews. She wrote articles on Jewish history and cultural life that were published in both Christian and Jewish publications.

“The Crowing of the Red Cock” was written in the wake of the Russian pogroms. It places the suffering of the Jews squarely on Christian shoulders, yet at the end calls for reconciliation and peaceful forgiveness here in America:

Across the Eastern sky has glowed
The flicker of a blood-red dawn,
Once more the clarion cock has crowed,
Once more the sword of Christ is drawn.
A million burning rooftrees light
The world-wide path of Israel’s flight.

Where is the Hebrew’s fatherland?
The folk of Christ is sore bestead;
The Son of Man is bruised and banned, 
Nor finds whereon to lay his head.
His cup is gall, his meat is tears,
His passion lasts a thousand years.

Each crime that wakes in man the beast, 
Is visited upon his kind.
The lust of mobs, the greed of priest,
The tyranny of kings, combined
To root his seed from earth again.
His record is one cry of pain.

When the long roll of Christian guilt
Against his sires and kin is known,
The flood of tears, the life-blood spilt,
The agony of ages shown,
What oceans can the stain remove,
From Christian law and Christian love?

Nay, close the book; not now, not here,
The hideous tale of sin narrate, 
Reechoing in the martyr’s ear,
Even he might nurse revengeful hate,
Even he might turn in wrath sublime,
With blood for blood and crime for crime.

Coward? Not he, who faces death,
Who singly against the world has fought, 
For what? A name he may not breathe, 
For liberty of prayer and thought. 
The angry sword he will not whet,
His nobler tasks is—to forget.¹²

“In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport” is a response to Longfellow’s poem of the same name, but, where Longfellow concludes his visit to the historic cemetery with the baleful cry “the dead nations never rise again,” Emma’s poem sees new life for the Jewish nationality here in America:

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 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!

Now 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.

And still the sacred shrine is holy yet,
With its lone floors where reverent feet once trod. 
Take off our shoes as by the burning bush,
Before the mysteries of death and God.¹³

Her hope and expectation of renewed Jewish life here in America is stated again in “The New Ezekiel,” which recalls the prophet’s famous vision of the valley of the dry bones in Ezekiel 37:

What, can these dead bones live, whose sap is dried
By twenty scorching centuries of wrong?
Is this the House of Israel, whose pride
Is as a tale that’s told, an ancient song?
Are these ignoble relics all that live 
Of psalmist, priest, and prophet? Can the breath
Of very heaven bid these bones revive,
Open the graves and clothe the ribs of death?

Yea, Prophesy, the Lord hath said. Again
Say to the wind, Come forth and breathe afresh,
Even that they may live upon these slain,
And bone to bone shall leap, and flesh to flesh.
The spirit is not dead, proclaim the word,
Where lay dead bones, a host of armed men stand!
I ope your graves, my people, saith the Lord,
And I shall place you living in your land.¹⁴

Despite her proto-Zionist leanings, it is clear that for Emma Lazarus, that land is here in America. In her poem entitled “1492,” Emma draws attention to the ironic fact that the same year that Columbus sailed to America, the Jews were expelled from Christian Spain and the inquisition was applied to those who remained. Meanwhile, a “virgin world,” full of hopeful, freedom-filled redemption, awaited the Jewish people here in America:

Thou two-faced year, Mother of Change and Fate,
Didst weep when Spain cast forth with flaming sword,
The children of prophets of the Lord,
Prince, priest, and people, spurned by zealot hate.

(The two-faced god of Rome was Janus, who looked forward and backward in time. The flaming sword recalls the angelic guard who barred Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden:)

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!”¹⁵

This vision of America as the biblically promised land for the Jewish people was expanded by Emma in the famous “New Colossus.” She picked up the spirit of Penina Moise, informed it with her own Zionist optimism, and inspired a vision of the American dream which still beckons in New York’s harbor. Its roots are in the biblical vision of redemption when all shall sit under vine and fig tree with none to make them afraid. You see its relics in our exhibit. Now, in a time when every immigrant has become suspect as a potential enemy—in fact, ever since the 1920s America has ceased to be as hospitable to the huddled masses yearning to breathe free as she should be, or wishes she could be—Emma Lazarus and the expression of redemption embodied in her Jewish literary tradition going all the way back to the seventeenth century call us to make our own country what it should and must become. That tradition continues in our own time and gives us courage in the face of our national anxiety following the terrorist attack of September 11. Its most current, though not most recent, expression was given by a Russian Jewish immigrant in the spirit of Penina Moise and Emma Lazarus: the author is Israel Baline, born in Mogla, Russia, in 1888. He was the son of a poor cantor and came with his family to the United States in 1893. Baline’s song begins:

While the storm clouds gather far across the sea, 
Let us swear allegiance to a land that’s free.
Let us all be grateful for a land so fair,
As we raise our voices in a solemn prayer.¹⁶

You might recognize these words as the beginning of “God Bless America” and know the author, Israel Baline, by his pen name, Irving Berlin. He stands in the same tradition as Penina Moise and also our beloved Emma Lazarus, singing the praises of a new world and wishing that all our ideals were realized.