The Enduring Values of the New Colossus
Emma Lazarus’s complicated relationship with Judaism
Few people could have imagined when Emma Lazarus’s impassioned lines were first inscribed on the Statue of Liberty that one day they would cause controversy. “Give me your tired, your poor,” she wrote, “Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore/ Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.”
The inscription is taken from Emma Lazarus’s poem The New Colossus. She wrote the poem to help raise money for a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty, given by France to the United States, in recognition of both nations’ shared values of liberty.
The poem self-evidently offers an invitation to refugees and the dispossessed to enter America. For years it served as a salutation to immigrants arriving by boat to New York. But it is controversial today. In 2018 an official in the Trump administration argued for a revision of the wording. His (possibly facetious) suggestion, "Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge", was met with outrage and ridicule. But nowadays, his view is closer than that of Emma Lazarus to the policy of governments across the world. One can only imagine how Emma Lazarus would have reacted, had she been alive today.
Born in 1849, Emma Lazarus was the fourth of seven children in a wealthy New York Jewish family. Her father was a prosperous sugar merchant, an uncle had been a cantor in a New York synagogue. The family’s ancestors are said to have been among the first 23 Jews to arrive in New York, then still known as New Amsterdam, who had sailed from Recife in Brazil, fleeing the Portuguese Inquisition (more about that next week).
Privately educated and with a precocious talent, Emma’s father funded the publication of her first collection of poems at the age of seventeen. With his encouragement, she sent a copy of her collection to the writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. He responded and they began a correspondence that would lead him to act as a mentor to her, until his death in 1882.
Over the next decade she published her work in newspapers and magazines, wrote novels, translated the poems of the German Jewish writer Heinrich Heinem and the medieval Hebrew poets Judah Halevi and Ibn Gavirol, and published a short play in poetic form about the tragic relationship between a father and daughter.
She had a conflicted relationship with her Jewish identity. In 1877 she wrote that the privileged circumstances of her life had led her “somewhat apart from my people”. After her death her editor wrote that she “had Christians for playmates and schoolmates and most of Emma’s friends were Christian. . . . She died, as she lived, as much a Christian as a Jewess—perhaps it would be better to say neither one or the other.” Yet Emma Lazarus’s poems and her activism give the lie to statements like this.