Biblical and Other Sources of the "New Colossus" by Emma Lazarus

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 lightning, 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!”

Textual Sources for the New Colossus

Loving the Stranger

Rachel Weeping for Her Children

The Longing for a Return From Exile

The Light of the Torch

Other Writings of Emma Lazarus

In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport

BY EMMA LAZARUS

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 an 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!

How 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.

Nathless the sacred shrine is holy yet,

With its lone floors where reverent feet once trod.

Take off your shoes as by the burning bush,

Before the mystery of death and God.

1492: Emma Lazarus

Thou two-faced year, Mother of Change and Fate,

Didst weep when Spain cast forth with flaming sword,

The children of the prophets of the Lord,

Prince, priest, and people, spurned by zealot hate.

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!"

"This sonnet [“1492,”], written the same month as “The New Colossus,” turns back four hundred years to an earlier group of refugees: the Jews expelled from Spain
during the Inquisition. As a descendant of these Jews, Emma identified deeply
with the refugees of the 1880s, though as an affluent fourth-generation American,
she had little in common with them." Emma Lazarus: Voice of Liberty, Voice of Conscience [curated by Esther Schor and produced by Nextbook, New York City, in association with the American Library Association Public Programs Office, Chicago]

Gifts: Emma Lazarus

'O World-God, give me Wealth!' the Egyptian cried.
His prayer was granted. High as heaven, behold
Palace and Pyramid; the brimming tide
Of lavish Nile washed all his land with gold.
Armies of slaves toiled ant-wise at his feet,
World-circling traffic roared through mart and street,
His priests were gods, his spice-balmed kings enshrined,
Set death at naught in rock-ribbed charnels deep.
Seek Pharaoh's race to-day and ye shall find
Rust and the moth, silence and dusty sleep.

'O World-God, give me beauty!' cried the Greek.
His prayer was granted. All the earth became
Plastic and vocal to his sense; each peak,
Each grove, each stream, quick with Promethean flame,
Peopled the world with imaged grace and light.
The lyre was his, and his the breathing might
Of the immortal marble, his the play
Of diamond-pointed thought and golden tongue.
Go seek the sun-shine race, ye find to-day
A broken column and a lute unstrung.

'O World-God, give me Power!' the Roman cried.
His prayer was granted. The vast world was chained
A captive to the chariot of his pride.
The blood of myriad provinces was drained
To feed that fierce, insatiable red heart.
Invulnerably bulwarked every part
With serried legions and with close-meshed Code,
Within, the burrowing worm had gnawed its home,
A roofless ruin stands where once abode
The imperial race of everlasting Rome.

'O Godhead, give me Truth!' the Hebrew cried.
His prayer was granted; he became the slave
Of the Idea, a pilgrim far and wide,
Cursed, hated, spurned, and scourged with none to save.
The Pharaohs knew him, and when Greece beheld,
His wisdom wore the hoary crown of Eld.
Beauty he hath forsworn, and wealth and power.
Seek him to-day, and find in every land.
No fire consumes him, neither floods devour;
Immortal through the lamp within his hand.

The Dance to Death: Emma Lazarus

"Ours is the truth, Ours is the power, the gift of Heaven. We hold His Law, His lamp, His covenant, His pledge. Wherever in the ages shall arise Jew-priest, Jew-poet, Jew-singer, or Jew-saint? And everywhere I see them star the gloom? In each of these the martyrs are avenged! (II, 16)."

By the Waters of Babylon [V. Currents]: Emma Lazarus

1. Vast oceanic movements, the flux and reflux of immeasurable tides, oversweep our continent.

2. From the far Caucasian steppes, from the squalid Ghettos of Europe,

3. From Odessa and Bucharest, from Kief and Ekaterinoslav,

4. Hark to the cry of the exiles of Babylon, the voice of Rachel mourning for her children, of Israel lamenting for Zion.

5. And lo, like a turbid stream, the long-pent flood bursts the dykes of oppression and rushes hitherward.

6. Unto her ample breast, the generous mother of nations welcomes them.

7. The herdsman of Canaan and the seed of Jerusalem’s royal shepherd renew their youth amid the pastoral plains of Texas and the golden valleys of the Sierras.

“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.”

Extract from a letter of a Russian refugee in Texas

Twilight is here, soft breezes bow the grass, Day’s sounds of various toil break slowly off, The yoke-freed oxen low, the patient ass Dips his dry nostril in the cool, deep trough. Up from the prairie the tanned herdsmen pass With frothy pails, guiding with voices rough Their udder-lightened kine. Fresh smells of earth, The rich, black furrows of the glebe send forth. After the Southern day of heavy toil, How good to lie, with limbs relaxed, brows bare To evening’s fan, and watch the smoke-wreaths coil Up from one’s pipe-stem through the rayless air. So deem these unused tillers of the soil, Who stretched beneath the shadowing oak tree, stare Peacefully on the star-unfolding skies, And name their life unbroken paradise. The hounded stag that has escaped the pack, And pants at ease within a thick-leaved dell; The unimprisoned bird that finds the track Through sun-bathed space, to where his fellows dwell; The martyr, granted respite from the rack, The death-doomed victim pardoned from his cell,— Such only know the joy these exiles gain,— Life’s sharpest rapture is surcease of pain. Strange faces theirs, wherethrough the Orient sun Gleams from the eyes and glows athwart the skin. Grave lines of studious thought and purpose run

From curl-crowned forehead to dark-bearded chin. And over all the seal is stamped thereon Of anguish branded by a world of sin, In fire and blood through ages on their name, Their seal of glory and the Gentiles’ shame. 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. Hark! through the quiet evening air, their song Floats forth with wild sweet rhythm and glad refrain. They sing the conquest of the spirit strong, The soul that wrests the victory from pain; The noble joys of manhood that belong To comrades and to brothers. In their strain Rustle of palms and Eastern streams one hears, And the broad prairie melts in mist of tears.

An Epistle to the Hebrews, Emma Lazarus (published in the American Hebrew between November 3, 1882-Februrary 23, 1883)

VII: There is not the slightest necessity for an American Jew, the citizen of a republic, to rest his hopes upon the foundation of any other nationality soever, or to decide whether he individually would or would not be in favor of residing in Palestine. All that would be claimed upon him be a patriotic and unselfish interest in the sufferings of his oppressed brethren of less fortunate countries, sufficient to make him promote by every means in his power the establishment of a secure asylum. From those emancipated countries of Europe and America where the Jews shares all the civil and religious privileges of his compatriots, only a small band of Israelites would be required to sacrifice themselves in order to serve as leaders and counselors. When the idea of a restoration that has spread to rapidly shall have once taken general root. I no more doubt that such a devoted band will volunteer from every land in the world where the Jews have either tasted or hungered after the delights of freedom, than I doubt that a whole army of Jews in Eastern Europe are now looking forward to such a restoration as the only solution of their immemorial problem, the only haven of rest from their tempest-tossed wanderings.

XII: Yes, we have not only survived the unparalleled vicissitudes to which we have been exposed, but on this remote continent, where so many storm-tost European outcasts have found freedom and peace, we have proposed to such a degree that as almost to forget the terrors of the tempest. But a wail of lamentation reaches us from distant countries, and to our grief and amazement we hear that other homeless and despoiled survivors of that wreck in which we suffered are subjected to renewed misery at the hands of powerful oppressors. Shall we remain deaf to their cry, or heeding the unanimous voice of friend and foe in counsel or in menace, shall we not rather exert ourselves to render the only remedy applicable to the evil? A home for the homeless, a goal for the wanderer, an asylum for the persecuted, a nation for the denationalized. Such is the need of our generation, and whether it be voiced in the hissing denunciations of Anti-Semitism, in the enthusiasm of helpful Christian advocates, or in the piteous appeal from Hungary and Galicia, from Bessarabia and Warsaw, from Berlin and Dresden, the call is too distinct for misconstruction, and too loud to remain ignored and unanswered.

Other Background Texts

The Jewish Cemetery at Newport

BY HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

How strange it seems! These Hebrews in their graves,

Close by the street of this fair seaport town,

Silent beside the never-silent waves,

At rest in all this moving up and down!

The trees are white with dust, that o'er their sleep

Wave their broad curtains in the south-wind's breath,

While underneath these leafy tents they keep

The long, mysterious Exodus of Death.

And these sepulchral stones, so old and brown,

That pave with level flags their burial-place,

Seem like the tablets of the Law, thrown down

And broken by Moses at the mountain's base.

The very names recorded here are strange,

Of foreign accent, and of different climes;

Alvares and Rivera interchange

With Abraham and Jacob of old times.

"Blessed be God! for he created Death!"

The mourners said, "and Death is rest and peace;"

Then added, in the certainty of faith,

"And giveth Life that nevermore shall cease."

Closed are the portals of their Synagogue,

No Psalms of David now the silence break,

No Rabbi reads the ancient Decalogue

In the grand dialect the Prophets spake.

Gone are the living, but the dead remain,

And not neglected; for a hand unseen,

Scattering its bounty, like a summer rain,

Still keeps their graves and their remembrance green.

How came they here? What burst of Christian hate,

What persecution, merciless and blind,

Drove o'er the sea — that desert desolate —

These Ishmaels and Hagars of mankind?

They lived in narrow streets and lanes obscure,

Ghetto and Judenstrass, in mirk and mire;

Taught in the school of patience to endure

The life of anguish and the death of fire.

All their lives long, with the unleavened bread

And bitter herbs of exile and its fears,

The wasting famine of the heart they fed,

And slaked its thirst with marah of their tears.

Anathema maranatha! was the cry

That rang from town to town, from street to street;

At every gate the accursed Mordecai

Was mocked and jeered, and spurned by Christian feet.

Pride and humiliation hand in hand

Walked with them through the world where'er they went;

Trampled and beaten were they as the sand,

And yet unshaken as the continent.

For in the background figures vague and vast

Of patriarchs and of prophets rose sublime,

And all the great traditions of the Past

They saw reflected in the coming time.

And thus forever with reverted look

The mystic volume of the world they read,

Spelling it backward, like a Hebrew book,

Till life became a Legend of the Dead.

But ah! what once has been shall be no more!

The groaning earth in travail and in pain

Brings forth its races, but does not restore,

And the dead nations never rise again.

The History of the Jews, Heinrich Graetz, vol. 1., pp. 345-6

The Babylonian Isaiah wished to comfort his suffering Judaean brethren, and, and the same time, to give a high aim. The suffering Jewish tribe as well as all those who have minds to comprehend and hearts to feel, whatever their race and language may be, can find in this prophet the solution of a problem, the correctness of which history has proven. He showed how a nation can be small yet great, wretched and hunted to death yet immortal, at one and the same moment a despised slave and a noble exemplar. Who was this prophet, at once a great thinker and a great poet? He says not a word about himself, and there are no records of his life. The collectros of the prophetical writing, finding that in eloquence and subliminity his words resembled those of Isaiah, added them to the prophecies of the older seer, and included them in the same scroll.

No one could console the sorrowing Judeaan community with such sympathy, or encourage it with such ardour as the Prophet of the Captivity. His words are like balm upon a burning wound, or like a gentle breeze upon a fevered brow.

The exhausted and despairing community was described by this prophet as a wife and mother who has been rejected, and robbed of her children on account of her sins but who still is dear to her husband as the beloved of his youth. This deserted one he calls "Jerusalem," the emblem of all that was tender to his soul.

Eliot, George. Daniel Deronda

“Amen,” said Mordecai, to whom Deronda’s words were a cordial. “What is needed is the leaven— what is needed is the seed of fire. The heritage of Israel is beating in the pulses of millions; it lives in their veins as a power without understanding, like the morning exultation of herds; it is the inborn half of memory, moving as in a dream among writings on the walls, which it sees dimly but cannot divide into speech. Let the torch of visible community be lit! Let the reason of Israel disclose itself in a great outward deed, and let there be another great migration, another choosing of Israel to be a nationality whose members may still stretch to the ends of the earth, even as the sons of England and Germany, whom enterprise carries afar, but who still have a national hearth and a tribunal of national opinion. Will any say ‘It cannot be’?

Eliot, George. Daniel Deronda

“Away from me the garment of forgetfulness.

Withering the heart;

The oil and wine from presses of the Goyim,

Poisoned with scorn.

Solitude is on the sides of Mount Nebo,

In its heart a tomb:

There the buried ark and golden cherubim

Make hidden light:

There the solemn gaze unchanged,

The wings are spread unbroken:

Shut beneath in silent awful speech

The Law lies graven.

Solitude and darkness are my covering,

And my heart a tomb;

Smite and shatter it, O Gabriel!

Shatter it as the clay of the founder

Around the golden image.”

Inscription said to be on the base of the Colossus of Rhodes. (from the Palatine Anthology (VI.171)):

"To you, Helios, yes to you, the people of Dorian Rhodes raised this colossus high up to the heaven, after they had calmed the bronze wave of war, and crowned their country with spoils won from the enemy. Not only over the sea but also on land they set up the bright light of unfettered freedom."

Ozimandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Julious Caeser, Act 1, Scene 2, William Shakespeare

Cassius: Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world

Like a Colossus, and we petty men

Walk under his huge legs and peep about

To find ourselves dishonorable graves.

Men at some time are masters of their fates.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars

But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Brutus and Caesar—what should be in that “Caesar”?

Why should that name be sounded more than yours?

Write them together, yours is as fair a name.

Sound them, it doth become the mouth as well.

Weigh them, it is as heavy. Conjure with 'em,

“Brutus” will start a spirit as soon as “Caesar.”

Now in the names of all the gods at once,

Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed

That he is grown so great? Age, thou art shamed!

Rome, thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods!

When went there by an age, since the great flood,

But it was famed with more than with one man?

When could they say till now, that talked of Rome,

That her wide walks encompassed but one man?

Now is it Rome indeed, and room enough,

When there is in it but one only man.

Oh, you and I have heard our fathers say,

There was a Brutus once that would have brooked

Th' eternal devil to keep his state in Rome

As easily as a king.

Criticism

Words and Worlds: Emma Lazarus's Conflicting Citizenships, Diane Lichtenstein, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 6, No. 2, Woman and Nation (Autumn,1987), at 260-61.

"The famous Statue of Liberty becomes, through Lazarus's imagination, a symbol of what America has meant to Jews, as well as to other "huddled masses." It also becomes a symbol of womanhood that defies traditional stereotypes of passivity and demureness. This "mother" is a "mighty woman" who promises not the easy comforts of gold-paved streets but the challenges of economic, political, and social freedoms. She is not the sentimentally glorified True Woman whose mothering took the form of gentle guidance and warm consolation but is, rather, the Victorian woman whose majestic strength supplied a nation with courage. She also personifies Deborah, the original Mother in Israel who valiantly defended her Jews, as well as the nineteenth-century Jewish woman who created for her family a refuge from a potentially hostile world. The Mother of Exiles is a regnant figure from whom both Americans and Jews could draw strength. By glorifying America's welcome of the "homeless" and by combining the two images of ideal womanhood into a single, more powerful figure, Lazarus effectively reconciled her multiple nationalities. Clearly not a conventional Jewish or American woman, Lazarus did not define herself through the roles of wife or mother. As a woman who consciously chose a public Jewish identity, at the same time that she was known as an American author, she forged a unique model of the American Jewish woman who could use her words to legitimize her identities."

"It is not difficult to trace the influence of these ideals upon Lazarus's condescending strategies in her famous "The New Colossus," which was commissioned in 1883 to aid a fund then being raised to furnish the pedestal for the huge statue that the French people were prepar ing as a centennial gift to America. Certain intimations of the great sonnet appeared earlier in a much different, more particularizing mode in the prose-poem "Currents": From the far Caucasian steppes, from the squalid ghettos of Europe, from Odessa and Bucharest, from Kief, and Ekaterinoslav, Hark to the cry of the exiles of Babylon, the voice of Rachel mourning for her children, of Israel lamenting for Zion. And lo, like a turbid stream, the long-pent flood bursts the dykes of oppression and rushes hitherward. Unto her ample breast, the generous mother of nations welcomes them. (Poems 2: 63) If this excerpt is indeed the authentic palimpsest of America's most famous public lyric, as I am suggesting, then Lazarus, as the Jewish-Prometheus, found a way to rekindle the divine flame to transform the immigrant experience of a particular wave of Russian Jews into the definitive representation of America's universal meaning. Like Heine, she had dallied with the oppositional tension between "Hebraism" and "Hellenism" in earlier lyrics, but here, in what amounts to one of the most "public" American poems of the nineteenth century, Lazarus triumphantly links America to the former and Europe to the latter-- to justify the Jewish immigrants' dream of "home-coming." The original name of the statue was "Liberty Enlightening the World," but Lazarus ingeniously transforms the French gift's rhetorical and symbolic function from that of a passive, austere symbol to a mission of active intervention on behalf of the oppressed in her image of the "Mother of Exiles":

Emma Lazarus, Jewish American Poetics, and the Challenge of Modernity, Ranen Omer-Sherman, Legacy, Vol. 19, No. 2 (2002), pp. 170-191

In this sonnet, Emma Lazarus deliberately opposes the national character of America, as represented by the Statue of Liberty, to that of the great Euro- pean nations as represented by the Colossus. In contrast to the classical, mas- culine, conquering, "storied pomp" of Europe - a cultural matrix which has been the chief source of Lazarus' poetic inspiration in the earlier part of her poetic career - the America of Lazarus' sonnet is a place where the humble, marginal, unstoried, alien is prized, where the outsider, schooled in homeless- ness, is welcomed as a source of new energy and industry» Unlike the Colossus of Rhodes, which stands, fixed in its position, "with conquering limbs astride from land to land," this statue stands by an "air-bridged harbor," a geographical space characterized by airiness or an openness of spirit, not yet concretized or limited by hoary, European forms of patriotism. Similarly noteworthy is the repetition of hyphenated word forms in the description of the State of Liberty and her new-world constituency - sea-washed, air-bridged, world-wide wel- come, tempest-tost - a set of word patterns that gesture toward the idea of the America as a place that allows for hyphenated forms of identity, that embraces ethnic diversity and affiliation even as it hopes to unite all of its newcomers into one new nation.

Especially significant here is the attention given to the feminine gender of the statue, as well as Lazarus' decision to situate this feminine figure with- in a distinctly biblical/Jewish context. As Esther Schor argues in her recent biography of Lazarus, "'[diefying the storied pomp of antiquity, precedent, and ceremony, the statue speaks not in the new language of reason, but in the divine language of lovingkindness." In place of the old Greek Colossus, a symbol of masculine, pagan, authority, Lazarus revisits and re-imagines her cultural past and offers a Jewish feminine counter-myth. Michael Kramer has astutely observed that Lazarus' Liberty is both "the mighty woman with torch," reminiscent of the biblical prophetess/poetess Deborah who is referred to in the book of Judges as "eshet Lapidot" literally, "a woman of torches"and a "Mother of Exiles/' evocative of the matriarch Rachel who is depicted in the book of Jeremiah as a mother weeping for the exiled Children of Israel Lazarus' dual invocation of Deborah, the warrior poetess, and Rachel, the weeping mother - opposing images of femininity - represents a poetics of duplicity, resulting in a feminine image which is simultaneously acceptable and subversive« Lazarus' use of conventional feminine imagery in this poem, her description of the female statue s "mild eyes" and "silent lips," as well as her maternal, nurturing qualities, conforms to a Victorian domestic definition of femininity, not unlike that evinced by the critics I cited earlier. At the same time, as Diane Lichtenstein observes, Lazarus' Deborah-like Liberty "stands as a symbol of womanhood which defies traditional stereotypes of passivity and demureness." This mother is both mild and mighty, nurturing and authoritative. More than that: in the sestet of Lazarus' sonnet, this silent-lipped mother of Exiles breaks her silence, as it were, and becomes a woman poet, uttering verse about the meaning of America. The Making and Re-making of Jewish-American Literary History, Wendy Zierler, Shofar, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Winter 2009), pp. 69-101