Old New York, old Sephardic roots
Emma Lazarus was born in New York City on 22 July 1849, the fourth of seven children of Moses Lazarus, a wealthy sugar refiner, and Esther Nathan. Her family belonged to the oldest Jewish community in North America. On her father’s side most of her ancestors were Portuguese Jews, among them some of the twenty-three refugees who reached New Amsterdam from Recife, Brazil, in 1654, fleeing the Inquisition; her mother came from a long-established New York Jewish family. Through her mother she was related to the future Supreme Court justice Benjamin N. Cardozo.
Her ancestors had helped found Congregation Shearith Israel, New York’s Spanish and Portuguese synagogue, where an uncle served as cantor for decades. She later recalled being raised to observe Yom Kippur and Passover, but by early adulthood she wrote that her convictions had led her ‘somewhat apart from my people’. Emma was educated privately by tutors in literature and languages, reading German, French and Italian, and she began writing poems as a child.
A precocious poet
Her first book, Poems and Translations, written in her mid-teens, was printed privately by her proud father in 1866 and published commercially in 1867; William Cullen Bryant praised it. It included translations from Schiller, Heine, Dumas and Hugo. Admetus and Other Poems followed in 1871, dedicated to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who became her mentor and correspondent and a powerful influence on her thinking.
Through the 1870s she published poems in Lippincott’s and Scribner’s Monthly, a prose romance about Goethe (Alide, 1874) and a verse tragedy, The Spagnoletto (1876). Her Poems and Ballads of Heinrich Heine (1881) contained translations still regarded as among the finest in English. She moved in the literary circles of New York and later corresponded with or met Henry James, Robert Browning, William Morris and other writers on two journeys to Europe.
Awakening: the pogroms of 1881
Until her thirties Jewish themes barely appeared in Lazarus’s work. That changed after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 unleashed waves of pogroms in the Russian Empire, followed by the repressive May Laws of 1882. Tens of thousands of destitute Jews began arriving in New York. Lazarus visited the immigrants held at Ward’s Island, worked with the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society’s employment bureau, and helped establish the Hebrew Technical Institute to give newcomers vocational training. In 1883 she founded the Society for the Improvement and Colonization of East European Jews. She taught English to immigrants at the Young Men’s Hebrew Association and even started her own fund to help refugees settle and find work.
She also began to study Hebrew, Jewish history and the Torah, and she translated the great medieval Hebrew poets of Spain, Judah Halevi, Solomon ibn Gabirol, via German versions; several of her translations entered American synagogue liturgy. Her collection Songs of a Semite (1882) is often called the first volume of Jewish American poetry.
‘An Epistle to the Hebrews’
Lazarus became a public defender of her people. In The Century Magazine in 1882–83 she published forceful replies to writers who had excused the Russian persecutions. Between November 1882 and February 1883 she published a series of essays in The American Hebrew titled ‘An Epistle to the Hebrews’, urging technical education for immigrants, a deeper Jewish education for American Jews, and the restoration of an independent Jewish nation in Palestine.
Written more than a decade before Theodor Herzl’s Der Judenstaat, these essays have led some historians to count her among the forerunners of Zionism. She was also a friend of the economist Henry George and an advocate of his ‘single tax’ on land, and her poem ‘Progress and Poverty’ took its title from his book.
The New Colossus
In 1883 a committee raising money for the pedestal of Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty organised an art and literary auction, the ‘Art Loan Fund Exhibition’. The fundraiser William Maxwell Evarts asked Lazarus for a poem. She refused at first; the writer Constance Cary Harrison persuaded her by suggesting she imagine the statue as immigrants would see it from their ships. Lazarus wrote ‘The New Colossus’ on 2 November 1883.
The sonnet rejected the ‘brazen giant of Greek fame’, the Colossus of Rhodes, a monument to conquest, for a ‘mighty woman with a torch’ whose name was ‘Mother of Exiles’. Where Bartholdi had intended a symbol of republican liberty enlightening the world, Lazarus turned Liberty into a welcoming mother calling to the world’s tired, poor and huddled masses. It was read at the exhibition’s opening in December 1883 and printed in its catalogue, and appeared in Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and in The New York Times. But when the statue was dedicated in 1886 the poem was not mentioned.
Travels, illness and an early death
Lazarus travelled to Europe in 1883 and again from 1885 to 1887. In England, Georgiana Burne-Jones introduced her to William Morris, and she met Browning and Thomas Huxley. Her last work, By the Waters of Babylon: Little Poems in Prose (1887), about the exile of the Jews from Spain, is counted among the earliest prose poems in English. She never married.
She returned to New York seriously ill in 1887 and died on 19 November, aged thirty-eight, most likely of Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She was buried in Shearith Israel’s Beth Olom Cemetery in Cypress Hills. Her collected Poems appeared in two volumes in 1889.
The poem finds its statue
For years ‘The New Colossus’ was nearly forgotten. In 1901 Lazarus’s friend Georgina Schuyler began a campaign to honour her, and in 1903 a bronze plaque bearing the sonnet was mounted inside the statue’s pedestal. As millions of immigrants sailed past Liberty towards Ellis Island in the following decades, the poem’s vision fused with the monument. Irving Berlin set its closing lines to music in 1949, John F. Kennedy quoted it in A Nation of Immigrants, and it has been invoked in nearly every American debate about immigration since.
The original manuscript is held by the American Jewish Historical Society, and the Museum of the City of New York holds another. In 2009 Lazarus was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.
The poem also shaped lives directly. Lazarus’s friend Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne, was inspired by it to devote herself to the poor and founded a Catholic religious order, the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, to care for the destitute sick. In 1951 Jewish women’s clubs organised themselves as the Emma Lazarus Federation. And the sonnet remains politically live: in 2019, when a senior US immigration official proposed rewording its lines to favour immigrants who could ‘stand on their own two feet’, the remark provoked a national outcry. In 2020 the American Jewish Historical Society launched a New Colossus project, gathering translations of the poem into languages from around the world.
Emerson, Newport and a Jewish voice
Lazarus met Ralph Waldo Emerson soon after her first book appeared, and for years he was her mentor, praising and encouraging her work. The relationship had a painful turn: in 1874 Emerson left her out of Parnassus, his anthology of favourite poems, though he included other women poets. Lazarus wrote him an angry letter, which went unanswered but was found among his papers after his death. She nonetheless visited the ailing Emerson family in Concord, and later wrote an essay on his personality.
Jewish history surfaced in her work earlier than is often assumed. Admetus and Other Poems (1871) included ‘In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport’, written in answer to Longfellow’s ‘The Jewish Cemetery at Newport’. Where Longfellow mourned that dead nations never rise again, Lazarus ended by insisting that the sacred shrine was holy yet. In 1877 she was jolted by a rise of genteel antisemitism in New York society, which, the Jewish Women’s Archive notes, shattered her assumption that America fully accepted even long-settled Jews like her family.
After 1881 her Jewish writing became defiant. In ‘The Banner of the Jew’ she called on Israel to recall ‘the glorious Maccabean rage’. The Dance to Death, a verse drama about Jews burned in Nordhausen during the Black Death, was dedicated to George Eliot, whose novel Daniel Deronda had imagined a Jewish national revival. And in April 1882 she asked in The Century whether Benjamin Disraeli had been a representative Jew, the first of a series of essays in which she spoke as a Jew to the American public.
Legacy
Lazarus’s legacy runs on two tracks. As a poet she was a gifted translator and lyricist whose best work deserves wider reading. As a public figure she was one of the first American Jews to defend persecuted Jews abroad in the national press, to organise practical help for refugees at home and to argue for a Jewish homeland.
Her most famous lines unite those tracks. A woman of comfortable, long-settled Sephardic stock, moved by the plight of poor Ashkenazi refugees, wrote the words that gave the United States its most enduring description of itself, a refuge for the homeless and tempest-tossed. Few poems have done more to shape how a nation understands its own promise. Her papers are kept by the American Jewish Historical Society at the Center for Jewish History in New York, and her letters at Columbia University.
Sources & further reading
Emma Lazarus, Wikipedia · Emma Lazarus, Statue of Liberty National Monument (National Park Service) · The New Colossus, Museum of the City of New York · The New Colossus, Wikipedia · Emma Lazarus, Jewish Women’s Archive · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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