Emma Lazarus’ American-Jewish Prophetics

Abstract

Emma Lazarus was among the first poets specifically to assert ethnic voice in America, and indeed ethnic voice itself as American. In doing so, Lazarus appeals to a biblical rhetoric that had from the time of the Puritan landing served as a founding ritual of American national identity. Written in the 1880s and 1890s, Lazarus’ works mark a conjuncture between trends in women’s writing and pluralist and ethnic post-Civil War literature, and the ways these reissue traditions of religious and biblical rhetoric in America. But Lazarus’ identity as an American-Jew gives special characteristics to her rendering of this foundational rhetoric, altering the structure of its basic terms and their distribution while at the same time reconstructing and redirecting her distinctive Jewish commitments in their relation to America. In Lazarus, the biblical typology elaborated by women poets, African-Americans, Melville, and many others becomes a scene of mutual transmutation between her American and Jewish identities, one made possible by their convergences, but necessary by their disjunctions. This complex interchange comes to focus in the strange, and in many ways volatile, Christ figure that emerges as a center of Lazarus’ poetic vision.