Emma Lazarus

Emma Lazarus was born in New York City on July 22, 1849, to Moses and Esther (Nathan) Lazarus. The wealthy family owned a sugar-refining business and descended from Spanish and Portuguese Jews who had settled in New Amsterdam in the mid-1600s.⁠[1][2][3]

The Jewish Women’s Archive notes that the Lazarus family had drifted away from religious observance and sought to fit in with their Christian peers, yet she was usually seen as Jewish.⁠[3]

Lazarus was educated at home under her father’s direction, learned languages and the classics from an early age and read classical and modern European literature. As a teenager she began translating poets such as Victor Hugo, Heinrich Heine, Alexandre Dumas and Friedrich Schiller.⁠[3][4][5]

In 1866 her father had her early work privately printed; in 1867 Hurd and Houghton published her collection Poems and Translations.⁠[5]

At 19 she sent a copy of the book to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who praised it and became a supportive mentor.⁠[3][4]

In 1871 she published Admetus and Other Poems, which she dedicated to Emerson; in 1874 J. B. Lippincott & Co. published her novel Alide: An Episode of Goethe’s Life; and in 1876 she produced the verse tragedy The Spagnoletto.⁠[4][5]

The Jewish Women’s Archive considers that by her early twenties she was a respected member of New York’s literary elite and one of the first successful Jewish American authors.⁠[3]

In 1881 she published her translation Poems and Ballads of Heinrich Heine. Around the same time, amid mass Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe and Russia, she began publicly defending persecuted Jews and Judaism and working to aid immigrants.⁠[1][4]

In 1882 the weekly American Hebrew published her collection Songs of a Semite: The Dance to Death and Other Poems, which included “The Dance to Death,” “The Banner of the Jew” and “The Crowing of the Red Cock.” She also wrote essays on pogroms and persecution for The Century and The American Hebrew and was an early advocate of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.⁠[5][4]

In the 1880s she aided Jewish immigrants detained by Castle Garden immigration officials at Ward’s Island and volunteered with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society; her encounters with Russian Jewish refugees shaped her writing.⁠[2][3]

In 1883 William Maxwell Evarts and the author Constance Cary Harrison asked Lazarus to compose a sonnet for an art and literary auction. Run by the American Committee for the Statue of Liberty, the auction raised money for the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund to build the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, which was designed by Frédéric Auguste BartholdiFrédéric Auguste BartholdiFrédéric Auguste Bartholdi (1834–1904) was a French sculptor who designed the Statue of Liberty (“Liberty Enlightening the World”), France’s gift to the United States, unveiled in New York on October 28, 1886; his other works include the Lion of Belfort.Open the full entry; Americans raised the money for the pedestal.⁠[2][6]

She wrote “The New Colossus” on November 2, 1883, drawing on her heritage, her work with refugees and the plight of immigrants. The poem calls the statue the “Mother of Exiles.” It was afterward published in Joseph PulitzerJoseph PulitzerJoseph Pulitzer (1847–1911) was a Hungarian-born American newspaper publisher and politician who founded the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, ran the New York World and served briefly in the U.S. House of Representatives. His will established the Pulitzer Prize, and his gift founded the journalism school at Columbia University.Open the full entry’s New York World and in The New York Times.⁠[2]

Around 1884 Lazarus fell ill, most likely with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. From 1885 to 1887 she traveled in Europe and continued to write. By the Waters of Babylon (1887), a series of prose poems, was her last work.⁠[5][3][4]

A few months after returning from Europe, Lazarus died in New York City on November 19, 1887, at age 38. She is buried in Congregation Shearith Israel’s Beth Olom Cemetery in Cypress Hills, Queens.⁠[2][5][3]

In 1889 Houghton, Mifflin and Co. of Boston and New York published The Poems of Emma Lazarus in two volumes, with “The New Colossus” on pages 202–203 of volume I.⁠[7][1]

After its debut “The New Colossus” faded from public memory. About 14 years after Lazarus’s death, her friend Georgina Schuyler found a book containing the poem in a bookshop and organized a civic effort to revive it.⁠[2]

In 1903 words from the sonnet were inscribed on a bronze plaque mounted on an inner wall of the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal. In 1945 the plaque was moved to the statue’s main entrance hall.⁠[2][6]

“The New Colossus” is a sonnet rhymed abbaabbacdcdcd whose title alludes to the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, destroyed by an earthquake in 224 B.C. The notes of the University of Toronto’s Representative Poetry Online judge that the “twin cities” of line 8 are most likely New York and Brooklyn, which were not consolidated until 1898.⁠[7]

The poem closes: “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, … I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”⁠[7]

The original 1903 plaque is displayed inside the pedestal, and an exact replica is in the Statue of Liberty Museum. The American Jewish Historical Society holds Lazarus’s original poetry notebook, which includes her handwritten draft of “The New Colossus.”⁠[2][8]

BritannicaEncyclopædia BritannicaEncyclopædia Britannica is a general English-language encyclopedia first published in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1768; the name also refers to its publisher, Chicago-based Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. (which presents itself as The Britannica Group). The print edition ended in 2012, and the company’s main businesses since then have been the online encyclopedia Britannica.com, digital education products for schools and libraries, and Merriam-Webster dictionaries.Open the full entry’s article judges her early works technically skilled but lacking real distinction, and calls “The New Colossus” a moving expression of an American ideal.⁠[4]

The Academy of American Poets describes Songs of a Semite as the first poetry collection to explore Jewish American identity while engaging with modern poetics. The Jewish Women’s Archive notes that the poem became closely linked with the statue’s meaning and with American ideals of liberty.⁠[5][6]

Statue of Liberty National Monument: Official website: https://www.nps.gov/stli/ (opens in a new window).⁠[2]

American Jewish Historical Society: Official website: https://ajhs.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[8]