Emma Lazarus was an American writer and poetess, spokesperson for the Jewish people.
Background
Emma Lazarus was born in July 22, 1849, in New York City, New York, United States, into the family of a wealthy planter, a descendant of an old Sephardic (Jewish) family who had fled to the New World from Portugal persecution of the Inquisition. She was the daughter of Moses and Esther Nathan Lazarus. Her father was a wealthy sugar merchant.
Education
Emma learned other languages, including Italian, French, and German. Emma and her sisters were educated by private tutors and spent their summers at the seashore in Rhode Island.
Career
When the Civil War broke out Emma Lazarus was soon inspired to lyric expression. As yet her models were classic and romantic. At the age of twenty-one she published Admetus and other Poems (1871). Admetus is inscribed to Emerson, who greatly influenced her, and with whom she maintained a regular correspondence for several years.
Emma Lazarus led a retired life, and had a modest conception of her own powers.
Lazarus's work began appearing regularly in Lippincott's Magazine and Scribner's Monthly. In 1874 she published her first prose (a style of writing closer to normal speech than poetry), Alide: An Episode of Goethe's Life, which won high praise from the great Russian author Turgenev (she received a generous letter of admiration from him).
Two years later she visited Concord and made the acquaintance of the Emerson circle, and while there read the proof-sheets of her tragedy The Spagnoletto.
Her translation of the German poet Heinrich Heine's (1797–1856) Poems and Ballads (1881) was considered the best version of Heine in English at the time. Meanwhile events were occurring which appealed to her Jewish sympathies and gave a new turn to her feeling.
The Russian massacres of 1880-1881 were a trumpet-call to her.
She belonged to the oldest Jewish congregation of New York, but she had not for some years taken a personal part in the observances of the synagogue.
The turning point in Lazarus's life was the outbreak of violent anti-Semitism (hatred of Jewish people) in Russia and Germany during the early 1880 th.
When a writer defended these activities in the Century Magazine, Lazarus wrote the angry reply "Russian Christianity versus Modern Judaism" in the nextissue.
From this moment on she began a private crusade for her people. From this time she took up the cause of her race, and " her verse rang out as it had never rung before, a clarion note, calling a people to heroic action and unity; to the consciousness and fulfilment of a grand destiny. "
Her poems, " The Crowing of the Red Cock " and " The Banner of the Jew " (1882) stirred the Jewish consciousness and helped to produce the new Zionism.
In 1883 Lazarus sailed to England, where she was received with great enthusiasm for her work on behalf of Jewish immigrants.
She made so many friends among the Zionists that she returned in 1885, spending the next two years traveling in England, France, and Italy.
Politics
Emma Lazarus devoted much of the short remainder of her life to the cause of Jewish nationalism. She is an important forerunner of the Zionist movement. She argued for the creation of a Jewish homeland thirteen years before Theodor Herzl began to use the term Zionism. Lazarus is buried in Beth-Olom Cemetery in Brooklyn.
Emma Lazarus was honored by the Office of the Manhattan Borough President in March 2008 and her home on West 10th Street was included in a map of Women's Rights Historic Sites.