Religious Identity : Public Voices of Nineteenth-CenturyAmerican Jewish Women Poets

Shira Wolosky

The ideology of the separate spheres has long

governed discussions of nineteenth-century women writers,

both their own and those written about them. This

ideology places women inside and men outside the home, in

what was called "the world." The American Jewish poets

Penina Moise and Rebekah Hyneman have thus been

interpreted, when at all, largely according to this

paradigm; although Emma Lazarus has proved impossible to

so restrict, given her overt political activism for the

mass Jewish immigration of the 1880s and her emergence as

the first American Zionist. But Lazarus, rather than

being an anomaly, should serve as model. The paradigm of

strict domesticity for Moise and Hyneman, as indeed for

many other nineteenth-century women poets, obscures their

work's central energies and purposes. For all three, as

for most other contemporary women poets, the authority to

venture into writing at all usually derived not in

personal expression, with literature the public stage of

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private life; nor only in sentimental writing, which has

rightly been reinterpreted as political and not merely

personal feeling, but which remains focused through inner

emotion. Rather, for Moise, Hyneman, Lazarus, and other

women poets, neither domesticity nor sentimentality is

their main literary mode. They instead wrote out of their

commitment to their communities. Their writing in this

sense was fundamentally public, that is, devoted to

issues of community concern. Read outside the paradigm of

domesticity, the work of Penina Moise, Rebekah Hyneman,

and Emma Lazarus firmly engages public issues central to

American Jewish cultural, religious, and historical

experience in the nineteenth century and, strikingly, in

the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as well. Their

writing illuminates the place of Jewish and also (with

differences) of American women generally in the

configuration of American culture, and indeed the

configuration of American culture itself.

At issue are formations of selfhood that were

increasingly contested through the nineteenth century.

Especially the rise of what has been called possessive

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individualism pushed to the side earlier forms of

selfhood constructed through religious and civic

involvements, which had been, in the original Puritan

polity, closely tied to each other. The nineteenth

century can be said to represent the steady compression

and domination of religious and also civic selfhoods by

economic ones. This has a distinctive gendered aspect.

Despite the ideology of the separate spheres that

declared women's lives private as well as domestic, women

can be seen as the inheritors of religious selfhood, and

also of civic selfhood in the sense of community

investment. As much historical work has uncovered, the

social services of the nineteenth century were

essentially manned by women, largely through church

associations. Such public service was prominent among

Jewish as among other American women. Nevertheless,

discussion and recognition of women's social involvements

tend to continue to be framed in domestic terms, as

extensions of the domestic sphere. Certainly the women

themselves put it this way, retaining expressions of

modesty in describing who they were and what they were

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doing. Religious/civic activism among women did not

merely, however, extend domesticity. Instead, it marked

direct entry and participation in the public sphere as

such. This is the case with regard to the three

nineteenth-century women poets treated here: Penina

Moise, Rebekah Hyneman, and Emma Lazarus.

I. Penina Moise: Mixed Hymnal Discourses

Penina Moise was born in Charleston, South Carolina,

at that time the city with the largest Jewish population

in America. While some of her poems reflect contemporary

women's culture, her main body of writing is not domestic

but emphatically public: the book of hymns she

contributed to became the founding liturgy for the first

Jewish Reform movement in America. Her hymns not only

actively shaped the community in which she lived and the

ongoing project of Jewish identity in America. They

register and reflect American discourses of her period,

as they intersected and often collided in the contentious

enactment of American identity itself in the emerging

republic.

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Moise was directly involved in the founding Reform

movement in Charleston, to which her hymns were devoted.

The initiative, which paralleled rather than derived from

contemporary German Reform, was spearheaded by her

brother, Abraham, and by their mentor, Isaac Harby, a

leading Charleston intellectual. As with Reform in America

in general, the movement combined a crosscurrent of

motives, to preserve Jewish life precisely through

acculturating to an America itself composed of

countertrends and contradictions. These become the

material out of which Penina Moise composed her hymns. As

Diane Ashton notes, Moise incorporates the contemporary

religious discourses of Southern evangelicals. These,

however, reside alongside republican Enlightenment

discourses inherited from the Revolution, liberal

theological discourses with which Isaac Harby identified

and which tried to bridge Enlightenment and Christian

ideologies, as well as Jewish ones in ways that signal

the emerging voice of ethnic identity in America, thus

reshaping American identity itself. Finally, Moise's is

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also a gendered project of a woman addressing such issues

of public identity.

For American acculturation was itself syncretist. In

terms of gender, Jewish women writers are culturally

linked to Christian American and generally Victorian

women writers; Diane Lichtenstein and others have argued

that the Jewish home has special status as a center of

Jewish life and preservation of national identity. This

difference, however, is relative. Every Victorian home

was regarded as the haven of religious and moral

guidance, and indeed resistance against the economic

forces increasingly commanding America. Most Moise hymns

in any case address public rituals and are intended as

common prayers, not private or domestic ones (although of

course some rituals take place in the home). They offer

an almost collage-like mix of discourses drawn from the

various scenes of American culture and religious life,

and as such present a portrait of American Jewish

identity as a contentious yet also resilient intersection

of cultural strands.

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Both the most and the least surprising discourse

resource for Moise is Evangelicism. Language of sin and

reprobation, of grace and salvation crop up in her work.

Hymn 80 speaks of "sinners," and sees grace as "not my

desert" but "from a source divine." In evangelical

Christianity, man's essential state is one of sin, to be

redeemed only through a divine act of free and unmerited

grace. In like manner, Moise describes herself as

"defiled by thoughts," and as sharing "the guilt of that

transgressive race" (Hymn 21).1 Judaism of course also

teaches penitence for sin; and some of these confessions

are set in penitential contexts of the Jewish New Year

and Day of Atonement (Hymns 139, 168, 169, 171).

Still more inextricably, Moise shared with

evangelicals biblical texts and visions, themselves

having been derived from Judaic ones. Moise's own

biblical vision represents a kind of loop: from the

Hebrew Bible to Protestant America to American Jewry.

American readings of the Bible adopted but transformed

traditional typological ones, in which Hebrew Scripture

became Old Testament, prefiguring and predicting New

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Testament revelation of the passion, death and

resurrection of Christ as history's central and eternal

moment. The Old Testament is "literal-historical,"

referring to the New Testament "figural-allegorical"

revelations for its meaning. This in turn becomes the

pattern for the inner life of spirit ("tropological"),

and ultimately, for the whole world's course, in a final

"eschatological" meaning as death and rebirth of creation

in apocalypse. The American venture was taken by those

enacting it to further reassert an immediate historical

embodiment of pattern. America itself becomes the

enactment of the eternal moment typology represents. Yet

this is also to say that history is inextricable not only

from memory but from eschatology.

As Jewish American, Moise's Bible will overlap with

but also contest a Christian one, along a border that is

permeable and often blurred, while also enacting

different interpretive paradigms. Like Christian

Americans, she appeals to an elect nation living a sacred

history. But election to American Christians refers to

themselves: they are the new Israel, in the new Promised

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Land, America. Moise's Jewish Hymns adopt something very

close to Christian usage when she cites, in Hymn 51,

Psalm 37's call to "follow the perfect man" to "salvation

and peace...And the branch of his root shall flourish

long,"2 a text of course read by Christians as a

prefiguration of Christ. Yet Moise does not intend her

biblical references typologically. When she says Israel

she means the Jews, not as figures, but as an historical

and present people. For her, Israel is not a type; it is

her immediate community. The "chosen band" of Hymn 189

specifies the contemporary religious commitments of the

"Hebrew, sanctified, His Unity to promulgate.3 When

Moise's Hymn 183 commemorates Passover, the Israel that

God with "outstretched hand" redeems is the "elect" as a

continuous unfolding of Jewish history. 4 Hymn 91

specifies the "modern Israelite," meaning herself and her

community in direct historical line and not as figural,

typological transference5

In this move away from typology, Moise parts company

with evangelical models and discourses. For the

evangelical community, what the Bible foretells is

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Protestant, evangelical America, prophesied as the elect

nation. For Moise, as a member of a non-Christian

American minority, this evangelical interpretation raises

problems. The notion of an elect community essentially

imagines the nation as a church, a covenanted people,

whose course and values are then identified with

Christian salvational history. But if the nation is a

church, Jews could not easily be members. They could,

however, take part in the nation through another set of

foundational values: those of liberty and equality as the

defining Enlightenment principles of the Revolution. If,

like evangelicals, American Jews identified with a

biblical narrative as shaping communal history – it was

not the same one. Enlightenment definitions of the nation

through liberty and reason offered a teleology into which

the Jews could enter as equal Americans. What sets Moise

apart from evangelicism is the concomitant language of

Enlightenment, drawing on republican Revolutionary

discourses. Her attempt to combine these with religious

discourses in turn connects her to nineteenth-century

liberal theology, with which the Charleston Reform

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movement closely identified. Moise interweaves such

liberal motifs into her verses. Hymn 91, which invokes

"God's blessings" on Israel, centers on equality of rank

in justice, on the one hand recalling Jefferson's

"nature's God" but also referring to Deuteronomy 1, with

"Modern Israelites" called upon to be "arbiters" who "let

equity stand unappalled."6 Hymn 49 speaks both of the

"first elected nation" and God's gifts as "light, being,

liberty, and joy."7" Hymn 97, entitled "Brotherly Love,"

opens announcing "How beautiful it is to see, / Brethren

unite harmoniously" (Psalms 123.) 8

And yet, who exactly do these "Brethren" include?

Everyone, or those contained within a specific group's

own solidarity? If, as in Hymn 98, universal love is

invoked to "strife remove" and "link in one harmonious

whole / all human kind from pole to pole," what then

remains as distinctively ethnic?9 Evangelical Christian

nationhood presented problems of Jewish exclusion;

liberal American trends, however, raised other problems

of erasure. As in today's concerns with multiculturalism,

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is diversity something to be tolerated, assimilated, or

asserted?

Moise's Hymns in effect already exhibit core

tensions in American identity. In Jewish terms, is

America an exile or a homecoming? A deferral of narrative

destiny or its fulfillment? Are the Jews wandering or

progressing? An ambiguity about the meanings and

locations of Zion in Moise at once signals and also

evades such American/Jewish distinctions. If Zion in

Moise is not a typological site, it is very much a

syncretist one. Zion emerges as sometimes a land of

faith, not of concrete geography (Hymn 170); of heaven,

not earth (Hymn 182). Redemptive consolation finds us

Blest...who, tho' afarFrom Zion's sacred fold,Have found a shrine 'neath freedom's star,Where faith is uncontrolled. (Hymn 151)10

The longed for "shrine" here becomes not a literal Zion

but freedom itself, located beneath the star of America

as the ultimate religious value and fulfilled divine

promise. No more strangers in a strange land, home itself

has been relocated and redefined for all, including the

Jews now free from oppression, but also from difference.

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Penina Moise's Hymns in many ways declare an

American identity that is composite, multiple,

intercrossing; mutually enforcing, but also unstable and

mutually subverting. The hymnal form itself, while

rendered by Moise as Jewish prayer, is an echo of

Protestant Call, quite explicit in many Protestant women

writers. Such a call authorized their writing in ways

they would not, in accordance with female social roles,

feel able to claim for themselves out of their own

independent, autonomous powers. Religious selfhood here

is a mode of public selfhood, the individual called to

and by commitments beyond herself. Moise, like many women

contemporaries, understood her ventures, including her

poetic one, as devoted to a purpose other than her own

creative prowess. She wrote her hymns as part of her

membership in a community that her writing helped to

shape, both immediately and into the next century. Poetry

itself becomes defined through such public and civic

religious vision. The promised land of liberty is one

"where every Muse has reared a shrine." Hymn 151 cites

Psalm 137 in its lament by the waters of Babylon, but it

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is she who consoles, with her poetic/prophetic harp, the

"captive band" which she also redefines. It is not quite

equated with a particularist ethnic identity, distinct

from both a Protestant mission and an Enlightenment

universalism. Instead, all of these are present in her,

in syncretist as well as contentious formations.

Moise's Hymns construct and enact more than they

mirror a pre-given identity. The multiplicity and

pluralism of American formation ultimately not only

situates but penetrates the individuals who comprise and

arise within its national polity, as conducted in the

mixed discourses that Moise's Hymns intensely perform. In

some sense they make the claim that to be most American

is to be most individual; and that to be individual is to

be composite, in deeply historicized and shifting ways.

That Moise as a woman emerges as one of the most active

voices shaping her community, speaking both for and to it

so that her words become its public discourse, is itself

an American identity she brings to her ethnic life. And

to include women among those in reason's image is itself

a revolutionary gesture. Her texts assemble her own and

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her community's multiple identifications, texts that act

as a public space in which selves both find and compose

themselves, arising from their cultural contexts and

responsible to them. Moise here, like many other

nineteenth-century American women poets, finds her own

voice and vocation through such appeal to and for public

visions.

II. Rebekah Hyneman: Witnessing the Holy Land

Less even has been written about Rebekah Hyneman

than Penina Moise.

As with Moise, the few comments on her work focus

interpretation through the women's culture that Jewish

women shared with other nineteenth-century women. Dianne

Lichtenstein generally places Hyneman, as Moise, within

paradigms of the "Mother in Israel" as a Jewish form of

Victorian "True Womanhood," with the poetry focused on

gender roles and how the woman writer negotiates their

constraints. Yet the writings of Hyneman, as of Moise and

Lazarus, do not foreground motherhood. Neither Moise nor

Lazarus married. Hyneman was married with two sons, but

was widowed after five years. None make gender their main

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focus, although certainly gender situates and frames

their writing and self-representation.

Rebekah Hyneman did not write hymns, and while she

did write some prayers, they are not her central genre or

poetic address. This consists rather in another topic

fundamental to American cultural and religious life: the

Holy Land, which emerged anew in the nineteenth century

as a core and looming obsession. Over 5000 items on the

Holy Land were published in America between 1800 and

1878, as well as countless other visual representations,

in the form of maps, dioramas, stereotypes, photographs,

landscapes, and material realia transported from the Holy

Land to America: stones, wood, shells, soil for burial,

water for baptism. A variety of converging circumstances

account for the emergence of the Holy Land as a cultural

center in nineteenth-century America. What began as

pilgrimage became inextricable with tourism, trade, and

diplomacy, made possible by new technologies of transport

and communication, by changes in political scenes, by

emerging ideologies. Steam ship routes and railroads

opened travel. The weakening of Ottoman control of

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Palestine by European incursions (inaugurated by

Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1799) and challenges by

other regional forces fueled colonialist interests and

presence in the region, both commercially and

diplomatically. Sojourns in the Holy Land converged with

emerging historicism in philosophy and science, which

tested, confirmed, and challenged religious claims

through archeology, geography, geology, topography,

ethnography, and biblical Higher Criticism, all

brandished to both prove and disprove biblical textual

records.

Above all the impelling force of American Palestine

was mission. The Palestine of pilgrimage, and then also

of tourism, remained the biblical land much more than a

contemporary reality. As such, it was above all an

ideological terrain, visited to confirm and strengthen

American self-interpretation. On one level, the Holy Land

was incorporated as the origin of American history

itself, confirming the sacred status of America's

founding. Reaffirming this origin in turn confirmed

America's current and future course. America, adopting

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from its Puritan origins the biblical narrative as its

own story, saw itself, like Israel of old, as the elected

nation. In the nineteenth century, expansion westward was

both image and extension of the errand America

represented and was continuing to pursue toward

fulfillment. The Israelite Holy Land of the past

authorized the American Holy Land of the future. These

sacral readings of American history, however, themselves

required confirmation. The Revolution had absorbed, but

also displaced and transformed American religious

ideologies, introducing Enlightenment values and views

into the construction of the republic. The Second Great

Awakening can then be seen as a way to re-Christianize

America, to reclaim its terrain and its errand as sacral.

Holy land narratives, mementos, maps, and models could

confirm America's own sacral status, casting its

political course as mission.

In this drama of American destiny, the Jew played a

special role. American sacral histories unfold in time,

but also as time's fulfillment, conforming to an eternal

pattern. In it time both proceeds and ends. The Bible

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provides the schema for both; its typology is also an

eschatology. The Puritans had seen themselves as the

fulfillment of history, which is to say as drawing near

its ending, as had Jonathan Edwards in the First Great

Awakening. The Second Great Awakening, stretching through

the first half of the nineteenth century, featured a

renewed eschatology in an independent, republican, and

industrializing America. Yet in it, as in other Christian

eschatologies, Jews have a pivotal place, with final days

typically marked by their ingathering and conversion.

Jews were thus a primary object of mission, on the

general premise of evangelizing, but also in their

specific eschatological role. Missions to the Jews were

established in both America and the Holy Land, supporting

and sending many of the pilgrims, travelers, diplomats,

and colonizers that knit America to Palestine.

Rebecca Hyneman's work stands within but also

against this Americanized Holy Land. The daughter of a

Jewish father and Christian mother, she converted to

Judaism, running counter to the current of assimilation,

almost as a kind of counter-acculturation. The Holy Land

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she presents, despite certain common features, offers a

different reading, according to different paradigms, from

those surrounding her. Her verse can be seen as resisting

mission. Two long narrative poems, both set in the

Orient, recount tales of betrayal of one's people. In

"Livia," the heroine ignobly commits betrayal. In "Zara,"

she heroically resists conversion unto martyrdom. A sense

of threat to the Jewish people repeatedly surfaces. "The

Hour of Death," a poem published a few weeks after

Hyneman's conversion, imagines facing death "through

scorn, and insult, and oppression’s wrongs," calling to

proclaimללל ללללל"” - the Hebrew’s prayer of faith" in

resistance and solidarity.

The central protagonist of Hyneman's poems of the

Holy Land is in many ways the landscape itself. The Holy

Land is site in poem after poem. This is the case for the

series of poems she wrote called "Female Scriptural

Characters," which echoes the biblical heroines treated

in Grace Aguilar's Women of Israel of 1847. Re-imagining

biblical women is something many nineteenth-century women

poets undertook, often featuring, as in Hyneman, gendered

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topoi: modesty, frailty, humility, service, if also

revising them. Here they take their place in Holy Land

testimonies alongside poems on male biblical figures -

Judah, Solomon, Jehoshaphat, Samuel, the Maccabees,

placed all together in a long section called "Hebrew

Melodies." Over half the poems in her published

collection The Leper and Other Poems (1853) can be called Holy

Land literature, including, very much, the title poem.

Throughout, epigraphs and notes to the poems cite

"Scripture Geography" ("Israel's Future"), Chataubriand's

Holy Land travel narrative ("The Valley of Jehosaphat");

Lamartine's Pilgrimage ("Lines"), with other references

to the travel narratives pervasive in contemporary

American letters, as well as myriad allusions to the

Bible and to Jewish history.

Hyneman's portrayals of the Holy Land, like many

others contemporary to her, feature desolation: a past

grandeur compared to present desiccation. This was a

satirical point in Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad, but to

pilgrim and missionary the Holy Land's desolation was

seen to prove the curse and punishment for Jewish sin in

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denying Christ, but thereby also confirming the

redemption to come when at last they are ingathered,

converted and saved. In Hyneman, current desolation

emerges instead as witness to Jewish faithfulness to

divine promise through history. What she reads in the

present apparent abandonment is "Israel's Future," the

title of a poem bidding the reader him/herself to "gaze"

on "that lone spot / Where, heaven-inspired, your

prophets dwelt;/ Still be their memories unforgot."11 The

present Holy Land bears witness to a past that,

remembered, grounds the present and future in historical,

providential trajectory. At the core is "Israel's Trust,"

another poem title, which declaims against "insulting

foes." But the remnant, though "dishonored and

oppressed," are "strong in God's own promise." The

desolation is not punishment but test, calling Israel to

be "true and firm and falter not."12

These and other poems stand as testimony to a

continued covenant, despite threat, oppression, and

desolation. Torah, Sinai, the desert guide of cloud and

fire, are recurring motifs. "Israel's Trust" opens facing

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a "lightning flash" and thunder which turn out to be at

Sinai, followed by "the fire from heaven, the pillar

cloud" that "attest how firm thy word hath stood."13 "The

Sun of Israel" portrays the same sun in the same place as

those who saw "cloud-pillar by day, flame witness by

night," which still guide those now "in sorrow and

exile." "The Valley of Jehoshaphat" prays "that God who

led their sires from the fierce oppressor's sway / will

be to them a fire by night, a pillar of cloud by day."14

Barren landscape is a mark of suffering, but, far from

being a sign of curse and abandonment as in Christian

readings, it is also a sign of the promise that remains

in force today and of Jewish faithfulness to the God of

history. The original covenant stands against claims of

the New one, into which it is not subsumed or resolved.

The poems instead point to a Judaic vision of history's

fulfillment.

In contrast to Christian Holy Land literature, such

fulfillment is not imagined as an end to time in

apocalypse, nor of course as conversion of the Jews. It

represents instead restoration within history itself. The

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long narrative title poem, "The Leper," is an archive of

Holy Land topoi. Reflecting new approaches to the Holy

Land through study of flora, fauna, geology, geography,

the poem constructs the land through an itinerary of

place-names and images of rock, vines, olive, plain,

desert, streamlets. Landscape is the central figure. But

nature is never unhistorical. Landscape serves as

memorial, in which "each scene recalls" the biblical past

and its ever continued force as well as historical

challenges and tests to the realization of its meanings.

The setting, at first without historical specificity,

turns out to be vividly historical. The poem is set at

the moment of the Bar Kochba rebellion, when Jewish

independence was attempted and failed. The leper emerges

as a figure of the outcast Jew exiled from his homeland

(joined by a feminine figure of "sister" representing

innocence, sacrifice and betrayal). Yet the poem

concludes with a pledge that "the memory shall ne'er

depart / of promises that still can bless / 'Mid slavery

and wretchedness." The vision of time is one in which

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"Judah wakens from her dream of shame / once more the

proud possessor of a name."15

Little is known of Hyneman's biography. Her

conversion was attested and presumably conducted by Isaac

Leeser, the Rabbi of the Mikveh Israel Synagogue, close

associate to activist Rebecca Gratz, and a major figure

in contemporary Jewish American life. Among Leeser's many

activisms was a strong concern with the question of

Jewish Restoration. Leeser at first held the Orthodox

position that Restoration would only follow divine

intervention. In the face of missionary pressures on Jews

both in America and the Holy Land, and reacting to the

Damascus 1840 Blood Libel, which caused a worldwide

outcry, Lesser evolved towards embracing Restoration as a

human enterprise. He launched organizational efforts to

raise funds and initiated projects of training towards

settlement. His many articles describing an historical

restoration appeared in The Occident where Hyneman's own

poetry was published.

Mission, exile, persecution, the status of the Holy

Land: these are the contexts of Hyneman's work. They are

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not private. To describe her writing as feminized and

domestic is to assign religion itself to the feminine

sphere. In America, a trend towards feminized religion

can be seen from early on, as men became increasingly

involved with economic pursuits. But this is not to

equate feminization of religion with domesticity or

privatization. Rather, it is to register the devaluation

of religion along with other public, community and civic

activities in the face of economic priorities and

interests. Nor can the economic sphere that men came to

inhabit and which gained increasing priority be called

“public” in any way except geographically, as taking

place outside the home. In terms of interests and

investments it is private. Describing religion as

feminized is a mark of its displacement along with other

civic and community values from the center of American

pursuits. But religion remains a public sphere arena, the

site of a community life with shared values that women

came to represent and shape. It is women who were

increasingly responsible for and to the public sphere as

civic and communal; while men's lives were increasingly

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privatized, concerned with making wages or profit. This

trend is visible in Hyneman's Philadelphia, where Rebecca

Gratz, also a member of Mikveh Israel and close associate

of Rabbi Isaac Leeser, founded the Female Hebrew

Benevolent Society in Philadelphia and the Hebrew Sunday

School that became central to many Jewish communities,

including that of Penina Moise, Headmistress of the

Sunday School in Charleston; and whose function was not

least a way of resisting Christian missionizing of Jews.

As religious selves, these women cross dimensions

and spheres. Hyneman very much defines her own vocation

as poet in these terms. Song itself figures centrally in

her verse, both lamenting and also pledging and

announcing a vision of history and peoplehood that has

and will endure. "Lament of Judah" concludes foretelling

"sounds of joy" when "again in glad telling heaven shall

bid her agony depart."16 The covenant will come to its

promised fruition, when "the hour of thralldom is past"

and "the songs of thy triumph shall echo once more" ("The

Olive Branch").17 Of these songs of covenant both

remembered and prophesied, Hyneman is herself the singer.

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Though "no prophet-kind" and "no holy choir" inhabit the

"Temple lain waste," she – beholding in her mind "The

Cedars of Lebanon" of the Holy Land – will "recall the

deeds which God made manifest."18 As in her poem "Miriam's

Song," she too offers "praise to Israel's God" who "had

brought deliv'rance nigh" and still does so though "Ages

have passed." This prophetic stance, authorizing woman,

though thought "weak and powerless," to public voice and

participation, Hyneman shares with other nineteenth-

century American women poets, who defined their poetic

selfhood not through personal genius but in relation to a

community they addressed, speaking to and for them. Yet

Hyneman's public vision differs in its Judaic imagination

as she understood this. The structure of prophecy itself

can be said to differ. Prophecy to Hyneman does not

exceed or transcend history in an apocalyptic end that

dissolves time into an eternal moment revealed by and

structured through the Crucifixion. The point is not only

that she does not embrace Christ, but that eternity does

not absorb history for her as it does in Christian

prophetic vision. In her, the past is remembered in the

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present, towards commitment to a future as ongoing

historical chain, not eternal synopsis. The Holy Land

therefore is also a different site for her than the one

circulating so obsessively around her. Its testimony and

the hope of its restoration does not displace history but

rather ties the present to the past and to an historical

future.

III. Emma Lazarus: Multiple Memberships

Emma Lazarus is among the first writers to self-

consciously regard not only herself but also America as

fundamentally ethnic. Born in 1849, she emerged as a

writer during a transformative moment of both American

and Jewish identities. Prior to the Civil War, the

grammar of American identity had been largely singular,

as essentially English Protestant White, albeit in two

forms: inclusive and exclusive. The possibility of

becoming American through incorporation into this

singularity was balanced by the denial of such

possibility in a nativist politics. The post-Civil War

period marked what might be called a moment of

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pluralization. The demise of sections and increased

federalization opened new consciousness of identity in

terms of region, city, gender, race, followed however at

the century's end with new kinds of consolidation:

melting-pot on the one hand – which returned to an

inclusive singularity very like the older English one;

and Jim Crow on the other, in renewed exclusionary forms,

alongside nativist victories in restrictions on

immigration. Lazarus represents and writes this moment of

pluralization, in ways that prefigure multiple senses of

identity to emerge again at the end of the twentieth

century. In this Lazarus foreshadows questions of

destabilization and constructionism that mark

contemporary discourses on identity.

Far better known than either Moise or Hyneman (not

least through her Statue of Liberty poem), Lazarus in a

sense pursues major trends found in both earlier poets.

Like Moise, she envisions America in liberal terms of

freedom and equality. But like Hyneman, she affirms a

Jewish identity that has geographic, historicist

particularity. Her insistence that the two can be

30

combined is the mark of her pluralist identity, in which

the American self, exactly as American, is imagined in

multiples. To be American is also to be something else.

The Statue of Liberty poem came to represent an ethnic

America that Lazarus herself helped to invent and was

among the first voice to project and construct. This,

however, transformed Jewishness itself, from what had

been fundamentally a religious identity to an ethnic one,

with its own national implications that Lazarus is

likewise among the first to explore.

Lazarus's Jewish identity was from the outset a

composite of Sephardic and German antecedents, from her

father's and mother's sides. Each of these shaped her

work as she came to translate German translations of

medieval hymns written by Spanish Golden Age poets Judah

Halevi, Moses Ibn Ezra, Alharizi. This, however, came

later, and, anecdotes indicate, with some resistance:

asked by her Rabbi Gottheil to contribute translations or

texts to his Reform prayer book, she equivocally denied

later having done so. Her early career – very early

indeed, in her precocious teens – portrays a poetic self

31

distinctly removed not only from Jewish, but from

historical identity altogether. Here Lazarus is at her

most gendered, at once identifying with yet also self-

consciously frustrated by the restrictions gender

imposed. The poem "Echoes" represents a gendered voice in

opposition to male epic poetics, but finally locates it

in a "cave" removed from the world. In "City Visions,"

the poet invokes Milton and Beethoven, but only as blind

and deaf; images for her own poetry are set in a

"restricted sphere of sound and sight." "Life and Art" in

fact opposes life against art, with the female Muse

serving a poet who is male, and who only is inspired by

her when he retreats from the "day's illusion."

"Influence" and "Mater Amabilis" likewise picture a

"Mother" who watches, but is not herself a poet,

separating gender from writing. When she does represent

her own poetry writing, it comes into being in

cemeteries, in "some dusky, twilight spot" of "Autumn

Sadness," in "Saint Michael's Chapel" far from the "vexed

hubbub of our world," or as "Restlessness" in longing for

missed places and exclusion from them.

32

This removal also defines the spaces of "In the

Jewish Synagogue at Newport," where Lazarus gestures to

her Jewish identity before her encounter with the mass

immigration of Russian Jewish refugees at Ward Island.

The poem, a riposte to Longfellow's "In the Jewish

Cemetery at Newport," still notably resembles it. Set far

from the "noises of the busy town," Lazarus's poem mainly

records absence, silence, death, things which are not:

"No signs of life are here: the very prayers/Inscribed

around are in a language dead;/The light of the

"perpetual lamp" is spent." The poem recognizes America

as a place of refuge for "weary ones, the sad, the

suffering," who have been "lone exiles of a thousand

years." Yet the American site remains ambiguous, a scene

not of rescue but of disappearance. The poem's concluding

homage does declare that "Nathless the sacred shrine is

holy yet," but not for anything alive and present. The

Synagogue remains a cenotaph of "lone floors where

reverent feet once trod." 19

Whatever the exact degree of continuity between

Lazarus's earlier Jewish selfhood and her later one, the

33

change from this scene of echoing absences to the

activist historical intervention which followed Lazarus's

visit with her Rabbi to Ward Island can only be called

dramatic. The "Synagogue" does announce what will remain

core concerns for Lazarus: the foreign as native and the

sacred as bordering secular history. The poem is

historical, moving from the Patriarchs through Egypt and

the Exodus to Solomon and the Babylonian exile, which

opens into the millennia of exile leading, albeit

ambivalently, to this American place of burial. What

Lazarus discovered in her visit to Ward Island with her

Rabbi was contemporary history, the Jews as an ongoing

venture in it, whose outcome requires activist attention.

This is not religious selfhood in a traditional sense.

Rather, it enacts the ambiguity that has always inhered

in Jewish identity: is it a people or a religion? Under

modern conditions of nineteenth-century nationalism, this

double identity had taken on new political meanings.

Lazarus, who had never fully aligned with Jewish religion

as such, responded to Ward Island with identification –

something somewhat astonishing for an elite, privileged,

34

wealthy Manhattanite facing impoverished, strangely

dressed aliens pouring into her city. Here already there

is a creative confluence between her American and Jewish

identities. America's women had throughout the century

taken on the role of social care, as an expression of

selfhood defined through and deeply inscribed in

community, largely focused through religious affiliation.

Lazarus embraces this selfhood, although she does so on a

transformative border between religion and peoplehood

that, in Jewish terms, launched Zionism, and in American

terms, ethnicity.

Lazarus's activism took several forms. She helped

found a Hebrew Technical Institute for Vocational

Training of immigrants to equip them for America. She

tried to organize a Committee for the Colonization of

Palestine as a Zionist venture, traveling to Europe

partly in order to fundraise for it. A more successful

fundraising venture was her contribution of "The New

Colossus" (1883) to an auction to cover expenses for the

pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, which had been donated

in the name of French/American friendship. This sonnet

35

takes its place within a transformation in Lazarus's

writing, to fierce polemical essays written in defense of

Jews against anti-Semitism. Lazarus had launched a public

voice, in which expression becomes directed away from

herself and towards a historical, national mission. In

her poetry, too, a parallel transmutation is visible,

from solitary singer in sequestered spaces as birthplace

to personal genius, to a compromise between feminine

modesty and a masculine, poetic genius such as Emerson,

whom she took as her mentor. Lazarus's poetic voice

becomes paradoxically both more assertively public and

yet consistent with women's poetic voices in the century,

which characteristically drew force, authority and

authorization from just such public commitments. In

Lazarus's case, she shifts from poet as genius to poet as

prophet; from self-expression, to historical vision and

call. But the historical is not separable from the

religious. Her Jewish selfhood is rooted in both domains,

interwoven with her American identities as well.

"The New Year / Rosh Hashanah 5643” (i.e. 1882, the

first year of mass immigration) returns to the synagogue

36

as poetic scene. Strong and precise liturgical imagery is

woven throughout, as if Lazarus were herself the Cantor

of the service. Indeed, she herself seems to blow the

shofar that prophetically announces and summons the people

through "ancestral blood," against Russian "priest and

mob" and towards an "undreamed of morn:"

Blow, Israel, the sacred cornet! Call Back to thy courts whatever faint heart throb With thine ancestral blood, thy need craves all. The red, dark year is dead, the year just born Leads on from anguish wrought by priest and mob, To what undreamed-of morn?

The prophetic act to "Call / Back" – recalling the shuvu,

shuvu (Return, Return) of Hosea 14, read traditionally

between the New Year and Yom Kippur – Lazarus adopts as

her own. She is also calling forward, to a new sense of

what Jewishness is.

Summoning her audience of the immediate present of

history, out of the "ancestral" past and towards a coming

"morn," she sets out the dimensions of peoplehood: to

belong to a community whose identity is inherited and

passed on, here inextricable from the traditional

language of the liturgy. And yet, for all its trumpet

call to Jewish renewal, the poem is strangely ambivalent

37

about how to locate it. The voice of the prophet is

Jewish, but the scene is American:

Even as the Prophet promised, so your tent Hath been enlarged unto earth's farthest rim. To snow-capped Sierras from vast steppes ye went, Through fire and blood and tempest-tossing wave, For freedom to proclaim and worship Him, Mighty to slay and save.

The call to return here is not to the ancient Holy Land,

but to the new one in America, in the western "Sierras;"

and the creed is "freedom" of worship. American pluralism

permits, indeed sanctions what Lazarus goes on to name as

"two divided streams" of exiles,

One rolling homeward to its ancient source, One rushing sunward with fresh will, new heart. By each the truth is spread, the law unfurled, Each separate soul contains the nation's force, And both embrace the world.20

Here is not one "truth" but two at least, ecstatically

announced as mutually confirming, separate soul and

nation, freedom and traditional commitment, past and

future. But can "each separate soul" indeed contain the

"nation's force," especially if more than one nation,

more than one history and people are at issue? How does a

self composed of multiple memberships balance among them?

38

Can the various strands intertwine in the way Lazarus's

formal mastery and prophetic voice seem to bind them?

Lazarus's "Statue of Liberty" poem remains her most

impelling, but also among her most fissured. The Liberty

sonnet rewrites American and Jewish, and also gendered

identities, pluralizing the self through identifications

whose interrelationship becomes not only complex but

potentially conflictual. Lazarus, in transforming the

Statue from symbol of French friendship and liberty to

"Mother of Exiles," erects the single greatest monument

to American women's culture of public responsibility. Its

oxymora register the paradox of female poetic voice, at

once modest and yet publically committed: "silent lips,"

"Mother of Exiles," "imprisoned lightning," "eyes

command." Equally palpable and equally oxymoronic are its

Judaic/American, foreign/native inscriptions. The Statue

contrasts Greek Europe against an America thereby

identified with Hebraism. Further Hebraic traces emerge

in "imprisoned lightning," which suggests Deborah, called

eshet lapidoth, the wife or woman of lightning, as does

"Mother of Exiles." The "lamp" at the conclusion recalls

39

many others in Lazarus from the Newport poem onward,

where it first appears as the "perpetual lamp" of the

synagogue, to repeated images of Hannukah menorahs as

signs of Jewish awakening. America and Judaism become

intermeshed. The foreign is welcomed as American, while

America itself is redefined, in this very performance, as

land of immigrants. Ethnic diversity constitutes a new

pluralist rather than singular identity. That a Jewish

woman speaks through and for America affirms and

demonstrates just this pluralized identity.

These multiple identities, however, are ultimately

non-identical. Lazarus speaks as an American woman whose

public care the Statue imposingly proclaims. She then

also encodes Judaic traces in the text. Nonetheless,

"Give me your tired, your poor" echoes Matthew 11:28,

"Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden," a

Christic call that America, as Werner Sollors explores in

Beyond Ethnicity, likewise embodies. Lazarus, like Moise,

universalizes and secularizes American identity. To be

Jewish, however, is not the same as to be universal. To

return to Zion is not the same as to emigrate to America.

40

Unlike Hyneman, Lazarus is unclear whether America or

Palestine is the Holy Land. This very confusion, however,

powerfully enacts multiple identities in ways that have

since become ever more a norm. Lazarus points forward

from religious selfhood as embedded in community, to

memberships in multiple communities, variously and not

necessarily consistently defined, residing in

intersecting but also differentiating ethnic, national,

cultural affiliations and participations. In Emma Lazarus

this does not lead to weak identity. On the contrary, her

American and Jewish selves address each other in an

ongoing, forceful project. Their lack of complete

alignment becomes characteristic of American ethnicity,

not as its dissolution, but as its mode. For Lazarus, as

for Moise and Hyneman, it is these affiliations that

launch and give force to poetic voice, voice that is

addressed to others in a community in which religious

selfhood becomes conjoined or redefined through further

gendered, ethnic, and national identities.

Notes

41

1 Penina Moise, Secular and Religious Works, Compiled and Published by Charleston SectionCouncil of Jewish Women, (Charleston: South Carolina; Nicholas G. Duffy Printer, 1911).2 Moise, p. 49.3 Ibid, p. 170.4 Moise, p. 1645 Moise, p. 83.6 Ibid, p. 83. 7 Ibid, p. 48.8 Ibid, p.89.9 Ibid, p. 90.10 Ibid, p. 133.

11 Rebekah Hyneman, The Leper and Other Poems (Philadelphia: A. Hart, 1853), 140 .12 Ibid, 141.13 Ibid, 142.14 Ibid, 119.

15 Ibid, 41.16 Ibid, 113.17 Ibid, 110.18 Ibid, 120.

19 Emma Lazarus, Selected Poems and Other Writings, ed. Gregory Eiselein (NY: Broadview Literary Texts, 2002), p. 49.20 Ibid, p. 175.