>>16873
The Curious Case of Emma Lazarus (2/3)
As it turns out, the truth about Ms. Lazarus has largely been memory-holed in academia to maintain her popular image as Our Lady of Immigration. In reality, Ms. Lazarus had some far more nuanced views towards immigration than her famous sonnet would suggest. Surely, she was a pro-Zionist Jewess, but that didn’t stop her from writing some eyebrow-raising realtalk about immigration. I’ve been reading Bette Roth Young’s biography of Lazarus, Emma Lazarus in Her World: Life and Letters, and have made some discoveries about her character which I believe /pol/ will find most intriguing.
For example, in the same year (1883) she wrote The New Colossus, Lazarus also wrote tracts like An Epistle to the Hebrews and The Jewish Problem (!), both of which remain mysteriously out of print and completely unavailable on the Internet 130 years later… hardly a fitting treatment for one of America’s first Jewish female authors. These works are thought to have been expansions upon Lazarus’ thoughts towards Jews and Zionism which she made known elsewhere. For example, Lazarus thought highly of the Spanish Jewry from which she was descended, but did not extend this kindness of thought to Eastern European Jews in the pale of settlement, saying they possessed "ignominious features" and "a shuffling gait… [they] wore the sordid mask of the Ghetto." In fact, Lazarus didn’t want European Jews coming to America at all, instead preferring them to be moved to (then) Palestine en masse. In her own words:
“For the mass of semi-Orientals, Kabalists and Chassidim, who constitute the vast majority of East European Israelites, some more practical measure of reform must be devised than their transportation to a state of society utterly at variance with their time-honored customs and most sacred beliefs. The only such measure that has been urged is the Re-Colonization of Palestine.”
Basically, Emma considered Eastern Jews so uncivilized that their customs and beliefs would not be appropriate in America, or indeed, the West.
Perhaps the most eye-opening factoid I discovered about Ms. Lazarus is that she was fiercely Darwinist in her social outlook. In her own words:
“Mr. [Herbert] Spencer and Mr. Darwin, not to cite less authoritative names, have pointed out the positively maleficent effects of ignorant philanthropy, and the portentous evils of that short-sighted charity which neglects to take into account the laws of nature and of natural selection.”
The absolute madwoman! Laws of nature? Natural selection? Short-sighted charity ? Oy vey! Doesn’t she know it’s (((current year)))? Our Lady of Immigration was not completely devoid of reason, it would seem.
There is also the case of Ms. Lazarus’ father, one Moses Lazarus. Moses was a sugar refiner who enjoyed healthy business with the sugar plantations of the American South, only closing his connections there once the Civil War broke out. Put another way: the Lazarus family benefitted directly from slavery in a very Jewish manner, selling the goods produced by slavery for a profit in the Northeast. It should also be noted that the Lazarus family engaged in a little bit of proto-white flight from the very immigration Emma would later canonize in her poem; in 1877, the family moved uptown from Fourteenth Street to escape vibrant diversity taking over their block.