Re-placing the Border in Ethnic American Literature

In 1856, Emma Lazarus, the Jewish American poet most famous for contributing the epitaph at the base of the Statue of Lib erty, wrote a pastoral poem about Jewish refugees in America titled "In Exile." ¹ "In Exile" celebrates the relative refuge found by Russian Jewish immigrants who escaped from the pogroms of Eastern Europe. "Strange faces theirs, wherthrough the Orient sun / Gleams," Lazarus writes. Stranger still, these Jews are not Talmudic scholars, nor even tailors or peddlers like so many Jewish immigrants. But then, the Jews in Lazarus's poem are not settled in New York, but in Texas, yearning for

Freedom to love the law that Moses brought,
To sing the songs of David, and to think
The thoughts Gabirol to Spinoza taught,
Freedom to dig the common earth, to drink
The Universal air—for this they sought
Refuge o'er wave and continent, to link
Egypt with Texas in their mystic chain,
And truth's perpetual lamp forbid to wane. (Merriam, 463)

The poem describes a unique moment in Jewish history, but it also tells us more about America than it might presume, and more about the consequences of America as a locus of diaspora than we could learn by reading only Jewish history. If we take note of the poem's date, we realize that in 1856, Texas, after years of contest and occupation, is recently conquered territory and part of a frontier that will stoke the national imagination. Lazarus invokes the rhetoric of biblical destiny for American settlement, an American poetic mainstay since Puritan times, but wonderfully reappropriated in "In Exile." Whereas Puritan and later American Romantic writers and poets invoked the conceit of Hebraic covenation and liberation while eliding actual Jewish history—"dead nations never rise again," wrote Longfellow—Lazarus reappropriates the exodus story and revises America's "errand in the wilderness" at the same time. America is the destined refuge for the Hebrews—actual Jews and not lately styled religious missionaries. That said, Lazarus's revision is nonetheless a buttressing of American Manifest Destiny, for it contributes to the myth of the open frontier and the romantic transformation land might have upon people, as ancient Hebrews become American pioneers. While Easterners moved across the "frontier," grabbing land and accruing capital, Mexicans dwelling in the region—suddenly granted U.S. citizenship after 1848—faced the loss of national identity and vulnerability to a tangle of U.S. land grant laws that would eventually facilitate the nearly complete usurpation of land from all Mexicans in the region (Limerick, 236-40). Interestingly, we note that Lazarus describes her pioneers in typically racialized terms, common to her time, their faces strange and oriental. But their faces didn't stay strange for long, presumably becoming tawny and steely, like the (stereo)typical American pioneer. That is, these oriental Jews became Americans. How did this take place? To what extent did the Jewish assimilation depend on U.S. imperialism? Clearly the presence of darker-skinned Mexicans, and the threat to U.S.-Anglo dominance of the region they portended, quickened the pace of U.S. acceptance of Jews as Americans, especially in imperially contested regions. But the juxtaposition of Jews among other nonnormative cultures—a juxtaposition that all cultural groups in America more or less share— certainly had a significant effect on Jewish self-perception, and future articulations of the American-Jewish sense of home and diaspora as well.

By juxtaposing two national phenomena, the arrival of immigrants and the settlement of the West, I do not intend to suggest that one is the cause of the other so much as to put the two in conversation. The synchronic occurrence of each tells us something about the other, and much about what both have in common, namely the impact of U.S. history on ethnic identity. The arrival in the United States of waves of German Jews in the mid-nineteenth century, and then Eastern European Jews at the...