Jewish Identity and Poetic Form in "By the Waters of Babylon"

The first prose-poems ever published in the English language appeared in the March 1887 issue of Century Illustrated, a popular American magazine. Their collective title, "By the Waters of Babylon," announced their common theme: the sorrows of Jewish exile. The subtitle, "Little Poems in Prose," drew attention to this unusual form by reminding readers of the precedent of Charles Baudelaire's groundbreaking 1869 collection, Petits poèmes en prose. A few months after the publication of "By the Waters of Babylon," its author died of cancer at the age of 38. Her name was Emma Lazarus. ¹

Lazarus is not a figure we usually associate with literary experimentation. She is still famous today for her poem on the Statue of Liberty, and she has an important place in the history of American ethnic writing because of her poems on Jewish themes. But she is not remembered as a particularly exciting poet. Although her trumpeting of Jewish identity was thematically novel in American letters, she has never been considered a trailblazer in terms of poetic technique. Indeed, before "By the Waters of Babylon," she had never even written a poem in free verse. Yet in this, the final publication before her death, she turned from the sonnets and rhymed quatrains on which her reputation was based, to try her hand at a genre that was highly controversial in Europe and as yet unknown in the United States and England, a genre that to many contemporaries seemed to undo the notion of poetry itself. Why? As I will show, the answer to this question concerns not only the origins of Jewish-American poetry but also the very possibility of creating Jewish poetry in a non-Jewish language. But first, let us review the career that led up to "By the Waters of Babylon."

Poems by Jews had been written in America for over a century before Lazarus was born, and Lazarus was hardly the only Jewish poet of her time. The nineteenth century knew a number of dedicated Jewish versifiers in the United States, most of them women. Yet Lazarus is the only truly interesting figure among them—save perhaps for the bohemian Adah Isaacs Menken, a Tennesseean of Irish descent, who took on the identity of a Jewish prophetess in her fervid and somewhat slipshod declamatory poems. Certainly, Lazarus was the real talent among her Jewish contemporaries, both poetically and intellectually. She published her first collection of verse at the age of 17, translated from German, French, and Italian, and took an interest in the Hebrew poets of medieval Spain as well as the proto-Zionist political programs of her own age.

It is sometimes mistakenly claimed that the highly assimilated daughter of a sugar merchant was shocked into Jewish consciousness only in the 1880s when, in the wake of vicious pogroms, huge numbers of immigrants from Eastern Europe began to arrive on American shores. The plight of Russian Jewry entered American consciousness, and Lazarus founded the Society for the Improvement and Colonization of Eastern European Jews, in order to settle these refugees in Palestine. It was also at this time that she published her openly Jewish collection of poetry, with its in-your-face title, Songs of a Semite.

Nevertheless, Jewish concerns were already evident in her work in the 1870s. During this time she wrote on Jewish subjects, translated poems by Heinrich Heine, and began her English renderings of Hebrew poems from medieval Spain, via German translations. As has been noted by two of her best critics, Bette Roth Young and Dan Vogel, much of Lazarus's work sprang from her "preoccupation with Christian anti- Semitism," her Jewish consciousness sharpening through an increasingly outraged awareness of the continuing history of Jewish oppression. ² What has been less noted is her interest in the phenomena of crypto-Judaism and marranos. A number of her works deal with ambivalent or hidden Jewish identity and...