"How Came They Here?": Longfellow's "The Jewish Cemetery at Newport," Slavery, and Proto-Zionism

This article proposes a detailed re-reading of Longfellow's poem, placing it at the heart of debates about slavery and the restoration of the Jewish people to their ancestral homeland in mid-nineteenth-century America. The manuscripts of the poem, examined here in detail for the first time, reveal a poet struggling with competing attitudes towards the vanished Jewish community of Newport, seeing them on the one hand as victims of "Christian hate" and on the other as contributing towards their own downfall through their obsession with an impossible dream of "restoration" to their ancestral homeland and their participation in the slave trade.