Emma Lazarus’ Newport connection
Very few of us are familiar with Lazarus’ 1867 poem “The Jewish Synagogue at Newport.” Touro Synagogue, built in 1763, is the oldest standing synagogue still in use in the United States. When “The Jewish Synagogue at Newport” was composed, Touro Synagogue was not open for worship services because the Jewish population of Newport had dispersed after the Revolutionary War.
Lazarus was familiar with Touro Synagogue because her family spent their summers in Newport along with many others of New York’s cultural elite. Even though Touro was officially closed, it was well maintained and was occasionally used for special occasions.
Lazarus’ poem was written as a response to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport.” The last stanza of the Longfellow poem included the phrase “dead nations never rise again.” Lazarus concentrated on the “living power” of the synagogue: “The sacred shrine is holy yet.”
“The Jewish Synagogue at Newport” used the same title format and the same meter as “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport.”
From Longfellow’s “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport”
How strange it seems! These Hebrews in their graves,
Close by the street of this fair seaport town,
Silent beside the never-silent waves,
At rest in all this moving up and down!
Emma Lazarus’ “In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport,” published in Lazarus’ 1871 collection “Ademtus and Other Poems”
Here, where the noises of the busy town,
The ocean’s plunge and roar can enter not,
We stand and gaze around with tearful awe,
And muse upon the consecrated spot.
No signs of life are here: the very prayers
Inscribed around are in a language dead;
The light of the “perpetual lamp” is spent
That an undying radiance was to shed.
What prayers were in this temple offered up,
Wrung from sad hearts that knew no joy on earth,
By these lone exiles of a thousand years,
From the fair sunrise land that gave them birth!
How as we gaze, in this new world of light,
Upon this relic of the days of old,
The present vanishes, and tropic bloom
And Eastern towns and temples we behold.
Again we see the patriarch with his flocks,
The purple seas, the hot blue sky o’erhead,
The slaves of Egypt, – omens, mysteries, –
Dark fleeing hosts by flaming angels led.
A wondrous light upon a sky-kissed mount,
A man who reads Jehovah’s written law,
‘Midst blinding glory and effulgence rare,
Unto a people prone with reverent awe.
The pride of luxury’s barbaric pomp,
In the rich court of royal Solomon—
Alas! we wake: one scene alone remains, –
The exiles by the streams of Babylon.
Our softened voices send us back again
But mournful echoes through the empty hall:
Our footsteps have a strange unnatural sound,
And with unwonted gentleness they fall.
The weary ones, the sad, the suffering,
All found their comfort in the holy place,
And children’s gladness and men’s gratitude
‘Took voice and mingled in the chant of praise.
The funeral and the marriage, now, alas!
We know not which is sadder to recall;
For youth and happiness have followed age,
And green grass lieth gently over all.
Nathless the sacred shrine is holy yet,
With its lone floors where reverent feet once trod.
Take off your shoes as by the burning bush,
Before the mystery of death and God.
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