Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought by David Biale

Author:David Biale [Biale, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2010-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

The Politics of Secular Nationalism: Emma Lazarus and Theodor Herzl

Not all nationalists embraced a racial definition of the Jewish nation. One of the earliest American proponents of a return of the Jews to their ancestral home was Emma Lazarus (1849-1887), eventually the poet laureate of the Statue of Liberty. Lazarus did at times seem to hold to a racial definition of the Jews, but in an ironic sense: “Naturally a race whose members are unmistakably recognized at a glance, whatever be their color, complexion, costume or language, yet who dispute the cardinal fact as to whether they are a race, cannot easily be brought into unanimity upon more doubtful propositions.”65 Lazarus uses the term “race” in a broader sense than a biological group, since it includes cultural as well as physiological signs. She has in mind something like the definition of a nation. But even if the Jews have the superficial characteristics of a race, they don’t behave like one. And, in any case, Lazarus, like Hess, wanted to inculcate a sense of solidarity among the Jews without segregating them from the outside world. She quotes Claude Montefiore approvingly when he says that the law forbidding taking interest from “brothers” may be understood universally since “by superior virtue we regard the stranger also as our brother and our neighbor.”66

Lazarus was a thoroughly secular Jew, the scion of an old Sephardic American family who was largely alienated from her religious community. She thus anticipated in an American context the cosmopolitan Jewish nationalism of the fin de siècle, a stance inaccessible to most of the eastern European Jewish immigrants whom she championed. To prevent the collapse of nationalism into xenophobia, Lazarus constructed a definition of the nation largely divorced from religion: “But if our people persist in entrenching themselves behind a Chinese wall of petrified religious forms, the great modern stream of scientific philosophy will sweep past them.”67 And, more broadly:

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