America, Land of the Pilgrim Jews: The Typological Encounters of the Immigration Era

• In Event: On the Move: Travel, Migration, and Modern Jewish LIteratures

Abstract

That Americans have understood themselves as metaphoric or typological Jews is shared across studies of American civil religion and the uses of biblical typology, from the works of Sacvan Bercovitch and Robert Bellah to the recent re-evaluations of Philip Gorski’s 2017 AMERICAN COVENANT. Consider, for example, the Puritan “city on a hill” and “errand into the wilderness,” the Exodus as paradigm of national founding, the idea of the “American jeremiad.” In the late-19th century “real” Jews, immigrant and native-born, increasingly began to live among these typological American Jews. Yet this symbolic encounter, formative and unique to the American and American Jewish experiences, is little remarked. I contend that its symbolic weight suggests how Jews, despite their small population, came (for example) to be enshrined in the postwar triumvirate of “Protestant, Catholic, Jew” as a way of being American. It suggests as well that American Jewish identity has come to life in conversation with ideas of “Jewishness” that bleed across religious and ethnic borders.

This paper focuses on two American poets who bookend the Jewish immigration of the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Too many of Emma Lazarus’ poems, I argue, are read strictly for questions of Jewish nationalism and proto-Zionism. Yet her works also engage with the biblical typology of Americanness, exploring what it means to be a Jew among “Jews.” Although she was an Irish-Catholic immigrant, Lola Ridge nonetheless takes the Jewish immigrant experience as a primary subject. A labor activist and modernist poet, she also turns toward the friction of this typological encounter while struggling with and against visions of America as “Promised Land.” While Lazarus settles on a re-imagining of the Maccabbees, Ridge, writing from the other side of the Immigration Era, uses the Lower East Side to re-imagine paradigms of Americanness. By reading typological Jewishness through immigrants, activists, and religious and ethnic others, Ridge defines what it means to be American through their experiences. Comparative readings of Lazarus and Ridge allow us to see how such symbolic encounters mark a key turning point in the history of American self-definition and civil religion, guiding each toward 20th-century revisions.

Author

• Joshua Logan Wall, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor