America's Prophet (21 page)

WE REACH THE
top of the pedestal and light floods in from all sides. Above, a plate-glass window shows the molded interior of
Liberty
’s gown. Outside is a 360-degree walkway. The wind whistles against copper, creating a kind of sound cocoon. I mention 9/11, and Moreno explains how a colleague, seeing a plane flying abnormally close to the statue, hurried up the pedestal and took one of the photographs of United flight 175 crashing into the second tower. Since then, visitors are not allowed to enter the body of the statue. From the pedestal, the hole in Ground Zero is still visible, and the cavity in the skyline is its most notable feature. The nearest icon is the Brooklyn Bridge, which was under construction when Emma Lazarus wrote her poem, a detail she captured in her line “the air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.”

Liberty Enlightening the World
was dedicated on a rainy October 28, 1886. Lazarus’s sonnet, which had earlier helped raise a paltry fifteen hundred dollars, was not read and not missed. Still, a number of speakers did draw connections between
Liberty
and the Exodus. Renowned orator Chauncey Depew, the day’s main speaker, said the statue was the “inspiration of God” who elevated “the conquered” to the “full measure” of freedom. Earlier he had said the statue “would for all time to come welcome the incoming stranger.” John Greenleaf Whittier’s official poem also likened Americans to enslaved Israelites whom Moses freed from the shadow of the Pyramids.

José Martí, the Cuban patriot, described the statue on its opening day as advancing forward “as if to enter the Promised Land.”

Lazarus died from cancer the following year, unlinked to
Liberty
. Not until 1903 did a wealthy friend place a plaque containing “The New Colossus” inside the pedestal. Still, it wasn’t until the late 1930s, with Hitler compelling Jews once more to flee Europe, that a Slovenian American immigrant named Louis Adamic began a one-man campaign to resuscitate the sonnet and renew
Liberty
’s role as a Mother of Exiles. This time it worked. New biographies called Lazarus the “Woman with a Torch” Alfred Hitchcock ended
Saboteur
(1942) in the statue’s crown with the heroine quoting the sonnet to an enemy agent; Irving Berlin used the poem’s final words in the lyrics of his Broadway musical
Miss Liberty
. By midcentury, Lazarus’s vision
of the Statue of Liberty as a beacon of freedom to heal a broken world had become its dominant cry. Emma Lazarus gave a voice to the statue that could not speak.

While we were standing outside the pedestal, I asked Barry Moreno why he thought Lazarus’s interpretation had become the prevailing one.

“I think it has something to do with the biblical ties of the statue,” he said, “and how much that related to the American experience. And to the Jewish experience. Jews were attracted to the New World, yet many of them felt attached to the world they were leaving behind. They felt compelled to come here. I think America, and the Statue of Liberty, helped persuade them into accepting a new life.”

“So the statue’s biblical iconography helped make them feel welcome?”

“Even the tablet itself may have been strong enough to overcome doubt. They were looking to escape their awful past—the poverty, the shtetl. Then when they get to the golden land, they see the Statue of Liberty, and they have a sense that this place also views itself as having a special role and being home to a special people. That idea had been in America from the very beginning, of course, but it took a Jewish poet to reignite it.”

As if to reinforce that image, Ronald Reagan came to the statue on its centennial in 1986 and made the connection explicit. Weaving Emma Lazarus and Abraham Lincoln together with the signers of the Declaration of Independence, he rooted the Mother of Exiles in the earliest Americans, the Puritans. “We sometimes forget that even those who came here first to settle the new land were also strangers,” Reagan said. “I’ve spoken before of the tiny
Arbella,
a ship at anchor just off the Massachusetts coast.” As the ship reached shore, Reagan continued, John Winthrop reminded his fellow Puritans that “they must keep faith with their God, that the eyes of all
the world are upon them, and that they must not forsake the mission that God had sent them on.” Reagan failed to note that when Winthrop quoted these words he attributed them to their source, “that faithful servant of the Lord, in his last farewell to Israel.” Moses. At the centennial of the Statue of Liberty, the union of state and symbol was complete. In the elegant, biblical phrasing of Ronald Reagan:

BACK ON THE
water heading home, I was struck by how much the statue’s story mirrored that of the Liberty Bell. An object made for one purpose was reimagined to signify another. In both cases, the power of the American story, with its grand themes of slavery and freedom, oppression and hope, had become so muscular that even objects with little transparent connection to Moses could be reforged in his image. The sacred story lines of America had long paralleled the central themes of the Exodus.

Then, just as the Bible seemed to be peaking in influence, something unexpected happened. Until now, the idea of linking America with Moses had been done almost entirely by Protestants. As Peter Gomes pointed out to me back in Plymouth, Christians easily cast themselves as inheritors of the Jewish role as the chosen people when no real Jews were present. But suddenly at the turn of the
twentieth century, millions of real Jews showed up in America, eager to claim their place as heirs to their own story. Efforts by Jews to interact with Christian America would become one of the dominant undercurrents of the coming century and one of the greatest reasons why Moses endured as a defining figure in the American identity.

To help understand the role of Jews in creating modern America, I went to see Jonathan Sarna, the leading historian of American Jewry. Sarna’s father, Nahum, was a pioneer student of biblical archaeology, and I had carried his books with me when I retraced the Bible through the Middle East. Now I was doing the same with his son’s books. Jonathan Sarna is a compact man, with a tidy beard, spectacles, and a small
kippah
on his head. He holds himself very still when he talks. Like Barry Moreno, he seems perfectly cast for a man of precision, but his mind is grand and his writing brims with joy.

I began by asking him to characterize the importance of Moses to Jews.

“In traditional Judaism,” Professor Sarna said, “Moses is the central figure to whom God gives the Torah. The assumption was that all the law, written and oral, was handed down at Sinai to Moses. The rabbis call this
halachah le’Moshe mi’Sinai,
the ‘law that goes back to Sinai.’ Cantors say that certain ancient melodies go back to Sinai. Jewish brides and grooms get married in the name of Moses. Moses is the human who comes closest to God, so everything is mediated through him.”

Given that importance, it’s not surprising that when Jews came to America they tried to link Moses with their adopted homeland. Their task was made easier because Moses was already here.

Jews made spotty appearances in the New World among early settlers, and the first significant community was established in New Amsterdam in 1654. But as late as the Revolution, Jews were still a
microscopic presence, totaling fewer than 2,000 people. One hundred Jews are known to have fought during the War of Independence. Still, the Constitution’s support of religious tolerance, and the elimination of state-sponsored churches, encouraged European Jews to view the United States as offering greater opportunity. By the start of the Civil War, America’s Jewish population had reached 150,000.

As early as the 1820s, Jewish leaders in Europe and the United States had begun referring to America as the new Promised Land, but the analogy was not always positive. Many Jews echoed Moses’ warning to the Israelites in Deuteronomy not to succumb to sinful temptations. As one teacher warned a couple leaving for Ohio in 1839, “You are traveling to a land of freedom…. Resist and withstand this tempting freedom and do not turn away from the religion of your fathers. Do not throw away your holy religion for quickly lost earthly pleasures.” Again the words echo Winthrop.

Protestants were ambivalent about these Jewish immigrants. Anti-Semitism ticked up during these years, but Jews were mostly perceived as less threatening than Catholics, who had grown from 2 percent of the population in 1830 to 10 percent by 1860 to 16 percent by 1910. Americans’ love-hate attitude toward Jewish immigrants was on display in an extraordinary edition of the satiric magazine
Puck
in 1881. The issue contained a two-page color cartoon showing Uncle Sam in red-and-white trousers, a blue coat, and a red cape, standing on a rock in the middle of the Atlantic, wielding a wand labeled “Liberty.” In an image that looks both back to Daniel Boone and forward to Charlton Heston, Uncle Sam spreads his arm and splits the Atlantic, while a stream of Jewish immigrants, many with hooked noses and kinky hair, dressed in top hats and formal gowns, crosses on dry ground to America. The editorial compared Jewish and Catholic immigrants on the question of who fit better in the Protestant Promised Land. The writers urged hooligan Catholics to act more
like the Jews but cautioned Jews not to believe they could have free rein in America. “Who is competent to decide the question?” the editors ultimately asked. “Uncle Sam, as the modern Moses, will decide it.”

“The Modern Moses.” Cartoon depicting Moses dressed as Uncle Sam, splitting the Atlantic Ocean and allowing Jewish immigrants to cross to the new Promised Land. Drawn by Frederick Burr Opper and Joseph Keppler.
Puck,
December 1881.
(Courtesy of The Library of Congress)

Up to this point, Uncle Sam had not been a particularly religious figure. He is thought to have earned his name when “Uncle” Samuel Wilson, a meat packer in upstate New York in the 1810s, teased that the initials “U.S.” on barrels of pork bound for American troops referred to him. The joke stuck. By the Civil War, Uncle Sam was being depicted as an old man with white hair and a goatee. He was often shown as a male companion to the Statue of Liberty. And like her, Uncle Sam emerged during the immigration debates in the late
nineteenth century as a kind of surrogate Moses. As Emma Lazarus did with
Liberty
, the editors of
Puck
imagined Uncle Sam addressing Jewish immigrants.

In the tradition of nearly every great American icon—the seal, the flag, the Liberty Bell—Uncle Sam now took a turn as Moses. The Hebrew prophet had become so ingrained in the country’s consciousness that he served as a kind of American Hamlet, a role that every actor, in order to be considered great, had to play at least once.

Jews, too, began converting Moses into a pillar of American identity, a kind of supra–Founding Father. As early as Thanksgiving 1852, a Philadelphia rabbi preached that “with the spangled banner of liberty in one hand, and the law of [Sinai] in the other, we will continue as faithful citizens in this glorious republic.” A Cincinnati rabbi created a bookplate that portrays Moses on the left and George Washington on the right, with the American flag and the Ten Commandments in front. The founder of Reform Judaism, Isaac Mayer Wise, said at the centennial of Washington’s inauguration in 1889 that Moses and Washington are “the two poles on the axis about which the history of mankind revolves.”

I asked Jonathan Sarna why Jews worked so hard to show that Moses went hand in hand with America.

“Jews’ greatest fear was that America would become a Christian nation,” he said. “That there would be a Christian amendment to the Constitution. And that that would undermine everything that made America special for Jews. By emphasizing Moses, they showed that Jews belonged here as well. Jews were fortunate that so many American Protestants were Old Testament–focused.”

The movement among American Jews to stress their kinship with Moses had another benefit. Liberal Jews wanted to return to the Mosaic roots of Judaism and downplay the myriad of laws governing food, dress, and prayer that rabbis had imposed over the years. Judaism should scrap these archaic ideas and modernize, they said. The back-to-Moses movement went so far that some prominent left-wing Jews actually proposed changing the name of Judaism to Mosaism, in part because Moses was perceived to be a more appealing figure to Christians.