Mother of Exiles

Liberty Enlightening the World 

(La Liberté éclairant le monde) (1886) by Edward Moran. 

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame 
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name 
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand 
Glows world-wide welcome… 
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she 
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, 
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, 
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. 
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, 
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Emma Lazarus' words, so misconstrued. Lazarus never intended her sonnet a convenient ploy for all the “leftists” of the world and their grasping adherents demanding “social justice” based entitlements.

Lazarus' 1883 sonnet "The New Colossus" was an intercession “for such a time as this” reminiscent of her ancient counterpart Esther for the life of her "people," “the Jews” (cf. Esther 4:13-14; Esther 7:3-4).

Mordecai (her father) answered “... Esther, Think not with thyself that thou shalt escape in the king's house, more than all the Jews. For if thou altogether holdest thy peace at this time, then shall... deliverance arise to the Jews from another place; but thou and thy father's house shall be destroyed: and who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this” (Esther 4:13-14)?

"Then Esther the queen answered and said, If I have found favour in thy sight, O king, and if it please the king, let my life be given me at my petition, and my people at my request: For we are sold, I and my people, to be destroyed, to be slain, and to perish. But if we had been sold for bondmen and bondwomen, I had held my tongue, although the enemy could not countervail the king's damage” (Esther 7:3-4).

Konstantin Pobedonostsev was the “eminence grise" of imperial Russian politics during the late nineteenth-century reign of Alexander III. In his capacity as Ober-Procurator of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church Pobedonostsev proposed a solution to the “Jewish problem”:

"One-third was to emigrate, one-third was to die, and one-third to disappear (i.e. be converted)." (Edward Flannery, "The Anguish of the Jews: Twenty-Three Centuries of Anti-Semitism," New York: Macmillan Company, 1965, pp. 189-190).

With prose contagious with Semitic ardor and poetry imbued with lyrical and Hebraic fire, Emma Lazarus lifted her “lamp beside the golden door!" And they came! Between 1881 and 1914, approximately two and a half million Jews emigrated to Western Europe and America, one of the largest mass migrations in recorded history.

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame 
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name 
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand 
Glows world-wide welcome...

Emma Lazarus [“Mother of Exiles”]

How can I be saved?