THESE ideas were echoed in a sublime form in English-speaking American Jewry by the poetess Emma Lazarus (1849‒1887), one of the most eloquent champions of the Jewish national idea in the English language. The story of Emma Lazarus’ life is the story of a soul ever striving and pressing ahead towards truth and the light. Her works clearly reflect the progress of her ideas. She was a born songstress, yet she did not sing like the nightingale for the joy of being alive. There was a shadow of sadness resting on her entire being, something born with her as part of her disposition and temperament, the stamp and heritage of a suffering race. _Hebraism_ lay dormant in this Jewish poetess. She was much influenced by Heinrich Heine (1797‒1856). Charmed by the beauty of his poetry, the whimsical play of his imagination and the heart’s muffled outburst audible through it all, she was nevertheless unaware of the actual bond that united them: the relationship in the blood, the unquenchable flame of the tragic Jewish passion of eighteen hundred years, which was smouldering in her own heart, and was soon to break forth and change the entire tendency of her thoughts and feelings. The persecutions of the Jews in 1880‒1884 were for Emma Lazarus a clarion call that awoke slumbering and unrealised feelings and aspirations. She was an assimilated Jewess herself at the beginning of her literary career. She had been in search of heroic ideals in alien fields, in Pagan mythology and in mystic, mediæval Christianity, ignoring all the time her birthright――the glorious vista of a great past and of a still greater future for the Jewish nation. Judaism had been a dead letter to her. But with the outbreak of the persecutions she found herself again. From this time dated the mission which she undertook on behalf of her race, and the expansion of all her faculties, that growth of spiritual power which is always stimulated when a great cause is championed and strong convictions awaken the soul. Emma Lazarus became an inspired poetess of the Jewish national idea. Her whole being had reshaped itself and found nourishment at an inexhaustible source. She threw herself into the study of her race, its language, its literature and history. Breaking the outward shell, she soon reached the kernel of the faith and the “miracle” of its survival. What was it other than the ever-present, ever life-inspiring spirit itself, which cannot die――the religious and ethical zeal which fills the whole history of the Jewish people, and of which she herself felt the living glow within her own soul? She had discovered the secret and the genius of Judaism――that complete transfusion of spirit with body and substance which, taken literally, often reduces itself to rites and ceremonies, but viewed in a proper light takes a nobler shape and form, and spreads its light over humanity in the prophets, teachers and saviours of mankind.