The Jewish Cemetery at Newport

Based on Longfellow’s 1852 visit to the still-extant Rhode Island Cemetery, the poem is ensconced in the tradition of the elegy—an ode to the deceased. It is melancholic and evocative in tone and in the 18th century elegiac fashion, uses a specific experience to make a more universal point about human experience. Yet, the poem is somewhat unusual in both its subject matter as well as its treatment. Longfellow’s is one of the rare mid-19th century poems to directly address the persecution of the Jewish community and the experience of a diaspora—the relocation of Jewish people beyond Israel. The specific community Longfellow references are Sephardic Jews, the first of whom fled to Latin America and the Caribbean to escape persecution in Europe. From 1658, small groups of migrants started to arrive in Newport, Rhode Island, attracted by the relative religious tolerance and open prospects of the new American colonies. In 1677, this group built a cemetery in Newport. Their descendants built the Touro Synagogue—the oldest in America—a century later.

Longfellow uses the imagined experience of the Newport Jews to understand the suffering of various Jewish diasporas. To balance the themes of death and life, past and present, he uses the literary device of contrast to the degree that even the tone and mood sometimes shift from one stanza to another. The shifting stances may indicate the speaker’s ambivalence around their subject, or reflect the conflict between the speaker’s progressive sensibilities and acknowledgement of historical reality.

Juxtaposition—the intentional placement of two dissimilar items near one another for the purpose of contrasting them—is evident from the first stanza as the speaker compares the silence of the graves with the tumult of the nearby sea. The appearance of the graves is described as “strange” (Line 1), which may allude to the fact the Jewish people buried there are non-native in origin—a suggestion which crops up again in the fourth stanza:

“The very names recorded here are strange,

Of foreign accent, and of different climes.” (Lines 13-14)

The Jewish cemetery’s anomalous status is thus established. But the speaker’s tone is sympathetic of this anomaly, again catching the reader by surprise.

A sympathetic tone continues in the imagery of the second stanza, where the trees tenderly give shade to the sleepers in the graves. The image is peaceful and warm. The third stanza respectfully describes the old tombstones; Line 11 compares the stones to the tablets on which God inscribed the Ten Commandments. Yet in Line 14, there is an allusion to Moses breaking the tablets. In the biblical story, Moses angrily breaks the tablets when he learns the Hebrew people are disobeying God’s decree. The allusion to the smashing of the tablets jars against the peaceful image of the sleeping dead. Further, more recent scholars argue that the mention of the broken tablets contributes to the problematic narrative that Jewish people were somehow personally responsible for their troubles. In any case, the mention of the tablets is another example of the tonal ambiguity of the poem.

Reading the inscriptions on the tombstones, the speaker notes that the names are redolent “[o]f foreign accent, and of different climes” (Line 14). Descriptors like “foreign” and “different” suggest that the people buried here are immigrants—a theme which the poem explores in some depth. The allusion to “Abraham and Jacob” (Line 16), both prominent figures in the Old Testament, is one of the many references to Jewish names and traditions. Through using such references, the speaker establishes a connection between those buried in the Newport graveyard and the larger Jewish community.

The sixth stanza has an elegiac tone and is suffused with a deep sympathy for those buried in the graveyard. The speaker imagines a burial in Jewish tradition where the mourners pray for the everlasting life of the dead. The sympathy shifts to a fatalistic despair when the speaker asserts that “closed are the portals of their synagogue” (Line 21), referring to the Touro Synagogue. Psalms of David do not break the silence of the dead, nor does the voice of a rabbi reading the “Decalogue” (Line 23) or the Ten Commandments. The conflation of the silence of the dead with the silence of the symbols of Jewish tradition—synagogue, psalms, rabbis—shows that though the speaker is sympathetic to the Jewish minority, they are ambiguous about the Jewish people’s place in the future.

This push-pull between sympathy and ambiguity recurs in Stanza Eight when the speaker uses a soothing, beautiful image to describe the grave dwellers. The fact that an invisible hand scatters care and grace over them shows that the dead still matter and are sustained by a universal force. Thus, their fate—mirroring that of the Jewish people at large—is not as determined as suggested in the previous stanza.

From Stanza Nine onward, the speaker more firmly turns their gaze upon the history of the Jewish diaspora. Mirroring this telescoping of perspective, the speaker’s tone also becomes more direct. In lines that unequivocally establish the speaker’s sympathetic view of Jewish history, the speaker wonders “[w]hat burst of Christian hate, / What persecution, merciless and blind, / Drove o'er the sea – that desert desolate – / These Ishmaels and Hagars of mankind?” (Lines 29-32). In the Old Testament, Hagar—a concubine of the patriarch Abraham—was exiled to the desert with their son Ishmael. The allusion establishes that the Jewish people in the cemetery in particular, in conjunction with the Jewish diaspora at large, may have been exiled or forced into migrating. Here, the tone of the speaker is quite progressive for the time the poem was composed.

In Stanzas Ten and Eleven, they speaker details the various manners in which the Jews were persecuted. The reference to “[g]hettos” (Line 34) is chilling and oddly prescient in light of what the contemporary reader knows of the Holocaust or the Shoah which began 80 years after the poem was written. Phrases like the “bitter herbs of exile and its fears” (Line 38) display a keen sensitivity for the experience of those forced into migration. Again, the speaker uses these specific allusions to connect the persecution of Jewish people through history with the biblical exodus of the Israelites and other instances of exile in the Christian Bible. “Accursed Mordecai” (Line 47) is a reference from the book of Esther: Mordecai and his people were exiled from Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon. While the allusions convey the strong cultural heritage of Jewish communities, the broad brushing also implies that the persecution of Jews is somehow fated.

However, the next stanza inverts the impression of victimhood: The Jewish people are described as proud, despite their humiliation, and “unshaken as the continent” (Line 48). The pride is rooted in their culture and tradition, because “all the great traditions of the Past / They saw reflected in the coming time” (Lines 42-43). This is an allusion to the belief in Judaism that a messianic age will arise during which peace will be established on earth.

In the final two stanzas, the poem’s tone undergoes another sudden shift. The speaker begins to devolve into pessimism again; in the thirteenth stanza, Longfellow offers the elaborate and clever metaphor of the Hebrew alphabet to suggest the Jewish people live backwards comparable to how the alphabet reads right to left. Of course, the speaker does not challenge the hegemonic notion that reading right to left, unlike the Latin script, is beyond the norm. In the last—and most controversial—stanza, the speaker suggests the Jewish nation is fated to obscurity, echoing the fate of the dead of the cemetery. The lines function almost as a coda—a section distinct from the poem so far—and indicate that despite their sympathetic and liberal views, the speaker’s imagination is bound by their historical reality. They also explain the ambiguity that has existed throughout the poem, giving it its unique, characteristic tension. Of course, the poem’s concluding prediction was ultimately erroneous, as the nation of Israel was recognized by the United Nations in 1949.

An alternative critical interpretation for the last stanza is that instead of suggesting the end of the Jewish nation, the speaker is referring to the futility of looking at the past to reconstruct the future. The past is behind in the same way the grave dwellers can never be roused from their eternal sleep.