MANUSCRIPT: Manuscript, typescript, and printed appearance: Chanuka.
ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT PRINTER’S PROOFS
AND FIRST APPEARANCE IN PRINT
Lazarus, Josephine. Signed manuscript: Chanuka 5666. December 1905.
8 leaves, in ink, rectos only affixed to larger leaves in a folder with a manuscript author/title/date label.
Together with:
Lazarus, Josephine. Typescript, “Printer’s copy”: Chanuka 5666. [1905.]
4 leaves, rectos only; annotated in pencil and lightly emended ink.
Together with:
Lazarus, Josephine Lazarus. “Hanuka 5666” in Souvenir Program of the Maccabaean Feast. Held under the auspices of the Zionist Council of Greater New York. December 27th, 1905. (Also present in this volume is Emma Lazarus’s poem, “The Feast of Lights.”)
Horizontal 12mo.; printed on coated paper; printed wrappers, formerly string-tied, now stapled; fragile; lightly annotated in ink, annotations suggesting this may have been the copy belonging to Committee Member and editor and contributor J.H. Berkowitz.
Lazarus in her article discusses the year of massive bloodletting and Jewish martyrs (1905), and
celebrates the new heroic Maccabaean Spirit and Jewish nationalism. Lazarus (1846-1910) "was the best
known of the poet Emma Lazarus's five sisters,” and one of Emma’s poems appears in this publication as
well. Josephine’s own first published piece was a memorial essay on Emma, followed by a series of
literary biographies of contemporary women writers. In 1893, she was one of the few Jewish women
invited to speak at the Congress of Religions at the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Like the
other Jewish speakers at the Congress, Lazarus emphasized the spiritual identity of Judaism, introducing
her vision of combining the truths of Judaism and Christianity in a nonsectarian ethical monotheism. She
further refined her ideology in The Spirit of Judaism, published in 1895... Lazarus's life and work provide
important insights into a pattern of Jewish identification and assimilation in late nineteenth-century
America... Josephine Lazarus's legacy is of a woman yearning for a Judaism that satisfies both the
intellect and the spirit, a Judaism that can connect the past with the present and the future." (Sue Levi
Elwell, Jewish Women's Archive, 2014).
Scarce: OCLC notes only one copy of the Souvenir Program; this is the first Lazarus manuscript we can
trace.
Print Inquire