“How came they here?” Longfellow’s “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport,” Slavery, and Proto-Zionism

This article places Longfellow’s much-anthologised elegy in context, highlighting its engagement with contemporary debates about slavery, racial difference, and the restoration of the Jews to their ancestral homeland. The poem’s complex textual history, reconstructed here for the first time, helps to explain its profoundly ambivalent attitude towards the vanished Jewish community of Newport, Rhode Island; their cemetery is both a monument to the shameful history of ‘Christian hate’ which drove them from Europe, and an emblem of the eventual fate of a people obsessed with the impossible dream of reviving the past and entangled in the ongoing horrors of slavery.