Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Jewish Cemetery At Newport

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is a well known American Poet who wrote “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport”. The poem can be seen as music like, but it stills has a historical background. The cemetery he writes about can be found in Newport, Rhode Island; which is a small seaside town. According to William E. Cain in American Literature “During the Colonial period, Jews, encouraged by the relative religious tolerance afforded to them in Rhode Island, settled in the area of Newport, which is also home to the oldest continually operating synagogue in the United States”(Cain, pg. 718). This makes sense as to why there would be a cemetery specifically for Jews in the town. Longfellow also writes about the Jews and the harsh past they faced in biblical times.

They lived in narrow streets and lanes obscure, Ghetto and Judenstrasse, in mirk and mire; Taught in the school of patience to endure The life of anguish and the death of fire”(Longfellow, pg 719, lines 29-36). This shows, according to James sullivan, author of “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport” that Longfellow “is very direct in assigning “Christian hate” as the cause of the persecution and dislocation of the Jews”(Sullivan, par. 2). It is well known that Jews who lived in Europe were forced to live in restricted areas and Longfellow does a wonderful job as portraying Christians as the reason for why Jews were forced to live like that. This poem was written in 1854, 79 years before the Holocaust began in Germany. This poem opens your eyes and allows you to see that Jews were discriminated against long before Hitler came along; which is something not very many