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