Emma Lazarus was born in New York City, July 22, 1849,[6] into a large Jewish family. She was the fourth of seven children of Moses Lazarus, a wealthy merchant[7] and sugar refiner,[8] and Esther Nathan (of a long-established German-Jewish New York family).[9] One of her great-grandfathers on the Lazarus side was from Germany;[10] the rest of her Lazarus ancestors were originally from Portugal and they were among the original twenty-three Portuguese Jews who arrived in New Amsterdam after they fled Recife, Brazil in an attempt to flee from the Inquisition.[11][8] Lazarus's great-great-grandmother on her mother's side, Grace Seixas Nathan (born in Stratford, Connecticut, in 1752) was also a poet.[12] Lazarus was related through her mother to Benjamin N. Cardozo, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Her siblings included sisters Josephine, Sarah, Mary, Agnes and Annie, and a brother, Frank.[13][14][15]
Privately educated by tutors from an early age, she studied American and British literature as well as several languages, including German, French, and Italian.[16] She was attracted in youth to poetry, writing her first lyrics when she was eleven years old.[17]
