A Passover sermon, a play, and a century of the Melting pot

　　The melting pot metaphor, touchstone of America’s debate over immigration, was claimed by the rabbi of a New York City synagogue, who said he coined it in a Passover sermon he gave exactly 100 years ago.

　　The image has been traced to a naturalized New Yorker in 1782, and also to DeWitt Clinton and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Later in 1907, a book by the English writer Ford Madox Ford included a chapter titled “The Melting Pot,” which said Britain had been revitalized by the influx of foreigners.

　　And finally, the following year, the phrase was popularized for eternity in “The Melting Pot,” a stage play by Israel Zangwill that preached the gospel of assimilation.

　　“I coined the term,” Rabbi Samuel Schulman said years after his 1907 sermon. “But I used it in a much different sense than Zangwill subsequently did. American democracy, in my mind, is a vast ‘single melting pot’, in that it absorbs all races, brings out the common humanity in each, separates the gold from the dross and preserves only the gold.”

　　The play by Zangwill, a London-born son of Russian Jewish immigrants who was a Zionist, made its debut in Washington in 1908 and played in New York for four months the next year. The protagonist is David Quixano, a Jewish immigrant, orphaned by a pogrom, who lives with his uncle on Staten Island and becomes smitten with the daughter of a Russian nobleman.

　　Zangwill originally titled the play “The Mills of God,” then “The Crucible,” before settling on “The Melting Pot.” The phrase has many fathers, including J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, a French writer who lived for many years in New York. He wrote 225 years ago that in America, “individuals of all nations are melted into a new race.”

　　By that time, the phrase had appeared in various writings about assimilation, including at least two articles in the New York Times in the fall of 1889 that referred to the “American melting pot” as a “mysterious force which blends all foreign elements in one homogeneous mass.”

　　Zangwill died in Britain in 1926 at age 62.

　　Since then, the metaphor of the melting pot has evolved. “If it means that cultures have mixed and impacted each other, he’d have no problem with it,” said Professor Nahshon, whose book “From the Ghetto to the Melting Pot” was published last year. “If it meant uniformity, he’d totally reject the meaning.”

　　考研詞匯：

　　melt[melt]

　　v.(使)融化，(使)熔化

　　coin[kɔin]

　　n.硬幣，貨幣;v.鑄造(硬幣)，創造(新詞)

　　absorb[əbˈsɔ:b]

　　v.①吸收;②吸收，使專心

　　homogeneous[ˌhɔməˈdʒi:niəs]

　　a.同種類的，同性質的，有相同特征的