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.”

　　考研词汇：

　　melt[melt]

　　v.(使)融化，(使)熔化

　　coin[k?in]

　　n.硬币，货币;v.铸造(硬币)，创造(新词)

　　absorb[?b?s?:b]

　　v.①吸收;②吸收，使专心

　　homogeneous[?h?m??d?i:ni?s]

　　a.同种类的，同性质的，有相同特征的

　　evolve[i5vClv]

　　v.(使)发展，(使)进化

　　[真题例句] We did not evolve, because machines and society did it for us.[2000年阅读2]

　　[例句精译] 我们没有进化。因为机器和社会替我们做到了这一切。

　　uniformity[?ju:ni?f?:miti]

　　n.统一，一致

　　[真题例句] There is “the democratizing uniformity of dress and discourse, and the casualness and absence of consumption” launched by the 19th century department stores that offered “vast arrays of goods in an elegant atmosphere”.[2006年阅读1]

　　[例句精译] 19世纪由百货公司发起的民主化统一的着装、言论和随意的消费提供了“在优雅购物环境中的大批商品”。

　　背景常识介绍：

　　人们常说美国是个大熔炉，能熔化移民到美国的各个种族和民族。美国的历史和文化决定了其移民社会的独特性。美国之所以成为“大熔炉”的基础——美国之梦，除了本民族价值观，还有美国公民都认同的另一个共同的价值观：自我奋斗，实现成功。这个“美国之梦”，将不同种族、不同文化背景的人融合到一起。

　　参考译文：

　　逾越节的布道，一部戏剧，一个世纪大熔炉

　　美国关于移民问题争论的试金石，大熔炉这个比喻，是由一个纽约市犹太教堂的法师提出来的，法师说他是从一百多年前的一次逾越节的布道中提炼出这个观念的。

　　这个形象化的比喻可以追溯到1782年，一个获得了美国国籍的纽约人，DeWitt Clinton以及Ralph Waldo Emerson。在随后的1907年英国作家Ford Madox Ford的一本书里有一章的标题就叫“大熔炉”，其中描述了移居英国的外国人给英国带来了活力。

　　而在第二年(1908年)，“大熔炉”这个词因为鼓吹“同化论”的Israel Zangwill的舞台剧“大熔炉”而广为流传。

　　Samuel Schulman法师在他1907年布道之后说“我创造了这个词。但是，我用它表达的意思和后来Zangwill表达的完全不一样。在我看来，美国的民主主义就是一个巨大的单一的大熔炉，这个熔炉吸纳所有的种族，熔炼出共同的博爱仁慈，去其糟粕，取其精华。”

　　Zangwill出生在伦敦，是一位俄罗斯犹太人移民的儿子，其父亲是一个拥护犹太复国运动者。这部由Zangwill编导的戏剧1908年在华盛顿首次登台亮相，并且1909年在纽约演出了四个月。戏剧的主角是David Quixano，一位犹太移民，由于大屠杀成了孤儿，和他的叔叔居住在一个叫Staten的小岛上，David深深地爱上了一位俄国贵族家庭小姐。

　　Zangwill在把这部戏剧确定命名为《大熔炉》之前，先后考虑过命名为《上帝的磨房》，《严酷的考验》。大熔炉这个词有很多的创造者，包括J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur，一位久居纽约的法国作家。他描写了225年前的美国“各种各样不同的种族融合成为一个新的种族。”

　　从那个时候起，“大熔炉”出现在各种各样的关于民族同化的作品中，其中，至少有1889年纽约时报的两篇文章把“大熔炉”誉为“可以把各种外国的因素融合成一种和谐社会的神奇力量”。

　　Zangwill于1926年在英国去世，享年62岁。

　　从那个时候起，大熔炉这个比喻逐渐形成。去年刚刚出版了新书《从犹太人区到大熔炉》的Nahshon博士说：“如果这个比喻的喻义是说文化交融并且互相影响，Zangwill先生肯定会赞成，但是，如果是指‘同一或统一’，我想他会完全反对的。”