c. 1999 Religion News Service

AMHERST, Mass. _ It’s been quite a year for Emily Dickinson.

In less than 12 months, two separate Dickinson scholars have published books suggesting her poetry, when read between the lines, reveals she was having either a secret lesbian affair with her sister-in-law or a secret adulterous affair with her friend, newspaper publisher Samuel Bowles.

Now into the mix comes a University of Massachusetts professor theorizing her poetry contains clues the Belle of Amherst may have been Jewish.

Jewish?

Well, no, not quite, says Richard S. Ellis, professor of mathematics and statistics at the University of Massachusetts.

But much of her poetry uses language in the same ways as the Torah _ the first five books of the Bible _ when read in the original Hebrew, said Ellis, who is also an adjunct professor of Judaic and Near Eastern studies.

This presents quite an enigma, he said, not unlike Dickinson herself.

Dickinson, born and raised a Christian, obviously knew her King James Bible from front to back, but as far as anyone knows she did not know Hebrew.

“I don’t think she knew Hebrew, but she may have been exposed to it,” he said.

It’s possible Dickinson could have learned about variations in the Hebrew translation _ perhaps from someone at Amherst College or when she herself attended Mount Holyoke College _ and applied it to her own verse, Ellis said.

His thesis has caught the attention of some Dickinson scholars.

Ellis has been invited to speak at the 400-member Emily Dickinson International Society’s annual conference later this year, and his 30-page essay will be published in the April issue of its Emily Dickinson Journal.

In her acceptance letter, journal editor Suzanne Juhasz writes: “Your essay is brilliant _ not only in your erudition and thoughtful analysis in Dickinson studies and biblical scholarship but in your ability to shift lenses … so as to bring insight to and from both disciplines.”

Juhasz, an English professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said in a telephone interview that she did not interpret Ellis’ essay to mean that Dickinson somehow knew Hebrew.

“If it did, I wouldn’t have published it,” she said.

Rather, she said, “It shows an affinity in the way she worked with language and the way she understood certain spiritual issues and the way it seems to be in the Torah.”

Dickinson was an intensely spiritual woman and her poetry lends itself to interpretation from any number of spiritual directions, especially from non-Western religions, Juhasz said.

“It was because she was a genius, a great exceptional mind,” she said.

What impressed Juhasz most about Ellis’ essay was not his Dickinson insights but those on the Torah, which she said she had never studied.

She also found it impressive that Ellis is not a Dickinson scholar, or even someone from the humanities, but instead is a mathematician.

Though Ellis has had a lifelong interest in Judaic history and culture, he is quick to point out that his bread and butter is in the world of mathematics.

It is there that he is known internationally for his research in the area of chance theory and for publishing two textbooks, as well as more than 50 papers in mathematics, engineering and physics journals.

He has also proven a mathematics theory dealing with large deviations, for which the Gartner-Ellis theorem bears his name. The study of large deviations involves the calculation of the probability of rare events.

His interest in Dickinson was ignited a little more than a year ago.

After finishing his second textbook, entitled “A Weak Convergence Approach to the Theory of Large Deviations,” he decided to pursue something new.

“I live in a town where she lived, created and died,” he said. “I knew Dickinson a little but I had never studied her.”

He enrolled in a course taught at the Dickinson Homestead, entitled “At Home with Emily Dickinson,” and it was during a discussion with instructor Jay Laden that he was struck by the similarities in the use of language in Dickinson and in the Torah.

“I had a flash of inspiration,” he said.

Most translations of the Bible typically have a very authoritative tone, with not a lot of ambiguity, as if the words are indeed carved in stone.

In Hebrew, however, the same passages have ambiguities in abundance, and, as Ellis said, “are riddled with paradox, wordplay and shifts of perspective.”

This is especially true when describing a meeting between humans and God, because ordinary language is not fit for describing such an extraordinary event, Ellis said.

“How do you portray the Divine with the same language that you use to buy broccoli at the market?” he asked.

That is exactly how Dickinson approaches the meeting between Jacob and the angel in “A Little East of Jordan,” which is based on Genesis 32.

He said he spent close to a year analyzing the poem, which he described as “a universe in 70 words.”

Laden, who is familiar with the Torah, said he has also noticed similarities with Dickinson.

“My understanding of the Torah helped me understand Dickinson,” he said.

How the similarities developed is another story, he said.

“No one knows. We can only make guesses,” he said.

Laden rules out that Dickinson was secretly Jewish, although he joked that Ellis “is trying to prove that she was.”

A genius like Dickinson’s does not exist in a vacuum but has thousands of influences, he said.

One of those influences may have been John Milton, the English poet and author of “Paradise Lost.” Milton, who died in 1674, was known to have studied Hebrew, and Dickinson was “a big Milton fan,” Laden said.

He likens her use of language to overhearing part of a conversation through a wall.

“You have to fill in a lot of the details and based on what you hear you make assumptions,” he said. “By filling in so much stuff we end up making the poem that she wants us to read.”

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That is one of the reasons that people pore over her poems and that every few years the mining of Dickinson poetry uncovers a new and supposed mother lode about the mysterious Dickinson.

In the last year, two separate books use analysis of her poems and correspondence to make assertions about her sex life.

“Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson,” edited by Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith, suggests that Dickinson had “romantic and erotic” feelings for another woman, her brother’s wife and next-door neighbor, Susan Dickinson.

Another book, “Emily Dickinson’s Secret Love,” by University of Massachusetts graduate Bill Arnold, makes the case that Dickinson’s poems contain clues indicating a sexual relationship with her friend Samuel Bowles, the married publisher of the Springfield Daily Republican.

Juhasz would only comment on the “Open Me Carefully” text because, of the two, she considers it to be a serious, scholarly effort.

She said the rumors that Dickinson had lesbian relationships have been circulating for more than 30 years, with little evidence to support them.

“My belief is that Emily Dickinson had intense, passionate loving relationships with both genders (and) that Emily Dickinson had very passionate and erotic feelings,” she said.

She believes, though, that however passionate or intense, Dickinson was largely abstinent when it came to physical relationships.

The correspondence between Dickinson and her sister-in-law, for example, are passion-filled and can be suggestive of a physical relationship. “But no one will ever know that or who did what to whom,” she said.

So much about the study of Dickinson’s life beyond her poetry comes down to four words, she said. “No one really knows.”