RMS itself being a diehard Scheme and Elisp user said that he found Java elegant over C. This was OFC long before Go and when C++ was king in the 90's.

On Java itself, when CLOS, a dog-ancient system for Common Lisp it's enough to support the Java class/method/object system by itself tells a lot on how great CL can be, even with SBCL which is the top tier free (as in freedom) interpreter/compiler out there.

On performance, well, who knows; remember that PyPy itself back in the day was written in Python itself and it ran things much faster than the vanilla Python interpreter.