Esperanto – A Jewish Story | Yiddish Book Center http://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/pakn-treger/12-09/esperan...

NUMBER 60
FALL 2009 / 5770
Esperanto – A Jewish Story
ESTHER SCHOR

IN A LETTER OF 1905, LUDOVIK LAZARUS

ZAMENHOF, the Jewish oculist from Warsaw who
created and founded Esperanto, wrote: “My
Jewishness has been the main reason why, from
earliest childhood, I have given my all for a single
great idea, a single dream – the dream of the unity
of humankind.” At best, the claim is a stretch.
Zamenhof, who in 1887 published his plan for an
international language under the name “Doktoro
Esperanto” – one who hopes – described his passage
from Zionism to Esperanto as “cross[ing] the
Rubicon.” From the far side he would look back at
Zionism, to be sure, but he never revisited his
decision to cross over. At worst, it’s a guilty
apology by a once-ardent Zionist who abandoned
Jewish nationhood – a man whose three adult
children, 25 years after his death in 1917, were
slain by the Nazis, one at gunpoint, two at
Treblinka.

As a young medical student in Warsaw in the early

1880s, Zamenhof knew that the Jewish question
was itself an answer to another question. Its most benign version was:
When will you Jews understand that you can’t be both modern and
Jewish? But there were darker versions hammered in the forge of
Christian anti-Semitism, whetted with centuries of rage and
resentment. After the pogroms of 1881–82 that smashed, burned,
robbed, raped, and murdered Jewish lives from the Pale of Settlement
to the heart of Poland, the Jews of Eastern Europe took it upon
themselves to ask and try to answer the Jewish question, conceding
that they were a problem in need of a solution. Zamenhof was among
those who asked if there was a future for Jews in Eastern Europe.
Would they be able to survive when legal disabilities, hostility, and
ostracism escalated to violence, or would they be driven to emigrate?
If so, where?

Zamenhof’s Zionist years were precisely those in which he conceived

of his universal language movement and invented its lexicon and
grammar. Unpuzzling the relationship between Zamenhof’s Zionism
and his universalism reveals a Jewish story within the history of
Esperanto.

HIS HEBREW NAME WAS LEJZER (LAZAR), but he grew up as Ludovik.

The son and grandson of foreign language teachers, Zamenhof was
raised to the emancipated Jewish life described by his fellow Litvak,
the poet Judah Leib Gordon, as “ a Jew at home, a man on the street.”
His father, Markus, seemed to have finessed this double life. Fluent in
French, German, Russian, and Polish, Markus derived most of his
income from his knowledge of Yiddish and Hebrew, which qualified
him to be the czar’s official censor of Jewish books and periodicals.
Much in demand as a Torah leyner, Markus wore the uniform of his
office to synagogue but left his official sword at home on Sabbath and
holidays.

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Zamenhof was sent to gymnasium to prepare for medical studies and

in 1879 he departed for Moscow University. But in 1881, for financial
reasons, he was called back to Warsaw, scant months before pogroms
erupted there in December. After documenting them for the Russian-
language Jewish magazine Rassyvet, Zamenhof joined the Hibbat Zion
movement and threw himself into planning a future for the Jews of
Eastern Europe.

Thanks to the exacting scholarship of Galician-born Esperantist N. Z.

Maimon, we can follow Zamenhof’s shifting positions. As Zamenhof
told the Jewish Chronicle of London in 1907, while still in Moscow he
had convened a group of 15 Jewish students and “unfolded to them a
plan [to found] a Jewish colony in some unoccupied part of the
globe.” Along the same lines, his first Zionist article, published in
1882 under the anagrammatic pseudonym GAMZEFON, argues that a
Jewish homeland was a necessity, but need not – in fact should not –
be located in Palestine. He enumerated the objections: Palestine was
sacred to both Christians and Muslims, a place where religious belief
ran high, and would place Jews in danger, sapping the resources with
which they were to build a state. Palestine belonged to the Turks, who
would not willingly surrender it. In short, it was an alien, inhospitable,
and primitive place that promised hostility rather than peaceful
coexistence.

Zamenhof’s alternative proposal was for Jews to purchase a tract of

unoccupied land – about 60 square miles – on the banks of the
Mississippi River. There, he imagined, Jews would be free to enjoy the
bounty of nature and to live unmolested. All their energy could be
devoted to farming and building a Jewish colony. When Zamenhof’s
dream of an American Jewish colony was met with ridicule, he was
enough of a realist to recognize that the dream of a homeland in
Palestine, burnished as it was with historical and cultural prestige,
was the dream that would prevail. His next article unambiguously and
romantically advocated settlement in Palestine as though he had
never thought otherwise.

At great personal risk, Zamenhof became active in the nascent Hibbat

Zion movement in Warsaw, serving on its executive committee. He led
a student Zionist society called “Shearith Israel” (“Remnant of Israel”)
and developed a network of youths to raise funds to settle in
Palestine. Now a young doctor trying to establish himself as a
practitioner, he devoted his after-hours to unifying the activities of
three separate Zionist circles in Warsaw, and was considered the
“go-to” man among Warsaw’s Zionists. At the home of a colleague in
Hibbat Zion, he met his future wife, Clara Zilbernick, the daughter of
a soap manufacturer from Kaunas.

Like his contemporary Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, Zamenhof knew that the

Jewish nation of the future would need a modern Jewish language. To
the Yeshiva-educated Ben-Yehuda, the Zionist dream required the
revival of Hebrew, but Zamenhof opted instead to modernize Yiddish.
At the time, his was the more practical of the two language projects,
given that two-thirds of the world’s ten million Jews spoke Yiddish.
During the early 1880s, perhaps even during his student days in
Moscow, Zamenhof worked on modernizing mame loshn. Writing in
Russian, he proposed the use of Latin characters and a new,
rationalized orthography that would free Yiddish from German-
influenced spellings. (In terms of orthography, Zamenhof was ahead
of his time, anticipating by decades both the Soviet reform of Yiddish
orthography and the Latin transliteration conventions developed by
YIVO in the 1920s.) To avoid homonyms, he distinguished in spelling
between pairs such as nehmen (to take) and nemen (names). Perhaps
the most intriguing feature of the project was his prosody of Yiddish –
not a prose treatise but a practicum in verse. Writing in his new Latin-
character system, he composed in Yiddish a Zionist ballad in verses of
iambs, dactyls, amphibrachs, and anapests, the Greek names of which
he rendered in his altered Yiddish. Zamenhof’s “new Jewish
Language,” as he called it, envisioned a new Jewish culture uttered in
both prose and poetry.

But the decade that began with a new Yiddish would end in a new
language altogether: Esperanto. It’s not clear exactly when Zamenhof
gave up his Yiddish project. Still, the palimpsest of Yiddish in
Esperanto remains clear: it was Yiddish, a mongrel of Germanic,
Semitic, and Slavic words, that modeled for Zamenhof an international
language. What had happened to Yiddish over a millennium, in mass

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migrations of Jews from Western to Eastern Europe and back,

Zamenhof would make happen to Esperanto – but at his writing desk,
and in just a few years.

IN THE END, Zamenhof built up his Esperanto lexicon of 900 roots

mainly from Romance languages, German, English, and Russian,
borrowing conjunctions and particles from Latin and Greek. For
maximal accessibility, he selected roots that were common to the
greatest number of languages. When in doubt, he favored Latin:
house was dom-; tree, arb-; night, nokt-. To become a word, a root
acquired a vowel ending: nokt- with an –o ending was the noun
“night”; with an –a ending, the adjectival nokta, as in “night-hour”;
with an e-ending, the adverbial nokte, meaning “nightly.” And for
flexibility, he developed lists of prefixes and suffixes that could be
combined with roots – or with several roots glued together– to form
new words. A forest was an arbaro; a cabin, a dometo; and later,
some Esperantist with something to say about a tree house would
coin the word arbodometo.

Zamenhof gave up Yiddish for Esperanto because he had changed his

mind about the Jewish question. By 1887, he had decided that it was
not an issue of the Jews at all; it was the transhistorical world
question of interethnic hatred, and he undertook to answer it for the
whole world. Not without trepidation: he had been to enough Zionist
meetings to know that Jews who took on universal causes
(notwithstanding the fact that Zionism weds nationalism to rights-
of-man universalism) were mocked for egotism and self-delusion.
Recalling this era in 1905, he wrote that he had been “tormented” by
the thought that he had “no moral right to work neutrally for human
ideals, when my people suffered so much and had so few to fight on
their behalf.”

But Zamenhof felt that the cause of human unity (he rarely used the
word “universal”) was itself a Jewish cause; in fact, it was the mission
to which God had dedicated the Jewish people. By 1901, he had
named his cause Hilelismo, a choice that was at once naïve and
revolutionary. He was naïve to think that a movement named for a
first-century BCE Jewish rabbi would be received as anything but a
Jewish affair. But Zamenhof needed Hillel in order to supersede, in
one grand gesture, both Moses and Jesus. With Hillel, Zamenhof
shifted the focus of Judaism from law to ethics, taking Hillel’s famous
dictum – “Do not do unto others what is hateful to you” – as the
epitome of Judaism. Like Felix Adler, founder of the Ethical Culture
movement, he was trying to cast religion as a way of living ethically;
like Mordechai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionism, he was
trying to infuse Jewish spirituality with Haskalah ideals. At the same
time, staking his vision on Hillel challenged the Christian monopoly
on the “golden rule,” Jesus’s positive reformulation of Hillel’s dictum
in his Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:12).

Under the pseudonym Homo Sum (“I am a man”), Zamenhof floated a

“trial balloon” of Hillelism in 1901 in a Russian Jewish magazine. It did
not get far: “I could not find a single person willing to help me in
organising such a sect as I contemplated.” Interviewed by The Jewish
Chronicle in 1907, Zamenhof said that he’d intended to “call together
a Jewish Congress and found a sect of Jews professing clearly defined
philosophical principles.” The Russian Jewish Hillelists would preserve
Jewish “customs and ceremonials, feasts and fasts; not, however, as
laws, but as traditions.” Insofar as halacha was to be regarded not as
binding laws but as cherished “folkways,” this was Reconstruction
avant la lettre.

The bloody events of the revolutionary year 1905 renewed

Zamenhof’s determination to press forward. Emboldened by the warm
reception he had recently received at the First Esperanto Congress in
Boulogne, he tried again, this time with an appeal to all Esperantists.
In January 1906, a fictitious “Circle of Hillelists” issued The Dogmas of
Hillelism, a twelve-point credo that reads like a cross between the
“Rights of Man and the Citizen” and Maimonides’ “Ani Ma’amin.”
Hillelists were entitled to their chosen or inherited religions, but
vowed to reject any elements that failed to meet the severe ethical
standards of Hillelism, such as nationalistic ideals; national, racial,
and religious chauvinism; and doctrines offensive to one’s reason. In
short, it was to be a sort of ethical quality control of religion. Hillelists
would someday convene in Hillelist temples with Hillelist religious
school and Hillelist programs for the elderly. And the language of

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Hillelism, of course, was to be Esperanto. The goal was a quiet,

gradual transformation, “little by little, unremarked and without any
disruption.”

Before the year was out, Zamenhof lightly revised the declaration,
changing the movement’s name to Homaranismo (Humanitarianism).
He was, in part, pandering to non-Jewish Esperantists, recasting a
movement grounded in Jewish ethics as a “philosophically pure
monotheism.” But Homaranismo required Zamenhof to come clean on
what he meant by monotheism. God, he wrote in a richly ambiguous
statement, was “a united ideal for all Humanity.” Zamenhof hoped
that Esperanto would eventually unite humanity in a belief in God, but
he was also suggesting that God was defined by the unity of human
beings. Esperanto was to do the Jewish work of saving the world, soul
by speaking soul.

AGAIN, ZAMENHOF HAD MISCALCULATED. He introduced

Homaranismo just as Esperanto was gaining credibility in France
among its most prestigious adherents yet – men of science, reason,
and progress, heirs to the French enlightenment, and openly
contemptuous of Homaranismo. Finding themselves on both sides of
the Dreyfus affair, the movement’s French leaders had pragmatically
decided that only by making Esperanto ideologically neutral could
they gain adherents in France. In 1906, when Zamenhof was
preparing to speak about Homaranismo at the Second Esperanto
Congress in Geneva, the French organizers warned him to spare the
assembly his pallid mystifications. Zamenhof’s close associate, the
Jewish French ophthalmologist Emile Javal, was in no doubt about the
French organizers’ anti-Semitism and warned Zamenhof to avoid
advertising his Jewishness. Knowing Zamenhof had recently been ill,
Javal even counseled him not to attend.

Instead, Zamenhof went to Geneva and delivered the most eloquent

and ardent speech of his life. He spoke neither about Homaranismo
nor about Hilelismo, but about Jews. In graphic and unsparing terms,
he decried the recent pogroms in his native Bialystok:

“In the streets of my unhappy birthplace, savages with axes and iron
stakes have flung themselves, like the fiercest beasts, against the
quiet town-dwellers, whose sole crime was that they spoke another
language and practiced another people’s [race’s] religion than that of
the savages. For this reason they smashed the skulls and poked out
the eyes of men and women, of broken old men and helpless infants!”

Zamenhof exhorted Esperantists to “break down, break down the

walls” between peoples, and defied those who insisted that
“Esperanto is only a language.” From these “first fighters for
Esperanto,” he called for resistance – a strange exhortation for a
pacifist; perhaps less strange from a six-year veteran of Hibbat Zion.
He would not let secularists and pragmatists “tear out of our hearts
that part of Esperantism which is the most important, the most
sacred.”

He now called that part, not Homaranismo, but the interna ideo
(internal idea). It was an attempt to keep Homaranismo at the center
without compelling Esperantists to subscribe to a particular religious
creed. With the interna ideo rather than an explicit creed at its core,
Esperanto would have a fighting chance to claim progressive
adherents in a new century. His was an ancient prophetic strategy for
a modern cause; those who had “ears to hear” would understand. And
yet, citing the interna ideo, the man who trusted words to redeem
humanity relied on a code word to protect his sacred cause.

THE HISTORY OF ESPERANTO is a series of Chinese boxes with a

Jewish ghost inside. Has the history of the movement vindicated
Zamenhof’s decision to hide Hilelismo in Homaranismo, and
Homaranismo in the interna ideo? Yes and no. That Esperanto has
lasted 120 years, with fluent adherents and active groups on six
continents, testifies to the flexibility and inclusiveness of the interna
ideo. Esperanto has served the causes of anti-imperialism,
antifascism, anti-Nazism; it has protested sweatshop labor, pollution,
and nuclear arms. Yet the few schisms and power struggles that have
occurred – and it’s hard to imagine a long-lived world movement
without them – usually began with an assault on the interna ideo: it
was judged too insufficiently socialistic, in thrall to a national
committee, and so on. Moreover, if Zamenhof felt he had successfully

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de-Judaicized the movement, Stalin and Hitler could have told him
otherwise. In Mein Kampf, Hitler labeled Esperanto a “Jewish
conspiracy” and both he and Stalin, after banning Esperanto, executed
Esperantists by special order.

More than a century after the Geneva Congress of 1906, the word
Homaranismo is all but lost to Esperanto. But at Esperanto
gatherings, the interna ideo still shimmers in the air, solemnly
invoked at opening ceremonies, dedications, and, on December 15,
Zamenhof’s birthday. I’ve asked Esperantists in Hanoi, Istanbul,
Sydney, Bialystok, Jerusalem, and San Diego what interna ideo means
and I’ve received many answers. Some tell me it is political and
religious neutrality; some, dignity and respect for all people; some,
equality; some, a striving for higher goals than politics can achieve. I
think justice is more what Zamenhof had in mind: a Jewish ideal of
justice, in which the righteousness of humanity and God are one and
the same.

Esther Schor, a professor of English at Princeton University, is the

author of Emma Lazarus (2006), winner of the National Jewish Book
Award.

DECEMBER 16, 2009

Attached Files:
Esperanto – A Jewish Story (http://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/files
/pt-articles/PT60_esperanto_schor_sm.pdf)

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Barbara Krasner (http://twitter.com/profwriter189) 7 MONTHS AGO (#COMMENT-

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If anyone's interested, I took a few photos of Zamenhof's grave at the remaining Jewish cemetery in
Warsaw (a large grave distinguished by a huge mosaic "E") and of his father's birthplace in Tykocin
(between Warsaw and Bialystok).

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Baila Miller 6 MONTHS AGO (#COMMENT-57095254)

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Yes, May I please have a copy of those photos?

baila@bailamillerprograms.com

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neil_nachum 7 MONTHS AGO (#COMMENT-48463512)

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Dankon, thanks. I'm wonderin if Esther got to lecture on Zamenhof at the Yiddish Book Center as
scheduled.

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Arielle Jackson 7 MONTHS AGO (#COMMENT-48672512)

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The talk went on as scheduled. Esther Schor gave a very interesting talk on Zamenhof's life and

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the Jewish roots of Esperanto.

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neil_nachum 7 MONTHS AGO (#COMMENT-48463457)

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Thanks/dankon.

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mzalc 8 MONTHS AGO (#COMMENT-44151027)

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Great article. Do you think that the main reason Esperanto didn't become more popular and no
government adopted it as second language was because its strong Jewish participation and
influence?

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bryn 9 MONTHS AGO (#COMMENT-37494468)

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A test comment.

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Boris Kolker 10 MONTHS AGO (#COMMENT-30741511)

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Excellent article. Thank you, Esther.

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