from earliest childhood, I gave myself completely to one crucial
idea, one dream—the dream of the unity of humankind. ”1 It’s an
unlikely claim for a man who, by his own account, “crossed the
Rubicon”2 from Jewish particularism to universalism, dismissed the
claims of both Yiddish and Hebrew as modern Jewish languages,
and invented, single-handedly, a new international language. But
the man who deemed the Jews a “shadow people” lived always in
the shadow of his Jewishness.
Zamenhof came to maturity in a world beset with Jewish
questions. There were questions posed from without, by
governments and non-Jewish elites: In an age of Jewish
emancipation, to what extent would Jews be relieved of legal
disabilities? Enfranchised as citizens? Assimilated into prestigious
social circles, universities, and the higher echelons of commercial
and professional power? Then there were the myriad of questions
Jews posed to one another: How would Jews make the transition
between life in the kahal (semi-autonomous Jewish community) and
citizenship in a nation-state? Even with broadening civil rights, how
were Jews to deal with entrenched anti-Semitism and intolerance in
the private sphere? What new institutions and social forms would
evolve within the Jewish community, and by the same token, what
might be lost to assimilation? By the time Zamenhof entered his
twenties, anti-Semitic violence in the Pale of Settlement had raised a
most urgent question: What sort of future, if any, could Jews expect
under the Russian Empire, and how were they to take their fate in
hand?
In his letter to Michaux, Zamenhof made it clear that Esperanto
had been motivated by his experience of anti-Semitism in the
Russian Empire; but at the same time, he insisted that anti-Semitism
was part of the larger, human problem of interethnic intolerance.
What he did not disclose is that Esperanto, by 1901, had become
part of a larger project to renovate Jewish religious experience,
build a modern Jewish community, and gradually expand it to
include people of other faiths and nationalities. Esperanto was a
part of his answer to the Jewish question from within—the question
of Jewish continuity in modernity. Paradoxically, this invented
language would also promote Jewish authenticity, which Zamenhof
found to be severely undermined by modernity. And if Esperanto
could be an answer to the Jewish question, the Jews of Russia just
might be the answer to sustaining Esperanto.
* * *
The man who devoted his life to a dream of untrammeled
communication was the son of a censor. Markus (Motl, Mordka)
Zamenhof, born in 1837 in Suwalki in what is now northeast
Poland, was a child of the haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment. While
most of his fellow Jews in the Pale of Settlement eked out a living as
merchants and small-scale entrepreneurs, Markus, like his father
before him, was a schoolteacher whose passion for foreign
languages had widened his world. 3 Having settled in Białystok,
Markus married Liba Rahel (Rosa) Sofer in 1858. A photograph
taken twenty years later shows her carefully coiffed, in a dark
winter dress, her left thumb hooked over a closed book that is more
prop than pursuit. On December 3, 1859, Markus and Rosa
welcomed their first child, Ludovik (Lazar). For nearly a decade, he
had his parents’ full attention, until 1868, when the first of his seven
siblings was born.
Punctilious in his habits and driven to succeed, Markus moved the
family to Warsaw where, in addition to his license to teach in Jewish
state-run schools, he earned a second imperial certification to teach
German in non-Jewish gymnasiums. 4 His performance was
outstanding; for “perfect and diligent service,” he received a third-
rank appointment to the Order of St. Stanisłav. 5 His command of
Russian, Polish, French, German, and Hebrew brought him to the
attention of the Warsaw Censorial Committee, which in 1883
appointed him censor for all German materials received by post in
Warsaw. Two years later, he took on the additional duties of censor
for Hebrew and Yiddish materials, at a combined salary that doubled
his pay as a teacher. To be an unconverted Jewish censor for the
czar was both a point of pride and a warrant for rigorous self-
containment. He reported to a baptized Jew in St. Petersburg, and
his colleagues were most likely members of the Polish gentry, which
had been hit hard by the emancipation of the serfs in 1865 and the
agricultural depressions of the 1870s and 1880s. 6 His contemporary,
Nahum Sokolov, editor of the Hebrew-language journal HaTzefirah,
described him as “wise, pedantic and reserved; he measured his
steps, sifted his words, an accurate chronometer, always
equilibrated … [He was] buttoned-up to the collar, speaking in a
monotone, with unvarying pronunciation.” 7 A photograph taken in
his early sixties shows a bald, gray-bearded, scholarly Markus in the
regalia of St. Stanislav, his medals shining on his breast.
For most ambitious Jewish men in Markus’s position, assimilation
and conversion beckoned; otherwise, the choices were few, the
horizons low. For a time, Markus seemed to have outstripped his
options. He was both a decorated civil servant and a respected
member of the Jewish community, called on to speak at a building
dedication and much in demand as a Torah chanter. He wore the
uniform of his office to synagogue but left his sword at home on the
Sabbath and on holidays. 8 But his failure to censor a controversial
HaTzefirah article on a union of Jewish merchants appears to have
led to his dismissal, first as German censor (which reduced his salary
by more than half) and, a few months later, as censor of Hebrew
and Yiddish books. When his abject plea for reinstatement was
ignored, he returned to teaching at a gymnasium (secondary
school). 9 The authorities left him his imperial decorations, which had
always meant far more to him than to the czar.
Markus (Motl) Zamenhof, 1898
[Österreichische Nationalbibliothek]
Liba Rahel (Rosa) Zamenhof, née Sofer
Like most upwardly mobile Jews from greater Lithuania (which
included present-day Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine), the
Zamenhof family were multilingual. They spoke Russian in their
Warsaw home, Polish and German in commercial transactions, and
Yiddish in their dealings with relatives and Jewish neighbors; they
chanted in Hebrew in the synagogue. Both Ludovik’s father and
grandfather had staked out identities as emancipated Jews by
mastering and teaching the languages of Western Europe; no
surprise, then, that when Ludovik began his studies at the
prestigious #2 Men’s Gymnasium in Warsaw, languages were his
forte. A student of both Latin and Greek, he was commended for his
excellence in the latter, also earning top grades in German, French,
and mathematics.
Together, Markus and Rosa Zamenhof had raised their children to