the emancipated Jewish life described by the poet Judah Leib
Gordon: “a Jew at home, a man on the street.” But on the streets of
Białystok, Ludovik Zamenhof recalled finding no men at alclass="underline"
In Białystok, the population consisted of four diverse
elements: Russians, Poles, Germans and Jew; each spoke a
different language and was hostile to the other elements.…
I was brought up as an idealist; I was taught that all men
were brothers, and, meanwhile, in the street, in the square,
everything at every step made me feel that men did not
exist, only Russians, Poles, Germans, Jews and so on. 10
Zamenhof’s home in Białystok
[Österreichische Nationalbibliothek]
The converse of his conviction that language wrought profound
divisions among people was another, just as deeply held: that
language had the power to transform people of various ethnicities
into “men.” If Zamenhof needed evidence that language could unify
human beings and transform their aspirations, it was all around
him. As Ivan Berend has shown, “from the 1770s to the 1840s, with
few exceptions, all the Central and Eastern European languages”—
Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Rumanian, Serbian, and Croatian—“were
modernized and standardized literary languages were created …
[that] provided a vehicle for the creation of national literatures and
scholarship, education, journalism and legislation. ”11
Such developments were rooted in Herder’s Romantic conviction
that a common language was the spiritual essence of a people,
indivisible from and essential to it: “Has a nation anything more
precious,” asked Herder, “than the language of its fathers? ”12
Zamenhof absorbed Herder’s insight, but used it as an Archimedean
lever through which to move diverse peoples with no “fathers” in
common to conceive of themselves as a community. He had also
absorbed Humboldt’s notion of language as a “third universe”
between the empirical world and cognition—as a mediator for the
entirety of human experience. 13 From the legacies of both Herder
and Humboldt, Zamenhof drew the guiding intuition of his life: that
not only social relations but human beings themselves could be
transformed by language.
In the autumn of 1878, about to turn nineteen, Zamenhof drafted
a language expressly designed to turn “Russians, Poles, Germans,
[and] Jews” into “men.” That December, at a small birthday party
for close friends, he formally launched—or in his words,
“consecrated”—his Lingwe Universala. Presenting his friends with
both a grammar and a lexicon (neither of which survives), he made
a speech in the new tongue and together, the group sang a
universalist hymn in the Lingwe Universala.
Malamikete de las nacjes
Kadó, kadó, jam temp’está!
La tot’ homoze in familje
Konunigare so debá.
Let the hatred of the nations
Fall, fall! The time is already here;
All humanity must unite
In one family.
But as soon as the party was over, the new language became a
lonely venture. None of the would-be “apostles of the language” was
willing to sustain it, and Zamenhof would later rue the fact that only
one of them eventually embraced Esperanto. 14 His early effort to
found a new international language-collective was a failure. And
before he would succeed in founding the community of Esperanto,
he would fail again, but this time in the service of nationalism, not
internationalism.
* * *
In one portrait from his teen years, Zamenhof looks studious in large
round spectacles, his hair slicked and parted in the middle along the
same axis as a sparse mustache. But a second photograph, taken in
his early twenties, shows a far more romantic figure, free of glasses
and mustache, sporting a brass-buttoned coat, black hair swept back
over a wide brow, and a poet’s melancholy gaze. This is the Ludovik
who, in 1879, was sent to Moscow University to study medicine.
Perhaps his parents meant him to pursue a more prestigious, less
precarious career than that of a teacher or bureaucrat (other siblings
followed him into medicine, as would two of his three children). Or
perhaps they sought to redirect his quixotic aspiration to build a
universalist language-community toward the more concrete matter
of acquiring a profession. Zamenhof seemed to understand that he
was to keep his aspirations under wraps while in Moscow, and
conceal them he did—an unhappy choice, as it turned out: “The
secrecy tormented me. Being obliged to hide my thoughts and plans,
I hardly went anywhere or took part in anything, and the most
beautiful time of life—the years of a student—for me passed most
sadly.” 15
But soon his aspirations took another form, for the journey to
Moscow took him closer to the pulse of Russian-Jewish intellectual
life, which was centered in St. Petersburg. During the 1860s, the
Jews of Russia, having endured segregation in the Pale of Settlement
(1795), enforced conscription (1820s–), and compulsory enrollment
at special Jewish “Crown” schools, had begun to take up the
question of their future. Zamenhof arrived in Moscow twenty years
later to heated debates between assimilationists and proto-Zionists
(bent on “auto-emancipation”); within a brief time, four new
Russian-language Jewish journals sprang up, and a fifth in Hebrew.
In a retrospective interview published in London’s Jewish
Chronicle, Zamenhof placed himself at the center of the controversy.
Less than three years after drafting his Lingwe Universala, Zamenhof
was becoming an ardent Jewish nationalist:
Already, in the year 1881, when I was studying at the
University of Moscow, I convened a meeting of fifteen of
my fellow-students, and unfolded to them a plan which I
had conceived of founding a Jewish colony in some
unoccupied portion of the globe which would be the
commencement, and become the center of an independent
Jewish State. I succeeded in impressing my views on my
colleagues, and we formed what I believe was the first
politico-Jewish organization in Russia. 16
It was a fateful year for Jews, and for Zamenhof himself. In
March 1881, the assassination of Czar Alexander II (following two
previous attempts) gave rise to pogroms against Jews in the Pale of
Settlement. During the wave of murders, rapes, arson, and looting,
the complicity of police and government officials, scrupulously
documented by observers, created a sensation as far afield as Paris,
London, and New York. Zamenhof was galvanized by a need to
address the most difficult Jewish question of alclass="underline" what was to become
of the Jews of the Russian Empire? Amid crackdowns in university
discipline and whispers of conspiracy, he managed to complete his
second year of studies, but with a marked decline in grades. 17 An
internal transfer record, gleaned from a Moscow archive by
Zamenhof’s biographer, Aleksander Korĵenkov, declared him “well
behaved and not under suspicion.” 18 By autumn he had decamped
for Warsaw, attributing the move to his father’s financial straits;