more likely, his activism had left him distracted, exposed, and
endangered.
Four months later, on Christmas Day, 1881, a pogrom broke out
in Warsaw, which occupied the western edge of the Pale of
Settlement; in its wake, the harsh May Laws of 1882 lashed Jews
with new restrictions, requiring all Jews living in Russia’s major
cities to relocate to the Pale. Zamenhof, now studying medicine in
Warsaw, threw himself into planning a future elsewhere for Eastern
European Jews. His first Zionist article, “What, Finally, to Do?”
appeared serially in several numbers of the Russian-Jewish journal
Rasyet (Dawn) in 1882 under the anagrammatic pseudonym
G(H)AMZEFON. A Jewish homeland, he argued, was a necessity, but
it need not—in fact, should not—be located in Palestine, also sacred
to Christians and Muslims. A place where religious belief ran high
would place Jews in danger, sapping the resources with which they
were to build a state. Zamenhof did not expect the pious Jews in
Palestine to welcome young Zionists; he seems to have believed their
vows to rebuild the Temple and return Judaism to a purified religion
of sacrifice and ritual. In short, Palestine was an alien, inhospitable,
and primitive place that promised hostility rather than peaceful
coexistence; a few years later, he would call it a “volcano.” 19
Zamenhof’s considered proposal was for Jews to purchase a tract
of unoccupied land—about sixty 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 state—as in Utah, he
wrote, hardly suspecting that the Mormon struggle for Utah’s
statehood would last nearly fifty years. When Zamenhof’s dream of
an American Jewish colony met with ridicule, he swiftly recognized
that the dream of a homeland in Palestine carried far more historical
and cultural prestige. In his next article, he shifted gears, imagining
Jews coming to Palestine “like bees … each from his own leaf and
flower.” 20 It was a romantic image that harbored a harsh truth: if
there was to be any honey in the land of milk and honey, the Jews
would be making it themselves.
Having been active in Moscow’s Hibbat Zion (Lovers of Zion)
movement, he now co-founded a chapter in Warsaw. He and his
fellow Zionists called the organization Shearith Israel (Remnant of
lsrael) and developed a network of youths committed to raising
funds for settlement in Palestine. Seeking the support of more
powerful members of the Jewish community, he convinced the
eminent advocate Israel Jasinowski to serve as president, perhaps
an honorary title, since Zamenhof himself headed up “the
Executive.” By day he studied medicine: by night, he was the go-to
man among Warsaw’s young Zionists, coordinating the activities of
three separate Zionist circles in Warsaw. And, at great personal risk,
he illegally channeled funds for settlement in Palestine to a rabbi in
Bavaria. At the home of a colleague in Hibbat Zion he met his future
wife, the plain, square-jawed Klara Zilbernick, daughter of a
successful soap manufacturer from Kovno (Kaunas).
Later, he would recall the unremitting duties of his Zionist days:
“I drew up the rules, hektographed them myself, and distributed
them, arranged meetings, concerts and balls, enlisted recruits, and
established a patriotic Jewish library.” 21 Among Zionists in Moscow,
and during his period of Zionist activism in Warsaw, Zamenhof kept
silent about his universal language. It was the same impulse that led
him to tell an Esperanto magazine, years later, the story of his
Moscow days without any mention whatsoever of his Zionist period.
The skills he had acquired as a “Jew at home, a man on the street,”
had made him, like so many emancipated Jews of the Russian
Empire, a chameleon, adept at surviving in diverse milieus by
shaping his self-presentation to his audience.
Though he’d shelved the universalist language project, Zamenhof
sooner or later homed back to his conviction that language was
essential for fellowship and solidarity. Unlike his Yeshiva-educated
contemporary, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the founder of modern Hebrew,
Zamenhof decided that “ancient Hebrew,” as he put it, could never
serve the Zionist dream. Instead, he devoted more than two years to
updating Yiddish for use in a Jewish state. In the early 1880s, a
modernized Yiddish must have seemed far more practicable than
Hebrew; after all, fully two-thirds of the world’s ten million Jews
were Yiddish speakers. While most Russian-speaking Jews still
referred to it as a “jargon,” Yiddish was slowly earning the respect
of the most self-respecting Jews—writers, such as Mendele Mocher
Sforim (Sholem Yankel Abramovitch); journalists, such as Alexander
Zederbaum, who in 1863 had inaugurated a weekly Yiddish
supplement to his Hebrew-language paper; 22 and Russified Jewish
socialists, who chose Yiddish to take their message to the masses.
Instead of using Hebrew characters, Zamenhof used Latin characters,
inventing a new, rationalized orthography that would free Yiddish
from German-influenced spellings. His innovations anticipated both
Sovietized Yiddish, “liberated” from Hebraicisms in the 1920s, 23 and
the enduring transliteration conventions developed the same decade
by the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO). To avoid homonyms,
Zamenhof spelled homophonic twins, such as nehmen (to take) and
nemen (names), differently. And just as he had composed an anthem
to showcase his universal language in 1878, he now composed a
Zionist ballad that doubled as a practicum in metered verse.
It is hard to say when he put aside the Yiddish project. Only in
1909 did he publish a portion of it in the Yiddish journal Lebn un
Visnshaft; the whole manuscript of his modernized Yiddish did not
appear until 1982, in Russian and Esperanto. But Zamenhof’s
disillusionment with Zionism can be dated to the final months of his
medical studies in 1883. To a group of settlers he had been funding
in Palestine, Zamenhof wrote: “You left already a year and a half
ago, but your affair stands as it did in the start; no, worse, much
worse.” Comparing them unfavorably to David, Bar Kokhba, Mucius
Scaevola, and the Maccabees, he calls them “Don Quixotes”: “And
now [the German-language journal Kolonist] regards you as
wandering nihilists (not socialists).… Lost, lost are your shining
young strengths, which seemed the dawn of salvation. ”24
Klara Zamenhof, née Zilbernick
[Österreichische Nationalbibliothek]
Disappointed and disillusioned by the Zionist dream, he became a
wandering Jew. After receiving his medical degree in 1884, he spent
the next three years in a professional vagrancy. Still single, his life
became increasingly chaotic as he wandered from region to region,
practicing medicine briefly in the town of Veisiejai, 150 miles
northeast of Warsaw, and then in Płock, 60 miles west of Warsaw.