Shakespeare, revered by Goethe, Schiller, Pushkin, and Turgenev,
was the playwright on whom litterateurs in the newly revived
national languages (Polish, Czech, and Hungarian) had cut their
teeth in the 1790s. 41 And in these European milieus, the brooding
figure of Hamlet towered over the rest of Shakespeare’s characters,
representing intellect, philosophical independence, a dialectical
relation to truth, and a challenge to corrupt anciens regimes.
But unlike Polish, Czech, and Hungarian, Esperanto was not the
language of an ancient folk; in 1894, it was barely past teeth-
cutting. In effect, Zamenhof was asking a seven-year-old to perform
Hamlet—and perform it did, furnishing him not only with syllables
for fluent blank verse, but also with a lexicon that, but for some
three dozen new roots he coined for the occasion, was almost
entirely sufficient for his needs. Thus, ambitious to build both a
library and a community, Zamenhof produced a playable Hamlet, 42
his shaky command of English notwithstanding. With the aid of a
German translation and probably a Russian one, too, he gave
Esperanto its first Shakespeare play.
For Zamenhof, the final years of the century were years of
despair and disaffection. When his father-in-law refused him funds
to launch yet another journal, the Zamenhofs returned to Warsaw,
where he set up his ophthalmalogical practice among the city’s
poorest Jews. He would remain in his house-clinic at 9 Dzika Street
from 1897 until the final months of his life, depending on these Jews
for his livelihood.
Meanwhile, Esperanto was buoyed by a new wave of enthusiasts
in France. Until 1900, Russians constituted the single largest
constituency in the movement, and the majority came from the
heavily Jewish Pale of Settlement. 43 But in the final years of the
century, Esperanto had been steadily gaining ground among an
erudite group of French intellectuals—philosophers, mathematicians,
a minister of state, and a university rector—which brought the
movement to a crossroads: for the first time, the French overtook the
Russians in the membership rolls. 44 In 1900 we find Zamenhof,
Janus-faced, looking in two directions: toward Russia, where the
Jewish intelligentsia were still debating, with more at stake than
ever, their future and their tongue; and toward Paris, where
Esperanto’s future appeared to lie. But even with this new
constituency in France, how was Esperanto, with virtually no one
speaking it from birth and no institutions endorsing it, to survive
into a new century? Perhaps France’s leading intellects would use
their influence to recommend Esperanto to the whole world, but if
not, Zamenhof had another plan: to spread Esperanto among
Russia’s Jews—but this time, as a modern Jewish language.
3. A Shadow People
Having lost faith in Zionism as an answer to anti-Semitism,
Zamenhof announced that he had “crossed the Rubicon” to
universalism. He rarely revisited his Zionist period in his essays,
letters, and interviews, though he never denied his Jewishness. “I
want to work only for absolute justice among people,” he later
wrote. “I’m profoundly convinced that I’ll bring my unhappy people
much more good this way, than by a nationalist goal.” 45 In fact, his
striving for “absolute justice” entailed an audacious attempt to
renovate Jewish religious experience, build a modern and authentic
Jewish community, and gradually include people of other faiths and
nationalities. It was in this imagined community that he hoped to
root Esperanto, securing it as a hereditary language.
He was not the only Russian Jew of his generation to decry a
moral hollowness among modern, assimilated Jews. In 1897, Asher
Hirsch Ginsberg, better known as Ahad Ha’am (One of the People),
admonished the First Zionist Congress for failing to ground
nationalism in the ethics of Judaism. Statehood, if not founded in
moral vision and ethical commitment, was “idolatrous”; redemption,
if equated with political sovereignty, merely a phantasm. “The
deliverance of Israel,” wrote Ahad Ha’am, lay neither in territorial
covenant nor in diplomacy, but in the legacy of the prophets,
“envisioning the reign of justice in the world at the end of days. ”46
Zamenhof’s Hil elism: A Project in Response to the Jewish Question
(1901), a Russian-language tract four times as long as the 1887
proposal for Esperanto, was his answer to this longing for prophecy.
Its original title, Cal to the Jewish Intel ectuals of Russia, invokes
earlier appeals to the Jews to assume responsibility for their fate,
such as Leo Pinsker’s 1882 Auto-Emancipation (which used an
epigraph from Hillel), Emma Lazarus’s 1881–82 Epistle to the
Hebrews, and Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State (1896). In Hil elism,
which he published under the Latin pseudonym “Homo Sum” (I Am a
Man), he excoriated the false consciousness of emancipated,
assimilated Jews who identified themselves as “Russians of Mosaic
religion,” the legal term for Jews in the Russian Empire:
The Jewish people for a long time now haven’t existed.…
The expression “the Jewish people” … is only the
consequence of an illusion, a deep-rooted metaphor,
similar to the way in which we say about a portrait of a
person, customarily, “There is that person” while
nevertheless this person is already long dead and what
remains to us in the portrait is only its shadow. 47
To Zamenhof, these Russian Jews were wrong about two things:
how Jewish they were and how Russian they were. First, no matter
how many generations they had lived in Russia or how fluently they
spoke the language, they would always be Jews to their Russian
neighbors. Second, to invoke the “Mosaic religion” was doubly
hypocritical, since these Jews neither showed respect for religious
authority—divine, Mosaic, or otherwise—nor observed any religious
or spiritual practices. To Zamenhof, the emancipated Russian Jews
failed every possible test of being a people: they were scattered,
irreligious, and immersed in the culture in which they lived, and
they lacked ethnic homogeneity. “In whose name do we suffer and
condemn our children to suffering? In the name of a phantom, an
empty phantom. ”48 The clincher, for Zamenhof, was that they “had
no language,” “since language is rightly that link which makes this
or that group of human beings, a people.” 49 Yiddish, although “rich
in forms … and possessed of a rigorous grammar,” 50 was a “jargon,”
and Hebrew was embedded in the ancient observances and liturgy
such modern Jews had forsworn. (Zamenhof was not above hedging
his bets: only a decade earlier, he had issued the Unua Libro in both
Hebrew [1888] and Yiddish [1889].)
For Zamenhof, the Jewish intelligentsia were culpable for
clinging tightly to the image of the dead ancestor, to a world that
could never again be theirs:
We are simply chained to a cadaver. The regional-racial