form of the Jewish religion now is not only a
philosophical-religious absurdity, but also the fullest
possible anachronism; and until such time as this form will
exist, the suffering of the Jews will never, never cease,
neither because of [ethnic] liberalism, nor because of
Zionism, and after one hundred and after one thousand
years, will Heine’s prophetic words still pertain with the
same strength: Das Judentum is keine religion, es ist ein
Ungluck. [Judaism is not a religion, it is a misfortune]. 51
For the “absurdity” of nationalism, Zamenhof squarely placed the
blame on those who “uttered the unhappy words, ‘God made with us
a covenant,’” thereby confounding monotheism with nationality and
turning a philosophical, ethical world-concept into an ethnically
homogeneous nation.
If the ancestors were mistaken, so was the Scripture that
sanctioned the Abrahamic covenant. Hence, the God who despaired
of humanity after the outrage at Babel, choosing to favor the people
Israel, had to be reimagined. Only by dislodging the concept of a
covenanting God—only through a “change to the Hebrew religion”—
could the “inner system” of exile be altered. He was urging Jews
who had already released themselves from Mosaic law to shed their
allegiance to the Abrahamic covenant. What he proposed was a
“purified” Judaism, unbound from Mosaic law and purged of
nationalism.
The conundrum Zamenhof faced was the one that had faced the
apostle Paul two millennia earlier: how to create a unified spiritual
community after Mosaic law had been abandoned, especially if that
community was no longer defined by ethnicity. Whereas Paul sought
to instill discipline in the churches, Zamenhof developed a credo
around the ethical teaching of the first-century B.C.E. rabbi Hilleclass="underline"
“Do not do unto others what is hateful to you.” Hilelismo, as he
called it, entailed three essential precepts:
1. We feel and recognize the existence of the highest Power,
who rules the world, and this Power we call God.
2. God puts his laws inside the heart of each person in the form
of conscience; for this reason, at all times obey the voice of
your conscience, since it is the voice of God, and never silent.
3. Love your neighbor and act with others in such a way that
you would wish them to act with you, and never do
anything, openly or in secret, which your internal voice tells
you does not please God. All other instructions … are only
human commentaries. 52
This third point was, in so many words, Hillel’s famed response to
the gentile who asked the rabbi to teach him Torah standing on one
foot, except that Zamenhof omitted Hillel’s coda: “[And now] go
study.” He was seeking to instill a motive for communal cohesion in
what he perceived as a radically disintegrated Jewish people,
writing in a mode that Andrew Wernick has called “socio-
theology.” 53
If we look to Hillelism for the blueprint of a functioning
community, we won’t find it. Having lodged the “laws” of God “in
the heart in the form of conscience,” Zamenhof left authority, moral
standards, judgment, and sanction entirely unaddressed. His guiding
intuition in doing so was canny and pragmatic: the best way to
transform Jews into Hillelists was by allowing them to live and act
out what remained of their culture. Hillelism would wear, so to
speak,
an outer dress of present-day Judaism. But this clothing
will be complete, definite and pure, and not full of holes
and patches, as it is with present-day Jewish intellectuals,
who randomly pick at their own rags here and take off the
final remnants there, and all the while feel the complete
abnormality and unhappiness of their nudity. 54
Hillelism would garb modern Judaism in integrity rather than a
patchwork of laws, but if it were to gain traction among the Jews of
Russia, it had to be recognizably, culturally Jewish.
Thus, Zamenhof retained all religious observances and customs
that could be adapted to Hillelist precepts. The Hebrew Bible, for
instance, as long as it was regarded as a “human” book, would be
retained as a treasury of legends and devotional poetry for the
Jewish people. The Sabbath, purged of the punctilious observance of
prescriptions, would remain a sacred day of rest, Judaism’s best
defense against materialism. And so on with the High Holidays and
the Jewish festivals. Zamenhof even retained Hanukkah, not as a
nationalist festival but as an “historical commemoration.” (The fact
that he was born during Hanukkah may have entrenched its
appeal.)
Hebrew, however, was too suffused with nationhood to be
amenable to Hillelism’s “liberal conscience, and sincere expression
of thought and prayer”:
[Yet] a group of people, desiring to call itself a people,
must above all possess their language, otherwise, it is only
the shadow of a people … a people only in a negative
sense; that is to say, all existing peoples will not accept
them as [if they were] something foreign; [this people]
will not have its own identity. 55
Only a “neutral, invented” language—one “unlimitedly rich,
flexible, full of every ‘bagatelle’ which gives life to language,
beautiful-sounding and extraordinarily easy”—could unify and
authenticate a renovated, Hillelist people. As it happened, such a
language—which Zamenof left unnamed—was already to hand:
“The labors of the last decades show that this language not only can
exist and satisfy the most refined followers, but that … it is so
simple that even the most uneducated person can learn it very well
in one week (and children can make it their own from birth). ”56
Clearly Zamenhof believed that Hilellists would pass this language
on to their children, as peoples will. And over time, it would become
“specially adapted to the spirit, life, manner of thought and
expression, specifics and customs of these people who founded the
initial contingent of Hillelists.” Hillelism would transform a
“fictive,” shadow people into a real one, and Esperanto would be
the means of transformation.
In the same way that Hillelism will not exist without a
neutral language, thus, the idea of the neutral language
can never truly come into being without Hillelism.… The
international language will become strengthened in
perpetuity only in the event that there will exist some
group of people who accept it as a familial, hereditary
language. 57
In isolation, Esperanto was a code, Hillelism a cult. But together,
they constituted an ethical calling that looked to the future, not the
past, for the spirit of community.
As he later told the Jewish Chronicle, Hillelism promised the
“normalization” of Jewishness.
We ought to create in Judaism a normal sect, and strive to
bring it about that that sect may come, in the course of
time—say after 100 or 150 years—to include the whole
Jewish people. We should then become a powerful group.