Nay, more, we should be in a position to conquer the
civilized world with our ideas, as the Christians have
hitherto succeeded in doing, though they only commenced
by being a small Jewish body. Instead of being absorbed
by the Christian world, we shall absorb them; for that is
our mission, to spread among humanity the truth of
monotheism and the principles of justice and fraternity. 58
What readers of the Jewish Chronicle might have called
“assimilation,” Zamenhof imagined as Jewish salience and
empowerment. His concept of “normalization”—uniting Jews and
then “conquer[ing] the civilized world”—was, to say the least,
idiosyncratic. And precisely at the moment when he planned to
usher Hillelism into the Esperanto world, his dreams collided with a
bitter reality: the prestigious Esperantists of France intended to hold
the future of Esperanto hostage until Zamenhof agreed to cut
Hillelism loose. They told him that the problem was his religious
utopianism; he did not need to be told that in France, during the era
of Dreyfus, the problem was his Jewishness.
4. Mysterious Phantoms
Louis de Beaufront—who would come to be known as Esperanto’s
Judas—was the man who single-handedly oversaw the blossoming of
the French Esperanto movement. Zamenhof’s biographers have not
been kind to him, describing him as a “sham marquis,” a
“mythomaniac,” and a “hypocrite” with a “tormented craving for
importance” couched in “jesuitical humility.” 59 He was born Louis
Eugène Albert Chevreux in 1855 in Seine-et-Marne, near Paris. A
multilingual private tutor, Chevreux let it be known that he was
delicate in health following a bout of typhus, and he dropped hints
of youthful indiscretions in India. In 1887, the year Zamenhof
became “Doktoro Esperanto,” Chevreux took the aristocratic
patronym “de Beaufront,” under which he appeared in the first
directory of Esperantists (1888). From these obscure beginnings,
Beaufront had an outsized—and dire—impact on the movement.
In 1892, when Beaufront published an Esperanto textbook for
French speakers, there were only ten French subscribers to La
Esperantisto. Beaufront changed that by rendering Esperanto
palatable to the French bourgeoisie. 60 To that end, he emphasized
the practical benefits of Esperanto in his promotional material, and
in 1898, founded the Societé pour la propagation de l’Espéranto,
which transposed the pedagogical practices of the French education
system onto the lingvo internacia. Graded examinations modeled on
those given to French students were administered to certify
proficient Esperantists as “adepts,” but membership was also
available to those who gave financial support. 61 Not only did
Beaufront accommodate Esperanto to the French bourgeoisie by
invoking familiar institutions and procedures; he also presented the
case for Esperanto to the French Association for the Advancement of
Science at the 1900 Exposition Universelle. At Beaufront’s urging,
Zamenhof prepared a lengthy address called “Essence and Future of
the Idea of an International Language,” which he wrote under the
pseudonym “M. Unuel” (meaning “Monsieur One of,” perhaps an
homage to Ahad Ha’am). Given unprecedented access to
intellectuals, Zamenhof seized his chance to convince the eminent
francophones who dominated the spheres of science and diplomacy
just how urgently they needed Esperanto.
Hyperbolical, polemical, at times bombastic, the address was not
finely calibrated to its audience, and it fell to Beaufront to edit and
translate it for the academicians. Beaufront trimmed away some
polemical passages but left intact Zamenhof’s vaunting comparison
of Esperanto to “the discovery of America, the use of steam engines
and the introduction of the alphabet.” 62 Massaged by Beaufront,
Zamenhof’s appeal was sufficient to attract a handful of prestigious
adherents who soon became the movement’s leaders: retired general
Hippolyte Sebert, a ballistics expert and reformer of library
classification; Émile Boirac, the philosopher and rector of the
University of Grenoble; and the mathematician-philosopher Louis
Couturat, formerly of the University of Caen.
Beaufront’s most influential convert, the worldly mathematician
Carlo Bourlet, persuaded the president of the eight-thousand-member
cycling organization Touring Club de France63 that Esperanto would
be invaluable to its members. Through the TCF, Esperanto attracted
the linguist Théophile Cart, who in 1904 cofounded the first
Esperanto press (Presa Esperantista Societo). Another important
adherent was the French Jew Louis Émile Javal, an innovator in the
field of physiological optics, who went blind from glaucoma in 1900.
Javal believed that Esperanto, reformed and rendered in Braille,
could help to bring literature to the blind; he inspired more than a
century of activism for Esperanto on the part of blind samideanoj.
Zamenhof’s only Jewish counterpart among the French leaders,
Javal became a trusted intimate, and Jewish terms and references
make frequent appearances in their correspondence. In a letter to
Javal, Zamenhof quoted the “rule given to the ancient Palestinian
sages: ‘It is not your duty to finish the work, but you don’t have the
right to distance yourself from it.’” 64
Bourlet’s other signal contribution was to convince the firm of
Hachette to publish Zamenhof’s long dreamed-of “Esperanto library
of world literature and philosophy.” Thanks to Esperanto’s
newfound legitimacy in France, never again would Zamenhof need
to self-publish. But even with his financial stress alleviated,
Zamenhof’s late hours and incessant smoking told on his health,
which was never robust. As he wrote in a letter of 1905, “I’m not
even 46 years old [and] I feel like a 60-year-old. ”65 He had already
begun to suffer angina and shortness of breath, symptoms of the
heart disease that would eventually take his life. By day, he
provided eye care to the Jewish poor of Warsaw, living among them
and operating a clinic in his home. By night, he devoted himself to
Esperanto, editing and translating for the Hachette series and
writing articles and letters. And in the moments between waking
and sleeping, between cases of cataract and of trachoma, he set his
hopes on Beaufront’s advocacy in France.
On the face of it, Beaufront was making remarkable progress. The
Association for the Promotion of Esperanto (soon renamed the
French Association for the Promotion of Esperanto) more than
doubled its membership between 1902 and 1905, when its rolls
showed 4,052 members. 66 Behind the scenes, though, Beaufront was
embroiled in squabbles with Bourlet, while Cart, an antireformist,
was squabbling with various proponents of reforming the language.
During the summer of 1904, seventeen years after Esperanto was
first brought before the public, the inaugural international congress
took place at Calais, jointly hosted by the English and French