When Schleyer came across Volapuk that memorable night in 1879, he did not think much about the possible applications of his language. Satisfied with his own genius, he let his supporters think about the problems his Volapuk could solve.
To his surprise, these problems were many. As his supporters showed, Volapuk could help solve the problem of scientific communication and fa- cilitate international transactions. Volapuk could also be the language of peace, or even a literary language capable of the most accurate and creative transla- tions of the most important literary works of humanity. Volapuk could deter the spread of English or, depending on national interests, German and French. Volapuk could have expanded in many different directions and for different purposes. But this did not happen.
Esperanto was the opposite case. Its inventor created the language as a solution to a pressing problem: the preservation of the rights, dignity, and integrity of the Jewish people, and, by extension, of all peoples in an era dom- inated by international rivalries, ethnic hatred, and tribal nationalism. And, contrary to Schleyer, he was able to solve the coordination problem posed by the reformists and let his language spread in the different and sometimes con- tradictory directions that had begun to appear within the Volapukist move- ment before Schleyer decided to purge it.
PART II
Esperanto
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"The Purpose of My Whole Life": Zamenhof and Esperanto
In 1937, the Soviet Esperanto movement was liquidated. Some of its leaders were shot, and many others were sent to the Gulag. There is some evidence that Jews were overrepresented among the Russian Esperantists. One-third of the leading Esperantists of Petrograd who fell victim to the 1937 purge were Jews.! This connection between the Jewish people and Esperanto did not go unnoticed by the Nazis. In 1939, the German Esperanto association was dismantled under the conviction that the language was the "weapon of the Jews" in their struggle for world dominance.[1]
Hitler had already made much the same charge in Mein Kampf: "As long as the Jew has not become the master of the other peoples, he must speak their languages whether he likes it or not, but as soon as they become his slaves, they would all have to learn a universal language (Esperanto, for instance!), so that by this additional means the Jews could more easily dom- inate them!"3
Although by the early 1930s the association between the Jewish people and Esperanto was somehow diluted, it was quite strong in the language's early years. Ludwig Zamenhof (1859-1917), the inventor of Esperanto, was a Jew, and his language first flourished in the Jewish milieu of Eastern Europe. It is precisely because of his Jewishness, as Zamenhof confided in a letter to fel- low Esperantist Alfred Michaux, that he acquired the necessary determina- tion and obstinacy to launch a new international language:
are indissolubly linked to my Jewishness. . . . If I had not been a Jew from the ghetto, the idea of uniting humanity either would never have entered in my head or it would never have gripped me so tena- ciously throughout my entire life. No one can feel more strongly than a ghetto Jew the sadness of dissension among peoples. . . . My Jewishness is the main reason why, from earliest childhood, I gave myself wholly to one overarching idea and dream, that of bringing together in brotherhood all humanity. . . . That idea is the vital element and the purpose of my whole life. The Esperanto project is merely a part of that idea; I am constantly thinking and dreaming about the rest of it.4
Ludwig Zamenhof was born in Bialystok, a relatively prosperous and in- dustrialized town in what is today Poland but at the time was part of the Rus- sian empire.5 Bialystok was a multi-ethnic but predominantly Jewish town. Ethnic Germans, Poles, Russians, Lithuanians, and Belarusians constituted 30 percent of its inhabitants, while the rest were Jews. Culturally, it was a center of the Haskalah movement, the Jewish version of the German En- lightenment.6 Russian maskilim, or supporters of Haskalah, had a difficult challenge. They were against superstition, opposed to both traditional Juda- ism and mystical Hasidim, and in favor of political and religious tolerance. Convinced that there was room for a distinct Jewish culture in Imperial Russia, provided that Jews embraced a more secularized worldview, they promoted the emancipation and integration of Jews. Among many other measures, they sought reform of the existing Jewish school curriculum in order to give more emphasis to occupational training and instruction in science, philosophy, Hebrew, and Jewish and Russian history. They were confident that progress was inevitable even in fairly backward Russian soci- ety, and that some changes in Jewish mores and folkways would grant them full recognition as loyal Russians, albeit distinctively Jewish.7
Zamenhof's father was a maskil. His loyalty to the tsar and condemna- tion of the 1863-64 Polish uprising won him a teaching position in a War- saw gymnasium and the opportunity to become a civil servant.8 This professional advancement placed him among the very few Jews who could give their children a university education.9 In 1879, his son Ludwig began his studies in medicine at the University of Moscow. But two years later Ludwig had to return to his parents because of the wave of pogroms that began in Ukraine and reached Warsaw by Christmas 1881.
The pogroms had a tremendous impact on Ludwig Zamenhof. They were concentrated in the territories of the Pale of Settlement—present-day Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, and Moldova—where the Jews where confined, and did not subside until September 1882, when the government finally decided to act against the perpetrators. All in all, from April 1881 to September 1882, several hundred Jews were killed, mutilated, or raped, and thousands lost property. The pogroms were a grim landmark in the history of Russian Jewry.10 They shattered the confidence of the maskilim and made the prospect of emancipation within Russian society seem unattainable. It was certainly troubling to see the Russian government blaming the Jews for the violence, and further punishing them with new antisemitic measures. More disturbing was the silence and indifference of the liberal Russian intelligentsia.
The 1881 pogroms were a litmus test for the maskilim and Haskalah ide- als. To many, and more particularly to young Jewish intellectuals, the pogroms illustrated the futility of the old dream of Jewish integration into the Rus- sian empire. In fact, driven by the antisemitism of tsarist officials and an en- during economic crisis, from 1881 to 1914 around a quarter of the Jews living in the Pale emigrated to other countries, mostly to the United States. The po- groms made evident the need for new ideas and leadership, and the Jewish press, printed in Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew, was crucial in this new pe- riod. Two articles written by Moshe Leib Lilienblum, an old and now- tormented maskil, changed the orientation of a divided Jewish press, then undecided about mass emigration. According to Lilienblum, it was a mistake to explain the pogroms as a transient phenomenon, or the natural consequence of the relative backwardness of Russian society. As long as Jews were aliens in their hosting societies, be they in Eastern or Western Europe, they would always be endangered. Lilienblum was convinced that assimilation was un- realistic. The more the Jews advanced in their societies, the more resentment they aroused. Nationalist movements in Europe and the "universal antipa- thy" that this ideology conveyed against anybody who was not considered a member of the hosting nation meant that the Jews could never dream of a safe place. Their only hope was to claim their own territory. For Lilienblum, that territory was Palestine.11