Lilienblum's articles convinced many, particularly young people, of the urgency of mass migration, a "new exodus," as the more Orthodox interpreted his argument. But even when historical and religious reasons recommended Palestine, some thought it should not become the final destination of the Jews.
If the old Haskalah agenda could not be realized in Russia, it could still be possible in the United States, where Jews could become loyal American citi- zens with a distinctive Jewish identity.
This was the position of the renowned Hebrew poet Yehuda L. Levin (pseudonym Yehalel); Yehuda L. Gordon, also a poet; and Lev O. Levanda, a poet and a formerly convinced Russifier and Russian patriot. It was also the position of Zamenhof, who made his views public in Razsvet. By early 1882, the debate between the supporters of America and the Palestinophiles, as they were called, was already over: the last Christmas pogrom in Warsaw made all of them—Levin, Gordon, Levanda, and Zamenhof—change their views and rally for Palestine.12
In February 1882, Zamenhof co-founded Warsaw's local Hovevei Zion chapter.13 Hovevei Zion, a proto-Zionist organization, raised funds and helped colonists establish the foundations of a new society in Palestine. By 1883 there were only a dozen Hovevei Zion chapters in Russian territory. Until 1890, when the Russian government granted them legal status, Hovevei Zion chapters had to operate semi-clandestinely. In these conditions, they could hardly coor- dinate with each other, which prevented them from gaining political momen- tum. Although they were a failure in the eyes of many contemporaries, Hovevei Zion and its activities kept alive the Palestinian dream in those years, pav- ing the way for the enthusiastic reception of Theodor Herzl's vision of Zion- ism in Russia.14
But only two years after the founding of the Warsaw Hovevei Zion soci- ety, Zamenhof was already disillusioned. He was not alone. By the mid-1880s, when the violence was over and the emotionally charged atmosphere of the previous years had dissipated, Gordon, Duvnov, and other former advocates of the Palestine project were reconsidering it to be an unattainable utopia, an escapist response to terrifying events.15 But Zamenhofs disillusionment was perhaps deeper. His chapter had focused on helping young BILU mem- bers establish colonies in Palestine.16 They were a self-proclaimed vanguard of university and gymnasium students, imbued by agrarian communalism and nationalist ideas. Baron Rothschild's refusal to support them, their lack of experience with agricultural labor, and personal rivalries ruined the ex- periment. In 1885, only around twenty of the fifty or sixty Biluim who moved to Palestine settled there. The rest either returned to Russia or emigrated to America.17 Although a legend in Zionist historical memory, the BILU ex- periment was hardly a source of pride among contemporaries, Zamenhof included.18
Even more disillusioning to Zamenhof was the drift in Hovevei Zion to- ward a Jewish nationalism.19 By 1884 Zamenhof had run out of patience with proposals of this kind. In Warsaw intellectuals including his friend Nahum Sokolow, the director of the newspaper Ha-Zefirah, were also critical of this nationalistic inflection in the movement and with the concessions that the new leadership was making to the Orthodox rabbinate for the sake of national unity.20 If the problem was nationalism, they reasoned, the solution was not more nationalism, but less.
Certainly, while a student at the University of Moscow, Zamenhof had fallen under the nationalist spell, as had many other representatives of na- tional minorities in Central and Eastern Europe. Influenced by the linguis- tic Romanticism of Herder, Fichte, and others, nationalist intellectuals were busy reinventing and standardizing their languages. By 1884, Czech, Slovak, Lithuanian, Serbo-Croatian, and Rusyn nationalist movements were relatively advanced in the standardization of their national languages. Now the Roma- nians, Finns, Norwegians, and Estonians wanted to have their own literary corpus.21 The young Zamenhof contributed to this trend. During his studies at the University of Moscow, and in order to provide Russian Jews with a com- mon language and identity, he crafted a proposal for the standardization of Yiddish as the language of the Jews.22 But not much later he decided to end this project, since, as he explained, "I thought that the awakening of a sort of national patriotism among the Jews could be detrimental for them, as well as for the ideal of the unity of the human race."23
A leading figure of the proto-Zionist movement, Zamenhof later became rather critical of nationalism, Jewish or otherwise. Manipulating a language to draw a firm line between us and them, purifying it from foreign words, and choosing an appropriate script to convey a suitable historical memory was, for Zamenhof, a dangerous and divisive game. He was an idealist, but not naive. He did not think that a common international language would bring peace among nations. There were other sources of conflict, such as economic interests, and countries with a common language have also endured civil wars.
But being a Jew and living in Eastern Europe, he thought that ethnic con- flicts were equally if not more dangerous than economic ones. He thought that a neutral, non-national language could reduce the antagonism among peoples that ethnonationalism fueled. It could prevent majorities from im- posing their language on ethnic minorities. More important, communica- tion in a non-ethnic language could help promote a non-national, cosmopolitan identity. As an adherent of Haskalah, he pursued assimilation. But not to a
Herderian type of society, a patchwork of homogeneous nations differently colored by their languages or religion.24 Assimilation should take place in a new society where kinship, religion, and language were not used to discrim- inate among people. And a non-national language could help advance this ideal.
This conception of the role of an artificial language departed from those of Schleyer and most Volapukists. Whereas for the latter an artificial language would basically serve an instrumental, communicative function, for Zamen- hof it had a political mission. He understood that, strategically, it was advis- able to emphasize the benefits of an artificial language for international trade or scholarly exchange, but he never concealed his idea that a non-national language had to have a soul, a moral mission. Paradoxically, then, Zamen- hof, was replicating the strategy he witnessed among Eastern European na- tionalist movements, although for quite the opposite intention. If nationalists were reinventing languages out of the linguistic varieties present in their ter- ritories to create separate national communities, Zamenhof invented a neu- tral language from the larger stock of Indo-European tongues to create a non-national community of speakers who could relate to each other as au- tonomous moral agents, and not as passive recipients of inherited or invented traditions.
In any case, Zamenhofs rejection of Zionism was not exceptional among the most educated Jews of Central and Eastern Europe. In his autobiogra- phy, and reflecting on his youth in Vienna, for example, the philosopher Karl Popper claimed that "all nationalism or racialism is evil, and Jewish nation- alism is no exception."25 Living between cultures, and feeling insecure in the countries where they were born, many Jewish intellectuals resorted to the cosmopolitanism embraced in the Enlightenment ideal. Popper found his cosmopolitan Heimat in the international community of scientists and philosophers committed to reason and the pursuit of truth, and in the never fully realized and always precarious institutions of an "Open Society," which might elevate man above the boundaries of his ethnic or religious tribe.26 Oth- ers found their Heimat in the supranational ideals of socialism and the prom- ise of universal brotherhood. Zamenhofs cosmopolitanism was also a reaction against the ethnopolitics of his time, always prone to put the Jews at the los- ing end. But his cosmopolitan solution to the Jewish question was quite noveclass="underline" it involved the creation a new language.27