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ABSTRACT
This article emphasizes Esperanto's imperial Russian origins as an essential frame for understanding the larger history of Esperanto and its creator, L. L. Zamenhof (1859–1917). Despite Esperanto's global popularity in the early twentieth century, historians have little explored the history of this international auxiliary language and the utopian philosophical principles that Zamenhof invested in Esperanto's mission to transform Jews, Russia, and the world. Yet scholars have recently reconsidered Zamenhof as a political actor who launched Esperanto in 1887 as a means of solving the Jewish Question. While building from their work, this article integrates the history of Esperanto into the history of late imperial Russia. The fraught political culture of the late Russian empire inspired a variety of radical, utopian ideological movements and Esperanto should be counted among them. Zamenhof offered Esperanto as a program for uniting all the world's peoples into a moral community of global citizens bound together by a shared international auxiliary language and universalist ethics. Conceived in the multiethnic borderlands of a Russian empire that he felt had failed him and his fellow Jews, Esperanto was Zamenhof's utopian vision for a harmonious empire of humanity.
Acknowledgements
With thanks to the participants who thoughtfully discussed an earlier version of this article with me at a colloquium session hosted by the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia. Special thanks are owed to the two anonymous reviewers who helpfully suggested revisions, as well as to Lauren Mancia and Peter Blitstein for their feedback on an earlier draft.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Brigid O'Keeffe is an associate professor of history at Brooklyn College (CUNY) and the author of New Soviet Gypsies: Nationality, Performance, and Selfhood in the Early Soviet Union (University of Toronto Press, 2013). She is currently at work on a book about the history of Esperanto and internationalism in late imperial and early Soviet Russia.
Notes
1 Esperanto [Zamenhof], Mezhdunarodnyi iazyk: Predislovie i polnyi uchebnik [por Rusoj] .
2 Ibid., 3–4.
3 Ibid., 9. Italics and emphasis as in original.
4 Garvia, Esperanto and its Rivals; Gordin, Scientific Babel.
5 Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism.
6 Zamenhof, Mezhdunarodnyi iazyk, 5. Italics as in the original.
7 Privat, The Life of Zamenhof; Boulton, Zamenhof: Creator of Esperanto.
8 Schor, Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language; idem., “L.L. Zamenhof and the Shadow People”; Korzhenkov, Zamenhof: The Life, Works and Ideas of the Author of Esperanto; Garvia, “Religion and Artificial Languages at the Turn of the Twentieth Century”; Lins, Dangerous Language: Esperanto under Hitler and Stalin, 1: chapter 1. See also Berdichevsky, “Zamenhof and Esperanto”; Halperin, “Modern Hebrew, Esperanto, and the Quest for a Universal Language.”
9 Boulton, Zamenhof; and Forster, The Esperanto Movement, chapter 2; Korzhenkov, Zamenhof; Privat, Life of Zamenhof. Authored by specialists working outside the field of Russian history, even the best of recent revisionist studies of Esperanto’s early history do not endeavor to historicize Zamenhof in his broader imperial Russian context. Garcia, Esperanto and its Rivals; Lins, Dangerous Language; Schor, Bridge of Worlds.
10 I borrow this useful phrase from Bradley, Voluntary Associations in Tsarist Russia, 5.
11 See especially chapter 1 of Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution.
12 In recent years, historians have published exemplary analyses of how individual life stories reflect not only the ethnoreligious diversity of imperial Russia, but also the lived experience of an empire confronting monumental challenges and strain. See, for example, Norris and Sunderland, eds., Russia’s People of Empire.
13 Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia, quote on 67.
14 Schor, Bridge of Words, 28.
15 “Esperanto and Jewish Ideals: Interview for the Jewish Chronicle with Dr. Zamenhof,” The Jewish Chronicle (London), 6 September 1907: 16.
16 Kobrin, Jewish Białystok and its Diaspora.
17 Nathans, Beyond the Pale, 215.
18 Schor, Bridge of Words, 67.
19 Boulton, Zamenhof, 19.
20 See Schor, Bridge of Words, 66; “Esperanto and Jewish Ideals,” 17; Korzhenkov, Zamenhof, 11.
21 Klier, Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881–1882; Nathans, Beyond the Pale, esp. 186–198; Frankel, “The Crisis of 1881–1882 as a Turning Point in Modern Jewish History.”
22 Boulton, Zamenhof, 23–24.
23 Gamzefon, “Chto zhe nakonets delat’?” Razsvet, nos. 2–5 (January-February 1882), reproduced in Holzhaus, Doktoro kaj Lingvo Esperanto, 91–114. The title Zamenhof chose for his article was almost certainly a conscious nod to the most consequential work of radical literature in imperial Russia, Nikolai Chernyshevskii’s What is to Be Done? (1863).
24 Ibid., 102. Jews from imperial Russia had in 1881 set up a colony at Sicily Island, Louisiana. It seems likely that hyperbolic reporting of their success in Russia’s Jewish press inspired Zamenhof’s vision of Lousiana as a promised land. See Klier, Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms, 276–277.
25 Gamzefon, “Chto zhe nakonets delat’,” 114.
26 Ibid., 112.
27 I borrow the concept of “emotional community” from Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions in History.”
28 On the quota system and its impacts, see Nathans, Beyond the Pale, esp. 266–281.
29 Ibid., 198.
30 Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, chapter 1.
31 “Esperanto and Jewish Ideals,” 16. Schor attentively traces how Zamenhof’s distinctly Jewish politics of Esperanto evolved throughout his life in her Bridge of Words, especially 60–108.
32 Zamenhof, Mezhdunarodnyi iazyk, 3–5.
33 Ibid., 5.
34 Holzhaus, Doktoro kaj lingvo, 266.
35 Zamenhof, The Birth of Esperanto, 4.
36 Ibid., 6.
37 Ibid., 6, 8.
38 Although “ethnicity” was not the term used in late imperial Russia, the concept of nationality (expressed in the Russian words of narodnost’ and natsionalnost’) were increasingly deployed in the service of conceptualizing, reifying, and normalizing notions of ethnic difference. Especially in the last decades of the tsarist regime, Charles Steinwedel has persuasively shown, ethnicity became a key category and locus of late imperial Russian politics. See his “To Make a Difference.”
39 On the widening politics and institutionalization of nationality (ethnicity) in late imperial Russia, see Cadiot, “Searching for Nationality”; Steinwedel, “To Make a Difference: The Category of Ethnicity in Late Imperial Russian Politics”; idem., “Making Social Groups, One Person at a Time”; Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 1863–1914. In an argument that Zamenhof would have surely appreciated, Paul Werth has shown how the late imperial politicization of ethnicity was entangled in longstanding imperial conceptions of faith as constitutive of peoples. See his The Tsar’s Foreign Faiths: Toleration and the Fate of Religious Freedom in Imperial Russia, especially chapter 6.
40 Cadiot, “Searching for Nationality.”
41 On how increasingly elusive were the parameters of a collective Jewish identity in late imperial Russia, and how this reality complicated tsarist efforts to document and institutionalize nationality, see Avrutin, Jews and the Imperial State.
42 Sum [Zamenhof], Gillelizm: Proekt resheniia evreiskogo voprosa. On the Jewish philosophers who appear to have inspired Zamenhof’s formulation of Hillelism, see Garvia, “Religion and Artificial Languages,” especially 54–63.
43 “Esperanto and Jewish Ideals,” 17.
44 Ibid.
45 Zamenhof, Gillelizm, 41.
46 Ibid., 55–57. His objections to Hebrew and Yiddish as suitable for Hillelism are repeated throughout the text. Despite his conviction that Yiddish was unsuitable for the utopian vision he endowed in Esperanto, Zamenhof throughout his life exhibited his scholarly and personal appreciation for the language. As a young man, he studied Yiddish intensely and completed in 1879 what has been described as “the first scholarly and comprehensive Yiddish grammar.” Norman Berdichevsky has claimed that “on more than one occasion, Zamenhof confessed to a deep love of Yiddish” irrespective of what he nonetheless saw as its unsuitability for the Jewish and human emancipation he hoped that Esperanto could and would achieve. Berdichevsky, “Zamenhof and Esperanto,” 67.
47 Zamenhof, Gillelizm, 52.
48 Ibid., 64.
49 Ibid., 71–73.
50 Ibid., 52.
51 Privat, Life of Zamenhof, 54.
52 The story of this behind-the-scenes struggle is expertly narrated in Schor, Bridge of Words, 82–91.
53 Quoted in Boulton, Zamenhof, 80–81.
54 The full text of the Boulogne Declaration is available online at https://web.archive.org/web/20140506075349/http://aktuale.info/en/biblioteko/dokumentoj/1905 (accessed 7 July 2017).
55 Quoted in Boulton, Zamenhof, 85.
56 Quoted in Boulton, Zamenhof, 98–99.
57 These figures are borrowed from Weinberg, “Workers, Pogroms, and the 1905 Revolution in Odessa.” See also Lambroza, “The Pogroms of 1903–1906.”
58 The 1905 Revolution is granted only fleeting and superficial mention in Boulton, Zamenhof, 96; Korzhenkov, Zamenhof, 52; Lins, Dangerous Language, 41; Privat, Life of Zamenhof, 64; Schor, Bridge of Words, 91.
59 At the turn of the century, the center of Esperantist activity decisively shifted away from Russia to France. See Garvia, Esperanto and its Rivals, chapter 10.
60 Burbank, “An Imperial Rights Regime: Law and Citizenship in the Russian Empire.”
61 Kotsonis, States of Obligation: Taxes and Citizenship in the Russian Empire and Early Soviet Republic; Sanborn, Drafting the Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905–1925.
62 Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, chapter 1.
63 [Zamenhof], “Dogmaty Gillelizma/Dogmoj de Hilelismo.”
64 Ibid., 4.
65 Ibid., 5–11.
66 Responding to these criticisms, Zamenhof attempted to rebrand Hillelism in late 1906 by renaming it “Homaranism.” Homaranism translates to “Humanitarianism”; “homarano” in Esperanto means “human being.” This rebranding did little to further his cause.
67 Quoted in Privat, Life of Zamenhof, 79.
68 Zamenhof, “After the Great War: An Appeal to Diplomatists.”