Dangerous Language — Esperanto under Hitler and Stalin

Ulrich Lins, Humphrey Tonkin, Humphrey Tonkin

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781137549174
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Historical & Comparative Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This is Volume 1 of Dangerous Language. This book examines the rise of the international language Esperanto, launched in 1887 as a proposed solution to national conflicts and a path to a more tolerant world. The chapters in this volume chart the emergence of Esperanto as an answer to a widespread democratic desire for direct person-to-person international communication regardless of political boundaries. Its early success was limited, mostly because of the Czarist regime's suspicion of direct communication with foreigners, and, later, similar suspicion by dictatorial regimes generally. As speakers of a "dangerous language, " its adepts were harassed and persecuted, especially in Germany and the Soviet Union. This book argues that the fate of Esperanto over the 130 years of its existence serves as a barometer to measure the degree to which regimes tolerate spontaneous personal contact with other countries and allow the pursuit of self-education outside prescribed national or ideological constraints. This book will appeal to a wide readership, including linguists, historians, political scientists and others interested in the history of the twentieth century from the unusual perspective of language. This volume is complemented by the sister volume Dangerous Language - Esperanto and the Decline of Stalinism which offers a concentration on the Cold War history of Esperanto in Eastern Europe.

Part I
A Suspicious New Language

© The Author(s) 2016

Ulrich LinsDangerous Language — Esperanto under Hitler and Stalin10.1057/978-1-137-54917-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Emergence of Esperanto

Ulrich Lins¹

(1)

Bonn, Germany

End Abstract

Zamenhof and the Origins of Esperanto

The author of Esperanto belonged to a persecuted people. Lazar Zamenhof, who in 1887 published his project for an international language, was a Jew living in the Russian Empire, whose four million Jewish inhabitants made up about half of worldwide Jewry.¹ This population continued to suffer discrimination to a degree that the majority of their fellows in Western Europe already regarded as a thing of the past. Zamenhof’s birthplace was Białystok, where Jews, living alongside Poles, Russians, Germans and Belarusians, constituted a majority.² Each group had its own language and regarded the other groups with suspicion. It was in this environment that Esperanto came into being. As Zamenhof explained in a long letter to the Russian Esperantist Nikolai Borovko:

In a city like this, more than anywhere, a person of an impressionable nature feels the heavy misfortune of language difference and becomes convinced at every step that difference of language is the sole, or at least the principal, factor that divides the human family and separates it into hostile camps.

For this reason, wrote Zamenhof, he decided that ‘when I was grown up, I had to eliminate this evil’.³

When this letter was published in 1896, the first Esperantists were ‘deeply heart-stricken’:⁴ later, it was often publicly cited as a clear explanation of Zamenhof’s motives and as a particularly convincing reason for the need of an international language. The letter presented the author of Esperanto as an altruistic advocate of understanding across all national antagonisms, as a person full of modesty and idealism, for whose goals it would be hard not to show respect.

Unknown for four decades, however, was another of Zamenhof’s letters, written in 1905 to the Frenchman Alfred Michaux. In this letter, Zamenhof put particular emphasis on his Jewish origins and the connection of all his ideals to his membership of ‘that ancient, much suffering and struggling people whose entire historical mission consists […] in the union of the nations and the goal of “one God”’. Zamenhof asserted that if he ‘were not a Jew from the ghetto, the idea of the unification of humankind’ would not have occupied him so insistently. No one, he asserted, could feel the need for a ‘nationless language, neutrally human’, as strongly as a Jew.⁵

We need not see a contradiction between the two letters. They reveal thoughts that came to Zamenhof in different stages of his life. When, as a young man, he worked on his project for an international language, it is unclear whether he considered the specific usefulness of the language to Jews. His family background did not immediately cause him to discuss the circumstances that drove him to such missionary zeal. The family, which, as of December 1873, was living in Warsaw, was assimilationist, confident in the further improvement of the legal situation of Jews. His father, a teacher of German,⁶ identified with the intellectual movement known as Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, and cultivated the hope that ideas of equality would finally prevail also in Russia. Lazar therefore grew up not in the traditionalist atmosphere and suffocating poverty of the Jewish ghetto, but in the circle of that minority of bourgeois and intellectual Jews who saw the way to emancipation as lying in maximum integration into the surrounding society.

In truth, Marcus Zamenhof, Lazar’s father, seems a typical representative of the modern urban Jews of Russia. His goal was to be a loyal citizen of the Russian state; he regarded himself as a Russian whose Jewishness was confined to the practice of the Jewish religion, and who desired that his children be allowed to advance in society through access to all available educational opportunities. Characteristic of his point of view is the surviving report on the inauguration of a new synagogue in Białystok in 1868. On that occasion Marcus delivered a Russian-language address in which, alluding to earlier persecutions, he expressed his thanks to Tsar Alexander II ‘for his just laws and good decrees’ and called on Jews to embrace the spirit of the new, liberal era: ‘We should no longer distance ourselves from our brothers the Russians, among whom we live, but share with them, equally, all the rights of this country, for our happiness and well-being.’⁷

Lazar’s childhood advanced under the influence of this desire for integration. He himself later remembered that he ‘had a passionate love for the Russian language and the whole Russian realm’ and that he ‘dreamed of one day becoming a great Russian poet’.⁸ Languages in general became his hobby. For a while he hoped to revive one of the ancient languages⁹ and also thought about the reintroduction of Hebrew as a spoken language.¹⁰ In the end, however, he ‘began vaguely dreaming of a new, created language [“nova, arta lingvo”]’.¹¹ His imagination may well have been stimulated, early on, by the legend of the Tower of Babel, of the time when humans could still communicate with one another freely. How might the condition introduced by the fall of the tower be overcome? Characteristic is the comment of 1908 by the mature Zamenhof regarding the biblical story: ‘The consequence of the Tower of Babel has now become the cause: once, confusion of languages was a punishment for sin; now the confusion of languages is the cause of the sin.’¹²

At the end of 1878, when Zamenhof was still in secondary school, the first project of a ‘lingwe uniwersala’ was ready. He and a group of friends happily recited, very much under the influence of the educated ideas of human brotherhood, the first poetic lines in the new language:

Malamikete de las nacjes

kadó, kadó, jam temp’ está!

La tot’ homoze in familje

konunigare so debá!¹³

But at this time Zamenhof still hesitated to go public with his project: ‘Anticipating only mockery and persecution, I decided to hide my work from everyone.’¹⁴ He finished secondary school in the summer of 1879 and left for Moscow to study medicine. He was there when, in March 1881, Tsar Alexander II was assassinated by anarchists; it is no exaggeration to say that this event had vital consequences for Zamenhof’s future activities. Following the assassination, the political atmosphere in Russia degenerated rapidly, particularly for Jews. In April pogroms began. They spread across large parts of Russia and lasted for over a year, finally resulting in the greatest sustained persecution hitherto suffered by the Jews in the modern era. What made these pogroms even more significant was the fact that they not only displayed the cruelties of the ignorant but were accompanied by the silent and even direct approval of the Tsarist authorities.

Among the Jews of Russia the disillusionment accompanying this new explosion of anti-Semitism was particularly profound. The policies of the murdered Tsar had brought a number of changes for the better—changes which, especially among the more assimilationist Jews, encouraged widespread hope for the gradual achievement of equality of rights. But now, in 1881, the Russian Jews were made painfully aware that anti-Semitism was by no means exterminated and that their efforts to assimilate had encountered insuperable barriers. Many were persuaded of the need for a collective Jewish renaissance—and the search for a solution to the Jewish problem not through adaptation to a hostile environment but through a national rebirth that would restore to the Jews a territory of their own. In many Russian cities, beginning in the winter of 1881–82, groups emerged which, calling themselves Hovevei Zion,¹⁵ spread the idea of reviving a Jewish state in Palestine. A stimulus to this new, pre-Zionist movement came primarily from the brochure Autoemancipation! of Leon Pinsker,¹⁶ a Jewish physician in Odessa. Pinsker had formerly been an ardent supporter of Haskalah, but in 1881, his hopes of continuing progress toward harmonious coexistence between Jews and Russians definitively dashed, he changed his view radically, beginning to argue among his fellow Jews that their salvation could consist only in self-sufficiency, national solidarity and the reacquisition of a territorial base.¹⁷

Zamenhof, now experiencing the rise of anti-Jewish feelings in Moscow, was also raised, as we have seen, in the ethos of those intellectuals who were most shocked at the return of anti-Semitism. It is in this light that we read his bitter observation in the letter to Michaux: ‘I grew convinced that my love [for the Russian language and the Russian realm] was repaid with hate.’ He added that people who claim a monopoly on the proper definition of Russian-ness saw in him the Jew ‘only a foreigner without rights’. Thus, Zamenhof was pushed back into his Jewishness, and as a consequence felt himself moved to help first those whom people ‘hate, look down on and oppress’—his Jewish brothers and sisters.¹⁸ While he was still in Moscow he worked on a grammar of the Yiddish language,¹⁹ and it was also in Moscow that he was caught up in the idea of founding a colony ‘in some uninhabited part of the world’, from which an independent Jewish state might in due course emerge.²⁰

In Augus...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. A Suspicious New Language
• 2. ‘Language of Jews and Communists’
• 3. ‘Language of Petty Bourgeois and Cosmopolitans’
• Backmatter