There are streets named after Ludvic Lazarus Zamenhof throughout Israel and Europe, as well as a statue of him in his Polish hometown of Bialystock. More recently, author Michael Chabon in his latest novel named a hotel for him—the decrepit Alaska hostelry where a dead body is found.
A doctor by profession, Zamenhof’s fame lay elsewhere: He was the inventor of the would-be universal language known as Esperanto, which captured the world’s imagination at the turn of the 20th century and has never quite let go. Born in 1859 to Jewish parents of Lithuanian descent, Zamenhof spoke Polish, Russian and Yiddish, learned Greek and Latin in school and taught himself English. At an early age, he decided a universal tongue could replace 5,000 or so languages, transcending human discord and leading the world’s people to greater understanding. It would run the story of Babel, with its confusion of tongues, in reverse.
“He hoped for his new language to not only create a new means of communication but the possibility of finding a common element in humankind,” much as Judaism did for its people, says Humphrey Tonkin, president emeritus of the University of Hartford and an Esperantist. At first, Zamenhof considered promoting Yiddish, already shared by Jews across Eastern and Central Europe, but he soon decided an entirely new language was needed and threw himself into creating it.
Zamenhof chose well-known words from Latin, Greek and Russian, and used English as a model of simple, regular grammar. By attaching prefixes and suffixes to roots, he made word building easy. “Beautiful,” for example, became bela, and “ugly,” malbela. “Combining logic with aesthetics, Zamenhof constructed an attractive, user-friendly language,” says E. James Lieberman, a Washington, D.C., psychiatrist and former president of the Esperanto League of North America.
In 1887, Zamenhof published Unua Libro (“First Book”), detailing the rules, grammar and vocabulary of his language and including translations of the Lord’s Prayer, Genesis and other well-known passages. He sent his book out into the world under the pseudonym of Doktoro Esperanto (“Doctor Hopeful”), and the new language soon took on the name. The manual came out in Russian first; editions in French, German, Polish, Hebrew and English soon followed. The language caught on, with Leo Tolstoy claiming that he had mastered Esperanto in just a few hours. Zamenhof understood, as did Eliezer Ben Yehuda, the father of Modern Hebrew, that for a language to succeed, it had to belong to the community that was to speak it, says Tonkin. Although Zamenhof would translate many classic works, including Shakespeare’s Hamlet (“Cu esti au ne esti,” soliloquizes the troubled prince), he was willing to stand back and let his language grow on its own.
There was another reason Zamenhof distanced himself from his beloved language: anti-Semitism. Though many Europeans began to speak Esperanto in the early 1900s some were concerned about the religion of the language’s creator. Zamenhof himself “was also concerned that his religion would be a liability to the language that he wanted to sell to the world, so he tended to separate himself from the Esperanto movement,” says Tonkin.
Later on in his life, Zamenhof began applying his radical ideas about language to religion. “As he matured, he became interested in the idea of religious conciliation,” says Tonkin. “He called it Hillelism,” after the first century B.C.E. rabbi. It was “the notion that there are common elements in all religions and that it should be possible to create a superstructure of the various religions which people could gather around.”
In 1910, Zamenhof was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. He died seven years later in Warsaw and was buried in Okopowa Street Jewish Cemetery. His daughter Lidia took on his cause and traveled the world to teach Esperanto before she and her two siblings were killed in the Holocaust. “Hitler, in Mein Kampf, declared Esperanto a language of communists and Jews,” says Tonkin. “A large part of the Esperanto movement in the early years were Jews, and they of course vanished in the Holocaust, so the blow dealt to Esperanto was huge.”
Although Esperanto never became the universal language it aspired to be, it has continued to thrive under the radar for generations; estimates of its speakers fluctuate wildly from 100,000 to two million. There are over a hundred Esperanto groups worldwide and, with the advent of the Internet, Esperanto has enjoyed a mini-renaissance. Wikipedia, the Internet encyclopedia, has its own Esperanto version (eo.wikipidia.org), and the thousands of books available in Esperanto translation include a new edition of The Lord of the Rings and Winnie the Pooh. “I’m sure someone is translating Harry Potter right now,” says Tonkin.
