Esperanto’s founder hoped it would foster universal peace.
Esperanto’s founder hoped it would foster universal peace. Illustration by Miguel Porlan
As the book of Genesis tells it, God had no sooner made a covenant with the survivors of the Flood, agreeing that He would never again try to drown humankind, than they did something new to annoy Him. Settling on a Mesopotamian plain, they made bricks and mortar, and began building a tower whose top, as they planned it, would reach to Heaven—that is, to where God lived. God did not fail to notice what they were doing:
And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.
So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
According to Esther Schor, in her new book, “Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language” (Metropolitan), this famous story, of the Tower of Babel, represents a sort of second original sin. “If mortality is what it is like to live after Eden, misunderstanding,” she writes, “is what it is like to live after Babel.” This is not just a psychological misfortune but, more pressingly, a political one. Because we don’t speak the same language as our neighbors, we can’t see their point of view, and therefore we are more likely to rob them and kill them.
For thousands of years, people have taken this matter quite seriously. Ambitious organizations such as the Roman Empire and the Roman Catholic Church made sure that their members, whatever their mother tongue, learned a second, common language. More recently, various thinkers have considered constructing universal languages from scratch. Schor gives a colorful summary. In the seventeenth century, Francis Bacon proposed that our written language switch to something like Chinese ideograms, bypassing words altogether, and John Wilkins, the first secretary of the Royal Society, proposed a new language with two thousand and thirty characters. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz said that we should use a pictographic system, a little like Egyptian hieroglyphs. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came the rise of nationalism and, with it, linguistic nationalism, which held that the particularity of language was in fact an advantage, not a problem. Johann Gottfried Herder claimed that a people’s language contained its spiritual essence. Wilhelm von Humboldt believed that language, mediating between the mind and the world, actually created a people’s identity.
The language called Esperanto was born of such considerations, and one more—the so-called Jewish question. Esperanto’s creator, Ludovik Lazarus Zamenhof (1859-1917), a short, sparkly-eyed, chain-smoking ophthalmologist, was a Jew, and, as he wrote to a friend, this made all the difference: “My Jewishness has been the main reason why, from earliest childhood, I gave myself completely to one crucial idea . . . the dream of the unity of humankind.”
By this he may have meant that Jews were broader in outlook. In any case, he felt that they needed to be. In the town where Zamenhof grew up—Białystok, now in Poland but at that time part of the Russian Empire—the population, he wrote, “consisted of four diverse elements: Russians, Poles, Germans, and Jews; each spoke a different language and was hostile to the other elements.” He went on, “I was brought up as an idealist; I was taught that all men were brothers, and, meanwhile, in the street, in the square, everything at every step made me feel that men did not exist, only Russians, Poles, Germans, Jews.”
In fact, the Russians, Poles, and Germans did see eye to eye on one thing: they all disliked the Jews. In 1881, this sentiment set off a great wave of pogroms in Russia, which, in turn, gave rise to Zionism, the effort to get the Jews out of harm’s way by relocating them to what was said to be their promised land, Palestine. Zamenhof was in his twenties when all this happened, and for a while, before devoting himself to the cause of Esperanto, he was an enthusiastic Zionist. He spent more than two years modernizing Yiddish, converting it to the Latin alphabet, revising the spelling, and constructing a grammar, the first Yiddish grammar ever recorded. (He did this while he was in medical school. Zamenhof was one of those nineteenth-century notables—Balzac, Dickens, Pasteur, Freud, Marie Curie—who seem to have slept only about three hours a night. In his adult years, when he was head of the Esperanto movement, he balanced this with a full-time ophthalmology practice. He also had a wife and three children.)
In time, Zamenhof became disillusioned with Zionism. Indeed, he turned away from all movements defined by ethnic or national identity. “Every nationalism presents for humanity only the greatest unhappiness,” he wrote. He deplored the Jews’ claim that God had made a covenant with them exclusively—that they were a chosen people. He wanted Judaism purged of all narrowness. Let the Jews keep some of their nice things, their High Holidays and the stories and the poetry in their Bible. But, as for theology and ethics, they should confine themselves to the teachings of Rabbi Hillel (first century B.C.), which, according to Zamenhof, consisted of just three principles: that God exists and rules the world; that He resides within us as our conscience; and that the fundamental dictate of conscience is that we should do unto others as we would have them do unto us. “All other instructions,” Zamenhof declared, “are only human commentaries.”
The objective of Zionism had been to find for the Jews a safe place, where their separate culture could survive unharmed. Zamenhof’s objective was to open up Judaism, so that it would no longer require either separateness or protection. “Instead of being absorbed by the Christian world, we shall absorb them,” he said. “For that is our mission, to spread among humanity the truth of monotheism and the principles of justice and fraternity.” Then everybody could be Jewish!
For this to happen, though, all human beings would need to be able to speak to one another. There had to be a shared, universal language. Hence Esperanto.
He started work on it early. At his nineteenth-birthday party, in 1878, he surprised his guests by giving each of them a small dictionary and a grammar of a new language he had invented. He then made a speech in the language, and taught his friends a hymn in its honor:
Malamikete de las nacjes
Kadó, kadó, jam temp’está!
La tot’ homoze in familje
Konunigare so debá.

Let the hatred of the nations
Fall, fall! The time is already here;
All humanity must unite
In one family.
To Zamenhof’s disappointment, most of his friends forgot about his linguistic innovation once they left the party. That was when he drifted into Zionism. But eventually he returned to the project with renewed purpose. In 1887, he self-published his “Unua Libro,” or “First Book,” a primer on the proposed language, with explanatory materials in Russian. It contained a pronunciation guide, a dictionary, and a grammar, plus translations of the Lord’s Prayer, an excerpt from the Hebrew Bible, a poem by Heine, and other items. He called the language the lingvo internacia, but people soon began referring to it as Esperanto, after the nom de plume that he had given himself as the book’s author, Doktoro Esperanto (Doctor Hopeful).

He said later that he wanted his language to be “unlimitedly rich, flexible, full of every ‘bagatelle’ that gives life to language,” but, above all, he wanted it to be easy to learn, and that is how he promoted it. He claimed that even uneducated people could master it in a week. Maybe he was right, if the people were Western, because Esperanto is closely based on Indo-European languages, or the ones that Zamenhof knew best. Though he eventually acquired almost a dozen languages, his mother tongues were Russian and Yiddish (which is related to German), and he learned German and French at an early age from his father, who was a language teacher.
Esperanto does not stray far from those sources. It has an alphabet of twenty-eight letters, in Latin script. About three-quarters of the words are derived from Romance languages; most of the remainder are based on Germanic languages. The phonology, or sound system, is fundamentally Slavic. The language is very simple. There is almost no distinction between masculine and feminine nouns. With some exceptions, common nouns used as subjects end in “-o” (singular) or “-oj” (plural), and adjectives modifying them end in “-a” (singular) or “-aj” (plural). Most adverbs end in “-e.” Verbs are not adjusted for person or number: “I sing” is mi kantas; “you sing,” vi kantas; “they sing,” ili kantas. Verb endings change with tense, but only once. No matter who sang or will sing—I, you, we, they—the verb is always kantis (past) or kantos (future).
In “Unua Libro,” Zamenhof offered about nine hundred roots, and although he added some more later, Esperanto remains a language with a very small pantry of staples. This frugality, its most basic trait, is then tempered by its second most basic trait, its agglutinative nature—the construction of words by the incessant addition of prefixes and suffixes to the roots. “Jet lag” is horzonozo: hor (“time”) plus zon (“zone”) plus ozo (“illness”). A samideano is a fellow-Esperantist, someone who has the “same idea” as you about Zamenhof’s creation. These words can now be found in Esperanto dictionaries, but you didn’t have to wait for permission: Esperantists were invited to construct words, and they did. Schor, trading improvisations with another Esperantist, comes up with elmuri—“to take something out of a wall”—for getting cash from an A.T.M.
The compounds give Esperanto a playful, almost childlike, character. (So do some of the roots. “Toast” is toasto.) Something else they call to mind is Dr. Frankenstein’s creature, stitched together from so many parts—an ear here, a nose there. Schor, a professor of English at Princeton, is the editor of “The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley.” She points out the connection, and she seems to think that Zamenhof may have experienced something like Dr. Frankenstein’s amazement when he saw what he had created. She quotes a letter in which Zamenhof tells a friend that, in using Esperanto, he eventually stopped translating in his head and began to think in the language. Suddenly, he says, it “received its own spirit, its own life, its own definite and clearly expressed physiognomy.” Oh, my God, it’s alive!
As for how it sounded, there have been some rude remarks. William Alden, the London correspondent for the Times, described it as “a sort of Italian gone wrong in company with some Slavonic tongue.” But that was in 1903, when probably no one yet spoke it confidently. If, today, you go to YouTube and listen to people who have spoken Esperanto from early childhood, you will hear something that sounds vaguely Eastern European and, though unmusical, perfectly O.K.
But Zamenhof did not put together Esperanto in order to show that he could invent a language. He was trying to achieve world peace. As usual, he gave his project a rather naïve coloration. In “Unua Libro,” he inserted a page printed with eight identical coupons—one for you and seven, presumably, to distribute to friends—on which you promised that if ten million other people agreed to learn the new language you would, too. You were supposed to sign the coupon and send it in. Zamenhof was disappointed to receive only a thousand responses.
Cartoon
Within two years of the original, Russian publication of “Unua Libro,” it had been republished in German, Hebrew, Yiddish, Swedish, Latvian, Danish, Bulgarian, Italian, Spanish, French, and Czech. There were two English editions. In 1908, a Universal Esperanto Association was established, but even before that Esperantists had begun holding international congresses every year. By the time of the first congress, in 1905, there were Esperantists as far afield as Argentina, Algeria, Australia, and French Indochina. For a while, there was a campaign to make Esperanto the official language of proceedings at the League of Nations and even to establish an Esperanto-speaking state, to be known as Amikejo (“friendship place”), in Neutral Moresnet, a tiny territory that at that time was on the border of Belgium and Germany. Pioneering Esperantists began teaching the language to their children, and a first generation of native speakers sprang up. Among their number was George Soros, the son of a prominent Hungarian lawyer who had helped found an Esperantist literary journal in Budapest. Soros used the occasion of the 1947 congress, in Bern, to escape to the West.
But the history of Esperanto has been far from smooth. The movement was divided from the start. Esperanto attracted leftists and freethinkers of various stripes—Goebbels called it “a language of Jews and communists,” not entirely inaccurately—and the majority of those people, like Zamenhof, conceived of the language as an ethical program. But many others were interested in it primarily as a linguistic novelty. French intellectuals, in particular, were put off by Zamenhof’s brotherhood-of-man effusions, as became clear at the first international congress, in 1905, which was held in Boulogne-sur-Mer.
At that time, France was still in the grip of the Dreyfus affair. A decade earlier, the French Army, trying to cover a security leak, had arrested a Jewish officer named Alfred Dreyfus, tried him for treason, and sentenced him to life imprisonment. From the beginning, it was suspected that Dreyfus had been framed, and the resulting conflict tore French society in two, exposing and fortifying a deep vein of anti-Semitism. When the Esperantists gathered for their conference, Dreyfus still had not been exonerated, and it did not help the movement’s cause that Zamenhof was Jewish. The conference committee asked to see the text of Zamenhof’s keynote address. “Through the air of our hall mysterious sounds are travelling,” he had written, “very low sounds, not perceptible by the ear, but audible to every sensitive soul: the sound of something great that is now being born.” He ended with a prayer to the spirit of brotherhood that, under the banner of Esperantism, would unite humankind: “To thee, O powerful incorporeal mystery,” etc.
A French Esperantist, a lawyer named Alfred Michaux, described the committee’s reaction: “One can hardly grasp the wonderment and scandal of these French intellectuals, with their Cartesian and rational spirit, representatives of lay universities and supporters of secular government, accustomed to and identified with freethinking and atheism, when they heard this flaming prayer.” They told Zamenhof to revise his speech and to drop the prayer. “Tearful, isolated, apprehensive, he refused to change the speech,” Schor writes, but he deleted the final stanza of the prayer, which proclaimed that Christians, Jews, and Muslims were all children of God. Meanwhile, the conference leaders were doing all they could to keep the bad news of Zamenhof’s ethnic origins out of the press. One of the organizers, Louis Émile Javal, himself a Jew, later wrote proudly that only one of the seven hundred articles about the congress mentioned that Zamenhof was Jewish.
On the surface, the congress was a great success. Almost seven hundred people attended. There were concerts and banquets. Stalls sold Esperanto-themed pencils, pens, plates, and even a liqueur—Esperantine. Zamenhof’s speech received a loud ovation. (One wonders how many people understood it.) But the occasion cannot have seemed a triumph to Zamenhof. Not only did the Congress Committee pressure him to tone down his address; it also issued a declaration that moral commitments had no bearing on Esperanto. The movement was an “endeavor to spread throughout the entire world the use of this neutral, human language,” the committee said. “All other ideals or hopes tied with Esperantism by any Esperantist is his or her purely private affair.” This was the exact opposite of what Zamenhof intended. The whole point of his Esperanto—what he called its interna ideo—was to teach the brotherhood of man.
Still, he capitulated. He could never stop his ears to the argument that his universalist values, by sounding Jewish, would put people off Esperanto—indeed, that his mere Jewishness, never mind his values, was a burden to the movement he had created. But his coöperation could not last. In the same year as the Boulogne congress, there was another spate of pogroms. Preparing his speech for the next international conference, in Geneva, in 1906, Zamenhof described the events in his home town of Białystok. “Savages with axes and iron stakes have flung themselves, like the fiercest beasts, against the quiet villagers,” he said. “They smashed the skulls and poked out the eyes of men and women, of broken old men and helpless infants!” At the conference after that, in Cambridge, in 1907, he said flatly that Esperanto would “become a school for future brotherly humanity.” In the end, he had decided that if the others wanted to regard Esperanto as a neutral business that was their private affair. Through various disputes and difficulties, backslidings and recoveries, he remained faithful to his interna ideo for the remaining years of his life.
They weren’t many. As early as his forties, he began to suffer cardiac symptoms. He died, of heart failure, in 1917, at the age of fifty-seven. It is good that he quit the scene early. Zamenhof was exactly the kind of person that the Third Reich would set itself to eliminate. And by dying before they took over he also spared himself the experience of seeing his children die. His son was shot by the Nazis in 1940. Both of his daughters were sent to Treblinka and did not return.
The story of Ludovik Zamenhof and the language he invented occupies the first third of Schor’s book, and it is by far the best part. That the rest falls flatter is not really Schor’s fault. “For sheer dirtiness of fighting the feuds between the inventors of various of the international languages would take some beating,” George Orwell once wrote. His Aunt Nellie had a lover who headed the Esperanto movement for some years in the twenties and thirties, and Orwell spent a lot of time with them in Paris during that period. Dirty fighting, if prolonged, does not necessarily make for good reading. Of course, there was fighting in Esperanto’s early years, too. What could be more distasteful than the French Esperantists’ treatment of Zamenhof’s Jewishness? But that whole thing reads like a novel, at least in Schor’s hands—she is a lively writer—and Zamenhof is a real hero, whom she clearly loves. By contrast, many of the people who came after him were the sort of nasty little demagogues whom one tends to find battling one another to the death for control over small, marginal movements, often on the left. Esperanto saw no end of sects, schisms, secessions, coups. Members set up rival languages: Ido, Arulo (later renamed Gloro), Poliespo. These sound like something out of “Gulliver’s Travels.”
When the Esperantists weren’t attacking one another, they were being attacked from the outside. Zamenhof had hoped that the United States would become the headquarters of Esperanto. This made sense to him: America was already multiethnic. There the Esperantists would not have to fight tribalism the way they had to in Europe. But that was part of the problem: many Americans felt that they were multiethnic enough, thank you. Many were also perfectly happy to embrace nationalism, as they are today. So, between the two World Wars, most Esperantists remained in Central Europe and the U.S.S.R. (also in Japan). There, though they were steadily persecuted, their movement managed to survive. Indeed, this period seems to have been the high-water mark of Esperanto, though, even then, its principles were so contested and revised that it’s hard, at times, to figure out which version of Esperanto Schor is talking about.
The fall of the Soviet Union, by letting the steam out of Communism, greatly weakened the Esperanto movement. In the twenty years following the end of the U.S.S.R., the Universal Esperanto Association’s membership fell by nearly sixty per cent. Equally important was the year-by-year expansion of English-language training. If Zamenhof felt that we needed an international language, we now more or less have one, though it’s not the one Zamenhof wanted. More recently, the rise of the Internet has changed the profile of Esperanto, albeit in ambiguous ways. On the one hand, it has made the Anglicizing of international communications ever more unstoppable. Next to English, Esperanto looks like a very small thing. On the other hand, the Internet has made this small thing much easier to learn. One no longer has to join organizations or subscribe to journals or attend congresses. Since 2002, the Web site Lernu! (“Learn!”) has taught Esperanto to people coming from thirty different mother tongues.
Schor isn’t certain how she feels about this. She is faithful to Zamenhof, to the idea that Esperanto is not so much a language as the bearer of an idea. To absorb the idea, she says, one must subscribe to the journals and go to the conferences. One must affiliate—meet Esperantists, talk to them. She does, and she takes us with her. In the book are four chapters describing her visits to congresses in Hanoi, Havana, Iznik (in Turkey), and Białystok. But, again, it’s not easy to figure out how she feels, or to what extent she is actually affiliating. At one conference, she lists the subgroups present: the gay Esperantists, the Green Party, the vegetarians, the pacifists, the cat lovers. She describes the slogan-bearing T-shirts—“Vivu! Revu! Amu! ” (“Live! Dream! Love!”)—and the “gray-braided elders dressed more or less like John the Baptist.”
The scene is a little like science fiction—a collection of radicals from the sixties who didn’t “sell out”—and it’s quite witty, until, after a few pages, it isn’t. Schor may have sensed this, because she starts unloading personal matters: how her interest in Esperanto coincided with a life crisis, during the course of which she split up with her husband of thirty years—“kind Leo; funny, brilliant Leo”—and wept daily, “sometimes most of the day.” Like the conference diaries, this material feels like something she decided to give us when she suspected that we’d be missing Zamenhof.
But she pulls herself together and ends on a strong, high note, taking on a number of what she calls myths about Esperanto: that its intent was to standardize us all, that it had its heyday and is over with. Above all, she attacks the idea that the Boulogne Congress Committee tried to force down Zamenhof’s throat: that Esperanto is essentially nonpolitical.
I don’t think she had to tell us that this was mistaken. To readers today, Esperanto may look quite political, and not necessarily in an appealing way. It may look like the family-of-man idea that had been sold to the unfortunate over the centuries, to discourage them from complaining that they hadn’t got a very good seat at the family table. In particular, it may seem directly opposed to the identity politics that many have now embraced, in order to end those injustices. They are not part of the family of man, they say. They are part of the family of women or African-Americans or gay people, and never mind individualism and case-by-case judgment. But Schor believes that it is precisely this division—the great political quarrel of our time—that Esperanto may be able to heal, by reconnecting us, through a common language, to a shared earth.
People are apt to make fun of other people’s habit of talking about the weather to their neighbors in the elevator. They shouldn’t make fun. By invoking the one thing that we know we have in common with others, we throw a rope across the divide, asserting that, whatever our differences, we do share something: when it rains on one of us, it’s going to rain on the other one, too. Schor quotes the Spanish Esperantist Jorge Camacho: “Esperanto continues to give me something . . . which I don’t find anywhere else, an irrational sense of directly belonging to the world.” A language in common, a few words that we can say to one another or, even if we don’t learn the words, an awareness of the interna ideo: it’s something, a hook. ♦