Universala Kongreso pri Rasoj post 100 jaroj (The Universal Races Congress 100 years on)

Kion dividas Felix Adler, Israel Zangwill, Franz Boas, W. E. B. Du Bois, kaj L. L. Zamenhof? Partopreno en la Unua (kaj lasta) Universala Kongreso pri Rasoj en Londono, 1911. Krom mi, mi trovis nur unu homon— Bahaano— kiu konscias pri ĉi tiu datreveno. Fakte, en interparoloj eĉ kun specialistoj pri afrikusonana literaturo, mi eltrovis, ke la ekzisto de ĉi tiu kongreso estas nekonita. Sed ĉi tiu kongreso estis mejloŝtono en la ideologia lukto kontraŭ la ĉiea kaj ĉiupova rasismo de la epoko. Nesurprize, ŝlosilan rolon, organizan kaj/aŭ intelektan, ludis judoj kaj negroj, sed partoprenis intelektuloj el la tuta mondo.

Mi trovas nenian publikan agnoskon de ĉi tiu jubileo nek programon por rememorigi ĝin. Do kion mi faru por ŝanĝi ĉi tiun situacion? Unue, mi kompilis bibliografion pri la temo, ĵus publikigita interrete:

First Universal Races Congress, London, July 26-29, 1911: Selected Bibliography
[Bibliografio pri la Unua Universala Kongreso pri Rasoj en Londono, 26-29 julio 1911]

Cetere, konsultu ĉi tiun blogon pri progreso ĉi-afere.  Mi ne scias ĝuste pluajn rezultojn anticipi. Mia venonta paŝo estas kontakti personojn aŭ instancojn kiuj eble interesiĝus. Ekz. ĉi tiu afero potenciale interesus esperantistojn, bahaanojn, humanistajn judojn, kaj adeptojn de negra historio. Eble mi verkos ion pri la afero.

Legante la fakan literaturon, mi konstatas la ideologian kompleksecon de la epoko, ankaŭ en la pensaroj de tiuj kiuj plej urĝe bezonis senmistifikigi la koncepton de raso. Mi legas precipe pri Du Bois, Boas, kaj diversaj judaj intelektuloj. Ankaŭ interesas la posta influo de ĉi tiu kongreso, ekz. en la verko de pionira aŭtodidakta afrikusonana historiografo J. A. Rogers, kiu citis interalie Zamenhofon en sia ŝlosila polemika dialogo de 1917, From Superman to Man (De Superhomo al Homo).

Jews & 'Race' in 1911 / Judoj & 'Raso' en 1911

Lyons, Harriet D. & Andrew P. “A Race or Not a Race: The Question of Jewish Identity in the Year of the First Universal Races Congress,” in Ethnicity, Identity, and History: Essays in Memory of Werner J. Cahnman, edited by Joseph B. Maier and Chaim I. Waxman (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1983), pp. 149-162.

The secondary literature on the First (and last) Universal Races Congress, which convened in London in 1911, covers various angles, but this is the first extensive treatment I have seen of the Jewish aspect of the Congress, which is significant inter alia for the fact that Jewish progressives, from Felix Adler on down, played a central role in its very organization. It is not a stretch to understand why Jewish intellectuals, anxious over their own place in Western civilization, would be motivated to counter racism in all its forms against all its victims. At that moment the Jews of the Russian empire were in dire straits, but anti-Semitic agitation and violence could be found in one fashion or another all over the Western world, including Britain itself. 

However, the Jewish intelligentsia did not line up uniformly in any political or metaphysical camp. In taking a position on the racial or non-racial character of the Jewish people, concerns over emphasizing similarities with their host nationalities or preserving the Jewish people as a distinct entity competed for ideological attention. The variable configuration of racial concepts and their application to various positions was the order of the day in any case, as can be discerned among the participants of all nationalities and 'races' in the Congress. The total elimination of race as a meaningful natural concept was the most advanced position, which few in general took regardless of their politics. We see a spread among Jewish intellectuals as well.

Another factor in the division of opinion is analogous to the first: the need to conform to the political prerogatives of host nations vs. the impetus to protest objectionable actions taken against colonial subjects or other minorities.

This essay contributes to an appreciation of the complexity of the ideological situation a century ago, and the complexity of this very landmark, historic anti-racist intellectual intervention. 

Nowhere in this treatment is there any mention of Zamenhof. It is worth noting that, while his knowledge of the world and political thinking were severely limited, the conclusions Zamenhof came to in working his way through the Jewish question that consumed him, issued in a definitive rejection of 'race' as an objective natural concept. Without engaging evolutionary or ethnographic research or speculation, Zamenhof ejected all mystical and pseudoscientific notions of group identity. He could be considered a naive forerunner of the notion of 'imagined communities'. Zamenhof's reduction of group identity and difference to language and religion is untenable, but in the process of oversimplifying social reality he simply assumes the essential unity of the human race and reduces difference to historical circumstance.

Israel Zangwill (3): The Voice of Jerusalem

No one has laboured more for the Pacifist ideal than the inventor of Esperanto, the late Dr. Zamenhof, the Russo-Jewish oculist who truly strove to heal the blindness of humanity. For the unity of speech at which he laboured was to him merely the outward sign of of the inner unity of mankind. If he sought to undo the curse of Babel, it was in order to bring the peace of Jerusalem. Amid the barbaric welter generated by that military ideal of which Prussia offered the supreme expression, in a planet seething and rumbling with animosities, and streaked with volcanic fires, this obscure Russian Jew managed to set myriads of every race, creed and colour, meeting in the concord of a common tongue, the very name of which brought the gospel of hope. (p. 13)

* * *

If a Russian-American Jew, Berenson, is the chief authority on Italian art, and Georg Brandes, the Dane, is Europe's greatest critic, if Reuter initiated telegraphic news and Blowitz was the prince of foreign correspondents, if Charles Frohman was the world's greatest entrepreneur and Imre Kiralfy ran its exhibitions, all these phenomena find their explanation in the cosmopolitanism of the Jewish intelligentsia. For when the Jew grows out of his own Ghetto without narrowing into his neighbour's, he must necessarily possess a superior sense of perspective. Lifted to the plane of idealism, this cosmopolitan habit of mind creates Socialism through Karl Marx and Lassalle, an international language through Dr. Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto, a prophecy of the end of war through Jean de Bloch, an International Institute of Agriculture through David Lubin, and a Race Congress through Dr. Felix Adler. (pp. 183-184)

SOURCE: Zangwill, Israel. The Voice of Jerusalem. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1921.

De Nacioj al Retoj, en la mezo Zamenhof, Esperanto & cionismo

Temas pri libro De la Nacioj al la Retoj verkita originale en la hispana de David de Ugarte, Pere Quintana, Enrique Gómez y Arnau Fuentes, kun prologo de Josu Jon Imaz.

La originala hispana libro estas elŝutebla jene: De las naciones a las redes. Estas du formatoj; mi elektis libros electrónicos de 8″.

Ankaŭ plena anglalingva traduko haveblas! Jen From Nations to Networks. Mi listigas la titolojn de la ĉapitroj:

Prologue
What Is This Book About?
PART ONE: A WORLD OF NATIONS
Let Us Imagine a Nation
The Political Nation
Race and Culture
Why the Nation Was Imagined
PART TWO: SEGREGATIONISTS
Seeking the Frontiers of a Closing Map *
Zamenhof: From Zionism to Esperanto
Segregationism in the 20th Century [libertarianism]
PART III: THE INTERNET AND TRANS-NATIONAL LIVES
New Challenges, New Spaces for Freedom
Netocracy: Explorers of a World of Network Cities
Neo-Nomads and PTs
Digital Zionists
From Internationalisation to Transnationalisation
The New Corporate Venices
Neo-Venetians
PART IV: THE NEW DISTRIBUTED TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITIES
Maps and Representations For A New World
Language, Identity, School **
The Horizon of a Post-National World

* Fine de ĉi tiu ĉapitro troviĝas la jena:

In this environment, and among these dilemmas created by the contradictory rise of Zionism, there appeared, however, a movement that was clearly atypical in its time, and that in some ways anticipated certain characteristics of the first trans-national identities that can be seen nowadays: Esperantism.

** Jen kelkaj citaĵoj, kiujn en la teksto sekvas perspektivoj por la futuro:

What's interesting about the way in which those networks are already working is that there will be no lingua franca, but rather many languages living alongside each other in every geographic space, as every network and every activity involving a number of nearby networks will have its own language.

* * *

It should however be pointed out that, for the time being, these extended networks, linked by a close geographic origin and by a destination social space similar to that in the metropolis, have been unable to solidly configure identities which are already de-territorialised.

Kelkaj ĉapitroj ricevis Esperantajn tradukojn:

De la nacioj al la retoj – Pri kio temas tiu ĉi libro?

De la nacioj al la retoj – Antaŭparolo de Josu Jon Imaz

De la nacioj al la retoj – Zamenhof: De la Cionismo al Esperanto

La aŭtoroj lokigas Zamenhofon en la historio de cionismo. Diskutataj estas la Dreyfus-skandalo, Ben-Yehuda, Herzl, Bundismo, marksismo (Luxemburg kaj Trockij).

En medio kie Bundismo furoris, Zamenhof proponis reformon de religio, t.e. Hilelismo, laŭ la aŭtoroj, restas formo de cionismo. Zamenhof sintezis plurajn identecajn ideologiojn: asimilisman kaj naciisman socialdemokratan Bundismon, senrabenan Herzl-ismon, kaj la religian cionismon de Agudat Israel (kiu proponis bazigon de juda identeco de biblia leĝinstanco). Zamenhof kombinis raciismon kun Talmuda principo.

Esperanto taŭgus por judoj ĉar ĝi baziĝas de lingvoj parolataj de eŭropaj judoj. Sed Esperanto allogis pli multe da ne-judoj ol judoj, do Zamenhof transiris al homaranismo. La nova popolo devenus de ĉiuj, ne nur de judoj. La Esperanto-movado kreskis, sed eventuale stagnado kaj persekutado kreus kvazaŭ-genton. 

Jen la konkludo, anglalingve:

The result is that the Esperantist world is not part of an imagined community in the way that national linguistic communities are. It is, for its most part, a real community: its members know each other, or at least know of the existence of others. And the huge majority of its members are so of their own free will, not because of their family roots. It is, like contemporary virtual networks, a community that precipitates from imagination into reality.

In this sense, Zamenhof's dream has turned out to be premonitory, fruitful, and paradoxical. It was born not out of a naive cosmopolitan impulse, as is often thought, but from the fertile debate on Zionism that took place in Central Europe at the turn of the century. It gave up the dream of creating a territorial community in order to become a tool for universal fraternity, and ended up forming the first transnational community of free aggregation. A late child of the progressive and ecumenical optimism of the last quarter of the 19th century, Esperantism anticipated the new forms of network socialisation which would follow the telegraph world which Zamenhof knew all his life.

Esperanto, the bearer of a universal humanist ideal, showed in practice, probably definitively, that the alternative to surpassing nationalities does not lie in universalist cosmopolitanism, for the only way of being human is to have a tribe, but in making the community real and tangible, and thus truly human.

Esperanto is the prodigal child of Zionism, but also the prophet of its future – the representation that the territorial dream could be surpassed by the dream of a network world.

Postskribo:

Supre troviĝas ligoj al la malnova retejo ne plu aktiva. La aktuala retejo estas Elektrolupo. Ankaŭ tie troviĝas la Esperanto traduko, De la nacioj al la retoj.

Nun troveblas la jenaj ĉapitroj:

Antaŭparolo
Pri kio temas tiu ĉi libro?
Zamenhof: De la Cionismo al Esperanto
Diĝitaj Cionistoj
Lingvo, identeco, lernejo
Epilogo: La reala komunumo kiel bazo de la postnacia identeco

Zamenhof & the new Jewish intellectual historiography (2)

The relevant documents by L. L. Zamenhof on Yiddish, Zionism, and the Jewish question are written in Yiddish, Russian, or Esperanto, and while there are Esperanto translations of most or all of the other writings, with the exception of a few letters, excerpts, or quotations everything in English is to be found in the scanty secondary literature in English. To get a picture of what Zamenhof was trying to accomplish, start here:

L.L. Zamenhof and the Shadow People: The Amazing Story of How Esperanto Came to Be by Esther Schor (2009)

Zamenhof and the Shadow People: video of presentation by Esther Schor, Zamenhof Symposium (15 December 2009)

There are revelant documents in Esperanto, Esperanto translation, and Yiddish on my web site:

Zamenhof & Zamenhofologio: Retgvidilo / Web Guide

For Zamenhof's conception of nationality in general, see:

“International Language” (Universal Races Congress, 1911) by L. L. Zamenhof

 Now let's pick up where we left off in the previous post, and proceed to this article:

On the Idea of a Jewish Nation: Before and After Statism by David N. Myers, Perush, Volume 1, 2009

Myers find today's discourse about Jewish nationhood impoverished compared to the vigorous debates of a century ago:

I am intrigued by the once-vibrant ideological and theoretical debate of the early twentieth century that revolved around the idea of a Jewish nation. [. . . .] But our main task in the body of the paper will be to begin excavating a history of Jewish nationalism that has been somewhat forgotten, neglected, and at times, marginalized. I argue that there is in fact a common thread linking the theoretical poverty today and the partial narrative of Jewish nationalism that has been received: namely, the rise to dominance of one variant of Jewish nationalist ideology, what I call Statist Zionism.

One must of course determine at the outset what one means by nation. Myers begins with Renan, who centers the idea of nationhood around a spiritual principle. This notion was taken up by Simon Dubnow. Comparable contemporary constructivist notions of nationalism have been articulated by Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, and Benedict Anderson. Here is how Myers summarizes the development of Jewish self-conceptions:

European Jews in the mid-nineteenth century, embedded in societies affirming their own sense of national integrity, labored to find the best way to name themselves. They described themselves as a confession of faith, a religious community, a community of fate (Schicksalsgemeinschaft), a tribe (Stamm). Later, toward the end of the century, they began to designate themselves more assertively as a nation. Throughout the early twentieth century, this language of Jewish nationhood was widespread among Jewish intellectuals, writers, and scholars, especially in Europe, though one of the characteristic features of this discursive moment was the considerable divergence over the ways in which the term was understood. Over the course of the latter half of the twentieth century, this mode of Jewish political discourse—marked by the ubiquitous use of the language of “nation,” alongside an obsessive need to name the collective—began to dissipate. Since that time, and up to the present, there has been relatively little meditation about the nature of Jewish collectivity, especially when compared to the golden age of ideological contestation that extended from 1897 to 1939.

Myers goes on to supply an explanation for the dissipation of this ideological contestation, and how it narrowed into the prevailing statism, which he now wishes to contest. But returning to the historical period that interests me:

So rather than begin in 1897 with the first Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland and then look forward to the inevitable creation (predicted by Theodor Herzl) of a Jewish state and again backward to the established “precursors of Zionism” (Alkalay, Kalischer, Hess, etc.) as they are known in Zionist historiography, I propose a somewhat less linear recounting that consists of the following chapters: first, a mid- to late-nineteenth-century phase in which Jews began to debate what to call themselves as a collective; second, a period that I’ll call the “golden age of Jewish nationalism,” commencing indeed in 1897, but highlighting less the historical inevitability of Statism and more the common commitment of Jewish nationalist movements to culture; and third, a phase in which rights of Jews as a national minority became a focus of international attention.

Myers begins with the French revolution and the subsequent re-definition of Jewish identity with respect to Jewish emancipation and loyal citizenship in the countries in which Jews lived. In 1869, Adolf Jellinek introduced a notion we might call ethnicity but which he called Stamm, or tribe, more suited to the conditions of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Then there was the Jewish rebellion against the thrust of a new configuration of anti-Semitism in the 1870s-80s, when the term "anti-Semitism" itself was launched. Into the Berlin Antisemitismusstreit of 1879-1881 comes the 1879 lecture by the German-Jewish philosopher and psychologist Moritz Lazarus, “Was heißt National?” In 1897, Ahad Ha-am, whose focus was cultural renewal, represented a dissenting view from the vision of Theodor Herzl that won the day. The Austro-Marxist (not identified by Myers as such) Social Democrats Otto Bauer and Karl Renner endeavored to disaggregate the notions of nation and state. Note Renner's notion of national cultural autonomy. And note the connection to Bundism:

On this view, it was not the state or territory or even race (in its biological sense) that made a nation, but, in the first instance, culture. Of course, we cannot forget the powerful class dimension in the Bund’s agenda, which added a deterministic quality to its view of Jewish nationalism. But it is the nexus between nation and culture that linked the Bund, in its 1905 platform, to the Folkspartay founded by Simon Dubnow in St. Petersburg a year later. Although the two parties disagreed over the question of socialism, they both agitated for the right of Jews to preside over their own cultural affairs, in their own language, Yiddish. In fact, it was that latter point that prompted the convening of an assembly of intellectuals and writers in Czernowitz a few years later in 1908—one hundred years ago (and now being marked with several centennial conferences). Amidst a typically discordant group of Jews, the conference demanded equal rights for Yiddish, but could not agree on declaring Yiddish “the national language of the Jewish people.” Instead, it opted for the formulation “a national language,” in recognition of the potent claims that Hebrew too deserved recognition as such.

One should compare this to Zamenhof's notion that a people is defined by language and religion.

Myers continues discussing Bundism (a phenomenon that merits sustained study), and summarizes:

. . .  there was a consequential debate among a growing and influential group of European Jews regarding the essence, preferred form, and desired venue of the Jewish nation in the first two decades of the twentieth century. It was not only Zionists, Autonomists, and Bundists, but also Territorialists of Israel Zangwill’s ilk and even the Agude, the Orthodox Agudat Yisrael, which arose formally in 1912 as a pan-national traditionalist alternative to secular nationalism. 

This is the debate that was cast down the memory hole by victorious statism. But continuing on, World War I and the subsequent reterritorialization spurred a new round of debate. Not mentioned by Myers: Zamenhof circulated his proposal to the world's diplomats on the post-war political order in 1915 and died in 1917, so he wasn't a party to the debates of 1919 and the 1919 peace conference where national minority rights were on the table. 

There is some debate on the ideological terrain in the interwar period, including the question of the definitive triumph of statism.  But if not earlier, the Extraordinary Zionist Conference at the Biltmore Hotel in 1942 sealed the deal. (Note that Hitler's Final Solution, formulated in 1941, was in macabre full throttle by 1942.)

Thus Myers seeks to resuscitate this complex ideological history drowned in the historical narrative instituted by victorious statism. And it is this history, apart from Myers and co.'s presentist political concerns, that is vital to understand, in general and in relationship to Zamenhof's lifelong struggle with the Jewish question. While Zamenhof is discussed in the context of Jewish intellectual historiography, I have not yet ascertained whether this recent turn in the historiography of Jewish nationalism has visibly incorporated Zamenhof into its narrative, and, lacking the recent scholarly books written on Zamenhof in Esperanto, German, and possibly other languages that slip my mind (but not English), I do not know how thoroughly this vein of scholarship has penetrated Zamenhofology. The interpenetration of these two foci of scholarship has got to be made to happen, above all in the English-speaking world.

Universal Races Congress of 1911 & L. L. Zamenhof

Decades ago I read the conference proceedings in hard copy, but now they are online, and hopefully complete:

Papers on Inter-Racial Problems, Communicated to the First Universal Races Congress, Held at the University of London, July 26-29, 1911; edited by Gustav Spiller. London: P. S. King & Son; Boston: The World’s Peace Foundation, 1911. xlvi, 485 pp.

Included in these papers is the English text of Zamenhof's contribution, which was originally submitted in Esperanto and in French. Sometime in the 1970s I read the entire proceedings cover to cover, and there were few contributions that impressed me, foremost among them an essay by W.E.B. Du Bois on the racial situation in the USA. But perhaps now I would be more historically perceptive.

I decided to look this up, as earlier today I read the Esperanto version in Zamenhof's Originala Verkaro (1929, pp. 345-353). This time I paid reasonably close attention to Zamenhof's reasoning, which while flawed, is interesting, esp. in juxtaposition with his writings elsewhere on the Jewish question. Oddly, Zamenhof is well aware of existing social conditions (though teeth-grindingly ill-informed about Africa) and is unsparing in demystifying the entirely bogus basis on which racial and ethnic discrimination is based, and yet remains—so it seems—obtuse to certain aspects of the driving forces which maintain them. The climax of Zamenhof's argument—the key to its fundamental structure—can be found in this paragraph:

All that I have said justifies us in formulating this principle: The diversity of peoples and the hatred of each other which they betray will not wholly disappear from the face of the earth until humanity has but one language and one religion. Then in truth will the whole of humanity form one single people. Then there may, indeed, still be the various kinds of discord which are now found within the confines of every country and every people, such as political and economic discords, or those of conflicting parties or classes, and so on, but the most formidable of all discords, the mutual hatred of peoples, will have entirely disappeared.

This follows upon the logic of Zamenhof's argument wherein he purports to explain the governing factors behind interethnic & interracial enmity, discounting most of the usual justifications. It is a curious argument, with a number of suppressed premises. Here is one revealing passage:

Can we say, for instance, that so many millions of poor Russians hate the millions of poor Chinese on economic grounds, when they shed their blood so willingly to defend their Russian oppressors against the attacks of foreigners? Assuredly not, for the Russian soldier knows very well, when he kills a Chinese soldier, that the man would never do him as much harm as the "mailed fist" of his own compatriots. It is not economic causes that give rise to national hatreds.

I do not know how keen a sense of irony Zamenhof possessed. When you read this paragraph with care, and in context, you may find it as amazing as I do, for what Zamenhof doesn't say as for what he does. He never follows up on this scenario, never answers the question: if poor Russian cannon fodder know full well their Russian oppressors are far more harmful to them to Chinese peasants they are willing to slaughter with gusto, and if underlying motivations for this situation are not economic, then what are they? Zamenhof's argument is that only language and religion ultimately keep people apart. (Note also that Zamenhof also interjects the Jewish question, which is the key to everything he wrote, into his exposition.) This is truly an amazing line of argument, because while it doesn't hold up to scrutiny, it constitutes a backhanded slap in the face to the actual sociopolitical conditions that Zamenhof seeks to combat, combining both political awareness and political self-censorship in a single line of reasoning.

Two decades later, Zamenhof's daughter Lidia would pursue a comparable agenda in the USA, promoting both Esperanto and the Baha'i religion (rather than Zamenhof's homaranismo), with the noblest of intentions but with identical social ineffectuality. There is also, I should add, at least an iota of documentation on Lidia's connection with black Bahai's who learned Esperanto in the USA in the 1930s.

It would also be instructive to compare Zamenhof's moral idealism and world view with two other participants in the 1911 Congress: Felix Adler, conference organizer and founder of the Ethical Culture movement, akin to Zamenhof's homaranismo, and Israel Zangwill, originator of the term "melting pot" (which he applied not only to the condition of immigrants in the USA, but ultimately to the whole world), proto-Zionist, and advocate of the Jewish contribution to world civilization in books and numerous essays published in every venue imaginable, including the African-American press, with frequent mentions of Zamenhof and Esperanto.

*     *     *

It is useful to compare this essay to Zamenhof's writings (originally in Russian) on the Jewish question— Hilelismo etc. Zamenhof is quite soberly hard-headed and realistic; he's a debunker and demystifier of then-accepted notions of race, ethnicity, nationality, or what some scholars today call "imagined communities". His remark about powerless poor people killing one another in service to the rich and powerful is an illustration of his realism, and remains, sadly, an entirely contemporary issue. It is curious, though, that he doesn't follow through on the logic of this scenario. He argues that all other social conflicts will remain, but were people to find a common bridge language and bridge religion, at least interethnic hatreds could be eliminated. There are some big "if"s here and dubious "then"s, which reveal the essential limitations of Zamenhof's social perspective. (I would argue the same for Adler and Zangwill.) If I were to recommend explaining how Zamenhof thought while standing on one foot, this is the paragraph I would cite.

Zamenhof references the Jewish question in the course of his argument. He explains his position on this more fully in his Hillelist writings, as he ponders all the variables which hold the imagined community of Jews together. Zamenhof ruthlessly demystifies all the usual explanations. His skepticism is quite remarkable. He supplies arguments about what holds other peoples together—Germans, Poles, Russians, etc. He argues that language and religion are what hold peoples together. He is skeptical about both as applies to the Jews: he gave up his reformed Yiddish project, and as a nonbeliever thought it pointless to continue to be martyred for a religion one no longer believes in. So there's a real dilemma, the proposed solution of which ends up being Esperanto + hilelismo/homaranismo as a vehicle for modernizing the ghettoized Eastern European Jews.

There were theoretical interventions on this question in other circles—particularly in the social democratic movement (Marxist) of central Europe, and later in Russia on the part of Stalin. Noteworthy here is the difficulty of defining the cohesive forces binding the Jewish people as compared to any other nationality of central and Eastern Europe. Politically, these issues were parceled out among assimilationists, Zionists, Bundists, Marxist social-democrats, and Bolsheviks. Ultimately, nothing turned out as anyone anticipated in Zamenhof's lifetime. Theoretically, there were individuals in the anti-Stalinist left who attempted to carry on. For example, Abram Leon, a Jewish Trotskyist, wrote a book on the subject circa 1940, and ended up perishing in Auschwitz. In recent decades, there have appeared retrospective works on these developments, pointing up the theoretical inadequacies of previous formulations.

So it is understandable how difficult it was for Zamenhof to struggle with the theoretical as well as the practical question. This applies also to the Esperanto workers' movement, whose anarchist (sennaciista) and Stalinist intellectuals were, as far as I can tell, no more sophisticated than their krokodilaj counterparts.

I can't get into this in my upcoming half-hour talk, but I have to keep it in mind when thinking of how Zamenhof encountered the USA in 1910. The USA presented a whole different scenario from Europe, and as millions of Eastern European Jews voted with their feet, ending up in the USA, there remains something else to be examined—i.e. Zamenhof's interactions with Jewish immigrants and their spawn in the USA.

*     *     *

The American situation of course could not be captured by the European conception of nationality. This applies also to the situation of black Americans. While the concept of "race" has certainly been the dominant organizing principle—conceptually as well as in practice—there have nonetheless been several theories attempting to explain how race works in the USA and elsewhere. A decade ago when I was researching this and assisting someone in a doctoral dissertation on this subject, I could have rattled off most of these theories. My memory is rusty at this point, though.

I'll just note that the Stalinist conception of nationality was imported into the American Communist Party in 1928, leading to some curious results, first in labeling American's apartheid system as a national question, and secondly, in formulating a policy that had no relationship to actual political practice or prospects. When James W. Ford was placed on the ballot as the Communist Vice Presidential candidate in 1932, probably the first such black candidate from any political party in the USA, the party's platform included the creation of a Negro republic in the Southern states with a predominantly black population. There was even a map indicating the relevant territory on campaign posters. It was an avant-garde position for the time and totally divorced from reality as well as from the actual practice of the Communist Party, which consistently fought for integration.

This was entirely opposite to the contemporaneous nationalist separatism of Marcus Garvey, who wanted to make a deal with the Ku Klux Klan on the basis of shared goals, one of them being emigration to / colonization of Africa. Ultimately, notions like these would resurface decades later.

The punchline, though, is that the American configuration of race and ethnicity and the quasi-caste system in place did not mirror the nationality question in central Europe or the Russian empire.

The Jewish question in Europe did not fit comfortably into the European national paradigm either, practically or theoretically. Theory and policy  don't always run parallel, as not every political position elaborates a complementary theory, though implicitly there are differential world views at work. The socialist Bundists for example militantly opposed Zionism but lobbied for cultural (not political) autonomy in Eastern Europe, a notion that was shot down by the Bolsheviks. The Nazis took care of the rest. There is a substantial amount of scholarship on Bundism still going on: see bundism.net.

The ethnicity question viz. the new European immigrants was fought out in the USA a century ago, both by pro-immigrant and anti-immigrant factions among non-immigrants (i.e. WASPs and others of Northwestern European extraction), and by intellectuals among the new immigrant groups, e.g. Israel Zangwill's "melting pot" vs Horace Kallen's conservative ethnopluralism.

It is also noteworthy that there have been ideological conflicts of this sort throughout the history of Esperanto. The implications of Zamenhof's own position, which after all grew out of the conditions of the Czarist empire, require a fair amount of analysis. It is not immediately apparent either what "internationalism" implies, and it was opposed by sennaciismo (anationalism), which in turn finds its polar opposite in etnismo. And then there's the ridiculous position of Giorgio Silfer (one incarnation of raŭmismo), culminating in the supremely ridiculous Esperanta Civito. (I'm a minister in the Esperanta Respubliko, but the less said about that, the better.) The nation-state still being the pivotal determining variable in language policy puts the kabosh on both sennaciismo and etnismo. As for the rest, the social organization of economics and technology as well as where history has left us determine what is going to happen internationally, and the pretensions of the mainstream Esperanto movement both to universalize the role of Esperanto as medium of international communication and to conserve national/ethnic languages and language rights within the boundaries of the nation-state are, to put it as politely as possible, quixotic. What remains unquestionably practical about Esperanto is its niche as a voluntary international speech community, which is nothing to sneeze at.

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The fragments above were written on 4 December 2010. I have digitized the Esperanto version of Zamenhof's contribution:

Gentoj kaj Lingvo Internacia (1911) de L. L. Zamenhof

Israel Zangwill (2): Global melting pot?

Though half my manhood has been devoted to the quest for a Jewish State, I have never regarded a world settlement, based on racial differences, as a final goal, nor do I share the current enthusiasm for the smaller nationalities. The mere fact that a group of people hates its neighbors affords no basis for reverence. Moses told the Jews, ''Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," and Seneca reminded the imperial Romans that all men are sacred — homo sacra res homini. Moreover, the world always has been and always will be a melting-pot.

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Its [the Jewish people] existence even in dispersion enriches the world, giving in our own day a Meldola to British science, a Bergson to French philosophy, a Schnitzler to Austrian drama, a Berenson to American art criticism, an Ehrlich to Gemian medicine, a Luzzatti to Italian statesmanship, a Josef Israels to Dutch painting, a Brandes to Scandinavian criticism, a Ronetti Roman to Rumanian poetry, a Rubinstein to Russian music, a Vambery to Hungarian adventure, an Enver Pasha to Turkish arms, a Zamenhof to Esperanto internationalism, a Sarah Bernhardt to the world's stage, a Leo Bakst to the newest Nobel Prize-list. Concentrated on a soil of its own, under conditions that might stimulate afresh its spiritual genius, this stock might well produce a superstate, a kultur, not of militarism but of humanism.

SOURCE: Zangwill, Israel. The War for the World (New York: The Macmillan company, 1916), pp. 442, 444-445. [Boldface mine—RD]

Israel Zangwill (1): Global melting pot?

For even if America — humanity's last hope — is narrowing into Americanism, America is, after all, a very large place — a Roman Empire in itself, in fact; and "the culmination of modern history," so far from lying in every petty swashbuckling race setting up for itself, is seen to consist in their fusion. A few such leviathans and we may easily fasten them with a hook. The coming Indian Nationality will also be the synthesis of a sub-Continent. Nor can the wave of rabid racialism long submerge the real "New Europe," which even in war two groupings suffice almost to cover. For our friend the Law of Contiguous Co-operation is still at its Alexandrine quest. And if the ultimate bounds of Nationality are fixed — as they obviously are — by the limits of Contiguous Co-operation, where are those limits to-day? Immensely enlarged by the same factors that have shrunk the planet — Steam and Electricity. Without Steam and Electricity to link America, it would have been by now a Europe, the separate States turned into Nations; with Steam and Electricity no racial rancour can ultimately prevent an America arising in Europe, with our Nations for States. The very disorder of the world to-day is a proof of the world-order that has been broken. With a world-post, Esperanto, and some two hundred international associations, civilisation was fast developing a nervous system. When I go to Barcelona and ride in a penny tram and to Venice and ride in a penny steam-boat, I feel that the pre-national period has returned, if by an ugly route, and, with lower links than cathedrals and universities. The demands for a Peace-League of the Powers are less a desire for an ovine or bovine tranquillity than a recognition that war between any of them is civil war. The very Manifesto of the Allies proclaiming "the principle of Nationalities" proclaims equally the contradictory principle of a World-League — contradictory because with the removal of Danger the essential nerve of Nationality must be dulled and its bristles moulted. For full-flavoured Nationality the price is War.

SOURCE: Zangwill, Israel. The Principle of Nationalities (New York: The Macmillan company, 1917), pp. 94-96. (Conway Memorial Lecture Delivered at South Place Institute, on March 8th, 1917.) [Boldface mine—RD]