Zamenhof interview: Esperanto & Jewish Ideals

Now on my web site:

“Esperanto and Jewish Ideals,” Interview for the Jewish Chronicle with Dr. Zamenhof, The Jewish Chronicle, September 6, 1907, pp. 16-18. Note also the advertisement for "kakao" (cocoa).

With Zamenhof’s translation of ‘La Gaja Migranto’ (published in Fundamenta Krestomatio de la Lingvo Esperanto, 1903), mentioned in the interview.

This interview was translated into Esperanto and published in two parts. Note that R. I. [ = Isidore?] Harris is given as the interviewer:

Intervjuo kun d-ro Zamenhof de R. I. HARRIS, elangligis N. Z. MAIMON, La nica literatura revuo 6/3 (n-ro 33), Januaro-Februaro 1961, p. 82-89.

Intervjuo kun d-ro Zamenhof (fino) de R. I. HARRIS, elangligis N. Z. MAIMON, La nica literatura revuo 6/4 (n-ro 34), Marto-Aprilo 1961, p. 121-127.

Here I noticed interesting details about Zamenhof's thoughts on the Jewish question that I don't recall from other statements. For example, when he describes his attempt to create a new Judaism for the 20th century, he makes two curious assertions: (1) he almost blames his fellow Jews for isolating themselves within the nations in which they find themselves, but (2) he rejects Reform Judaism for excessive accommodation to the gentiles, who don't accept Jews anyway, Zamenhof thus abjures assimilationism as lacking self-respect. His project of Hilelismo (Hillelism, which later morphed into Homaranismo, no longer Jewish-specific and somewhat akin to Ethical Culture) was meant to reject an obsolete territorial (and superstitious) traditional conception of Judaism and modernize it to reflect the ethical ideal (of which monotheism is a part) incorporated in it.

Zamenhof's conception of the causes and cure of ethnic conflict betray an incredible lack of political sophistication. This can be seen most clearly in his paper “International Language” presented to the First Universal Races Congress in 1911. Denying economic causes for national conflict, Zamenhof curiously argues:

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.

There is a glimpse of political consciousness in the reference to a group's own oppressors, which immediately disappears. His entire argument is abstract. While correctly denying intrinsic, ineluctable differences between peoples at the basis of animosity, Zamenhof exhibits not an ounce of political or historical consciousness in understanding how these problems came to be or what drives them. What he does show in his various statements is his intimate familiarity with Eastern Europe and the dilemma of Jews in this hostile environment.

This interview in English is invaluable, as the most extensive documentation of Zamenhof's engagement with the Jewish question, outside of his writings in Russian, is in Esperanto. But again, his political cluelessness comes to the forefront.

Zamenhof, soberly and with absolutely no self-aggrandizement, proposed the most far-reaching ambitious projects, all of which failed except for Esperanto, which succeeded in creating an international community of speakers that has survived 130 years, including the century following Zamenhof's death. Zamenhof projected into the future on a grand scale, from the vantage point of a provincial Eastern European Jew chafing at the ghettoization and discrimination that he suffered.

Bridge of Words (1)

I mentioned Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language by Esther Schor (Metropolitan Books, 2016) in a recent post, but I've been negligent in blogging about it. I am also acknowledged in it, as my web site is an invaluable source for research into Esperanto and its history.

April 14 marked the centennial of Zamenhof's death, which has been commemorated in various ways. (I have begun to blog about this, more to come.) In Zamenhof's lifetime, and for decades afterward, it was necessary to downplay Zamenhof's Jewishness due to the prevalence of Zamenhof, and in fact all of Zamenhof's children were murdered by the Nazis. Esperanto researchers and scholars, writing in Esperanto -- N.Z. Maimon and Adolf Holzhaus come to mind -- began to undo this enforced silence with documentation of Zamenhof's investment and activity in the Jewish world.  This dimension of Zamenhof's Jewish interests and their relation to Esperanto remained even more obscure in the English-speaking world than Esperanto generally. A few years ago Esther Schor began to write and speak about this in the USA. We lectured together at a symposium on Zamenhof on December 15 (his birthday), 2010, at a U.N. building. George Soros made a surprise visit, and while the rest of us got a photo op with him, only he was reported in the mainstream media. I was covered by the Jewish Daily Forward, though.

This book is the latest fruit of Esther Schor's endeavors. It has a strongly Jewish angle which is also bound to be emphasized in some reviews.

Michael Wex is a Yiddishist, known for such books as Born to Kvetch. It is not surprising that he would review this book in The New York Times (November 11, 2016) : "The Jewish Roots of Esperanto." Wex has some criticisms but overall appreciates the subject matter and whets the appetite, and of course highlights the Jewish dimension.

Stuart Schoffman's review "The Great Family Circle" in the Spring 2017 Jewish Review of Books is much narrower, but with some interesting anecdotes. Under the editorship Itamar Ben-Avi, the Jerusalem daily Do’ar Ha-yom published an item about Esperanto on January 23, 1924 and on several other occasions, its obsession with a Jewish renewal notwithstanding. On this date the writer noted that Zamenhof was a Jew, after reporting: "An anti-Semitic weekly in Germany had urged fellow anti-Semites to learn Esperanto, the better to communicate with anti-Semitic organizations in other countries." The short review also mentions Zamenhof's involvement in the proto-Zionist movement.

There is a contrasting pair of comments. The first is a poem from a snotty Zionist ridiculing Esperanto's universalism, Obama, and George Soros. The second is from an Esperantist posting Zamenhof's poem "La Espero" (Hope).

Jewish utopian nostalgia & Esperanto in fiction: 2 reviews

This seems to be a trend in Jewish novels for a number of years now. Looking backward, reflecting on dashed hopes and lost possibilities, ideals failed or betrayed: Jewish fiction is casting Esperanto in a utopian role.  Here are my two latest reviews:

• Is Emigration Good for Soviet Latvian Jews? David Bezmozgis, The Free World reviewed by R. Dumain 


• Amos Oz Mourning Jewish Utopia: Between Friends reviewed by R. Dumain

Amos Oz: Esperanto among the Kibbutzim

Famous Israeli author Amos Oz, who lived on a kibbutz for decades, has written a book of connected stories about kibbutzim, Between Friends. The publication release date for the English translation is September 24.  One of the stories in the book is titled "Esperanto." Here are excerpts from two reviews.

Amos Oz explores the daily lives behind utopian dreams in 'Between Friends' by Michael Walsh, Daily News, September 18, 2013

 The collection concludes with a masterfully rendered story called “Esperanto,” which has an atmosphere so rich it can almost be considered a character itself. It focuses on Martin Vandenburg, an anarchist who teaches Esperanto, the easy-to-learn constructed language that was crafted to transcend nationality and promote peace.

Between Friends by Amos Oz – review by Alberto Manguel, The Guardian, Wednesday 8 May 2013

The Esperanto teacher declares that "imprecise words poison relations between people everywhere, and that's why clear, accurate words can heal those relationships, but only if they are the right words spoken in a language that all people can understand". One of the students observes that Cain and Abel "probably spoke the same language too"; another says nothing but thinks that "the sorrow in the world was born long before words".

Vandenberg believes humans are essentially generous and kind-hearted but corrupted by their environments. He wants states to be abolished and replaced with an international, pacifist brotherhood of Esperanto speakers.

“When all human beings speak the same language,” he tells his class, “there will be no more wars because their common language will prevent misunderstanding among individuals and peoples.”

This claim reveals an ideological rift. Students question his belief with instances of violence between people who spoke the same language: Cain and Abel, German Jews and Nazis.

One student sat quietly, thinking “the sorrow in the world was born long before words.”

If that young man is correct, then the feeling of sadness, miscommunication and pain existed long before anyone uttered those nouns, which are essentially metaphors for something intangible.

On this web page are two videos and links to the story "Esperanto" in Italian and Hebrew:

Video. Amos Oz, Esperanto (Festival Internazionale delle Letterature 2012 – Basilica di Massenzio, Roma )

In the second of these videos, Oz recites the story in Hebrew, accompanied by music and Italian subtitles.  The first is an interview in which Oz summarizes the story "Esperanto," which you can view right here:

Carl Alpert remembers Lidia Zamenhof

 Thanks to Neil Blonstein for publicizing this article and attendant information:

 “Interesting People I Have Met: Lidia Zamenhof” by Carl Alpert

From this little piece alone one can see the idealism and naivete of Lidia. She thought she could solve social problems by propagating Esperanto and the Baha'i religion throughout the world. In a way, her thinking was a step backward from her father's, which itself did not sufficiently engage the world politically. Lidia's innocence extended to her sojourn in the USA, which was far more extensive than her father's, but it had a curious twist: Lidia innocently crossed racial boundaries in the USA in a way that others would not have. There are many black Bahai's in the USA—I've known many of them myself—and Lidia cultivated a number of them in the 1930s.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union (5)

I just finished reading Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union. I don't want to plant major spoilers in this blog, so I will say that there are two major mysteries solved in the end: the nature of the monstrous conspiracy engineered by Litvak, and the murder of Mendel Shpilman. And the subplot of the relationship between  Meyer Landsman and his ex-wife Bina Gelbfish (now Meyer's boss in the police department) assumes a major role in the end.

As to the leading forces behind the conspiracy, there is a true believer, the cynical manipulator Litvak, and perhaps the most powerful faction which in the real world would correspond to the Christian Zionists. But here is what Litvak thinks (p. 345):

In return for providing them with manpower, a Messiah, and financing beyond their wildest dreams, the only thing that Litvak had ever asked of his partners, clients, employers, and associates in this venture was that he never be expected to believe the nonsense that they believed. Where they saw the fruit of divine wishes in a newborn red heifer, he saw the product of $1 million in taxpayer dollars spent secretly on bull semen and in vitro fertilization. In the eventual burning of this little red cow, they saw the purification of all Israel and the fulfillment of a millenia-old promise; Litvak saw, at most, a necessary move in an ancient game--the survival of the Jews.

As Landsman comes face to face with the key player in the American government who facilitates the plot, he is disgusted with the whole game (p. 368):

"Fuck what it written," Landsman says. "You know what?" All at once he feels weary of ganefs and prophets, guns and sacrifices and the infinite gangster weight of God. He's tired of hearing about the promised land and the inevitable bloodshed required for its redemption. "I don't care what it written. I don't care what supposedly got promised to sandal-wearing idiot whose claim to fame is that he was ready to cut his own son's throat for the sake of a hair-brained idea. I don't care about red heifers and patriarchs and locusts. A bunch of old bones in the sand. My homeland is in my hat. It's in my ex-wife's tote bag."

He sits down. He lights another cigarette.

"Fuck you," Landsman concludes. "And fuck Jesus, too. he was a pussy."

On page 372 you will find an account of Landsman's dream about Einstein, chess, Landsman's sister, and the destiny of the Jews.

Bina, like Landsman, realizes the extent to which she is only a pawn. Omitting egregious spoilers, I'm quoting part of what she says to Meyer (p. 375):

"God damn them all. I always knew they were there. Down there in Washington. Up there over our heads. Holding the strings. Setting the agenda. Of course I knew that. We all knew that. We all grew up knowing that, right? We are here on sufferance. Houseguests. But they ignored us for so long. Left us to our own devices. It was easy to kid yourself. Make you think you had a little autonomy, in a small way, nothing fancy. I thought I was working for everyone. [.....]"

A little later Landsman ruminates (p. 280):

Landsman considers the cohort of yids who arrived with his father, those who were not broken by suffering and horror but rather somehow resolved. The former partisans, resisters, Communist gunmen, left-Zionist saboteurs--the rabble, as they were styled in the newspapers of the south--who showed up in Sitka after the war with their vulcanized souls and fought with Polar Bears like Hertz Shemets their brief, doomed battle for control of the District. They knew, those bold and devastated men, knew as they knew the flavor of the tongues in their mouths, that their saviors would one day betray them. They walked into this wild country that had never seen a Jew and set about preparing for the day when they would be rounded up, sent packing, forced to make a stand. Then, one by one, these wised-up angry men and women had been coopted, picked off, fattened up, set against one another, or defanged by Uncle Hertz and his endless operations.

That's about all I can reveal of the plot. As for my overall evaluation, I have come to admire Chabon's fictional achievement. It really does take a lot to write a novel like this. I am not so taken with the nature of the apocalyptic conspiracy that forms the linchpin of the plot, but perhaps that reflects the prevalence now of the theocratic fascism that threatens to destroy the world. Ultimately, this is a meditation on the precarious nature of Jewish identity, which, in the confines of this scenario makes sense, whether or not it would be my main preoccupation in the real world. Chabon's style is quite rich, and he does successfully create a noirish evironment, in which the authenticity of his own Yiddishisms doesn't matter so much.

When you are finished reading the novel, think again about the title.

In addition to the installments of this review, if you follow the subject "Michael Chabon" on this blog, you will find meditations about alternative history and historically oriented novels in general, Jewish and otherwise. I rarely read novels, but before this, I read Ned Bauman's Boxer, Beetle, which featured a seedy lower class Jewish milieu in the East End of London in the 1930s. I don't have much to go on to posit a trend, but I can speculate.

If there is some trend of writing Jewish historical fiction and alternate histories--the ones I know are those in which Esperanto and Zamenhof pop up--it must mean something about an attitude toward the present, as if there were past potentialities according to which things might have turned out differently. But I don't know enough about any of the authors to know their minds, and while I know why Jews and others would be disillusioned with American society or the contemporary world as a whole, I am too far removed from specifically Jewish concerns and their corresponding milieu to know what Jewish authors think about Jews, if generalizations are supportable.

As you know, the whodunit begins with a burned-out, alcohol-besodden detective investigating the murder of a chess-playing junkie in the run-down Hotel Zamenhof in which they both reside. In the end there's a bit of redemption for Meyer Landsman, though not for the society in which he lives. I haven't researched enough of Michael Chabon to know whether Hotel Zamenhof is so named in order to contrast the shabbiness of the reality with the utopian ideal. Zamenhof was a pioneer of the Zionist movement in its earliest stages and renounced it by the time it was becoming a real project, favoring a universalist humanistic project even while still working on the problem of adapting East European Jewry to the modern world. Zamenhof only gets brief mention in the novel as a putative ghost. Perhaps whatever redemption there is must be covered in the grime of hard experience. Perhaps there is at least a reminder of the possibility of redemption in our Hotel Zamenhof?

The Yiddish Policemen's Union (4)

The actual novel Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union comprises 411 pages, including the prefatory quote:

And they went to sea in a sieve -- Edward Lear

But there is also back matter, consisting of a glossary, author's note [acknowledgments] , bio of the author, "The Frozen Chosen" by Patricia Cohen, "Guidebook to a Land of Ghosts" by Michael Chabon, blurbs about Chabon's other fiction, advert for the CD audio of the book performed by actor Peter Riegert.

Cohen's essay, originally published in The New York Times, gives us a portrait of Chabon in the real Sitka, Alaska, along with his thoughts about the construction of his fictional universe. Apparently, in reality Harold Ickes, Secretary of the Interior, actually in 1940 did support opening up the Alaska territory to European Jews. Chabon got in hot water for his essay triggered by his reaction to the 1958 phrase book Say It in Yiddish, and started thinking about an imaginary Yiddishland. Cohen describes the real Sitka and its Jewish and other inhabitants. From the interview with Chabon, we learn that Chabon found an affinity between Isaac Babel in English and hard-boiled detective fiction. Also about Chabon's approach to style:"I felt like I had to invent a whole new language, a dialect." He explains the creation of his own slang as well as his approach to the characters and detective fiction generally.

Cohen was motivated by the themes of destiny and chosenness, and wondering what the world would be like minus the state of Israel. "How mad it seems that this tiny little scrap of land [would be central in global geopolitics] . . . . I have a very strong feeling of complete ambivalence about a world without Israel . . . . I didn't come in with a point to prove or an agenda."

Chabon's 1997 essay on Yiddish, which appeared in Harper's magazine, is reprinted in the book. He takes Uriel and Beatrice Weinreich's Say It in Yiddish as an exercise in futility. As Yiddish had been abandoned by Israel for Hebrew, leaving surviving Yiddish speakers stranded in limbo, the actual application of Yiddish to contemporary situations--booking a plane flight, for example--to be fantasy. Hence Chabon fantasizes about an alternative Yiddish-speaking homeland. Would its denizens be as rough and tough as Israelis? And here is the germ of his future novel. And then he wonders what Jewish Europe would have been like had it been spared the Holocaust.

Esperanto photo archive at Harvard Library

Harvard Library Visual Information Access can be searched for 'Esperanto', yielding 6 results. All photos originate from the Central Zionist Archives.

Results #5 & #6 actually consist of two images apiece. # of these are apparently identical photos of L.L. Zamenhof; the last is apparently a photo of his father, Marc Zamenhof. #5 dates the Zamenhof photo at 1908.

#1 is a photo of Zamenhof's grave.

None of the above photos are of good quality. However, there are 3 photos of excellent quality.  They are, respectively, from the 5th (1943), 6th (1944), and 7th (1945) Palestine Esperanto Congress, Jerusalem.

I had no idea that there were Esperanto congresses in Palestine, let alone during the Holocaust of World War II whilst European Jewry was being exterminated.  There's a story here.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union (3)

I've now read 40 chapters, about 360 pages, with six chapters (about 50 pages) to go.

Occasionally my attention has strayed and I lost the thread of what was going on, but it always picked up again and stayed glued for a long while to this whodunit. As a crime novel with pseudo-Yiddishkeit, this is a great read. What its meaning or message is eludes me, but perhaps that too is part of the whodunit.

The plot revolves around detective Meyer Landsman's unrelenting, unauthorized drive to resolve the murder of Mendel Shpilman (a.k.a. Emanuel Lasker) at their common home, the Hotel Zamenhof. The Hotel Zamenhof, born of high ideals, is a seedy, degenerated dive. Perhaps this contrast was intended by Chabon?  Landsman is an unlikely hero, and Shpilman a dodgy candidate for the role for which he was groomed. The Jewish settlement of the Sitka district of Alaska, temporarily reserved for Jewish refugees with its own governing structure but now facing Reversion to Alaskan control, is now endangered. The Jews are not only unsettled by this prospect, but their entire existence is askew, uncomfortable, damaged and wounded, far remote from ideals or utopian visions, compromised not only by their difficult circumstances but by their internal politics and their relations with both the indigenous people and the American government. The worst among the Jews are the ultra-orthodox, who wield illegitimate political power and harbor a gangster element among them. And the manipulation of their religious fanaticism could prove to be the world's undoing.

Perhaps I am not the only one tempted to draw parallels between this alternate history and real history.  But I have no real clue as to Chabon's intent.

There is a history of struggle between the Jews and the Tlingit, with multiethnic offspring and antagonistic friendships in the mix, as one would expect. Here is an extract from one colorful exchange illustrating the situation (p. 283):

[....] "Johnny the Jew," he says. "Well, well. Beanie and all. Clearly you haven't had any difficulties lately saying the holy blessing over the Filipino donut."

"Fuck you, Dick, you anti-Semitic midget."

"Fuck you, Johnny, and your chickenshit insinuations about my integrity as a police officer."

In his rich but rusty Tlingit, Berko expresses a wish to one day see Dick lying dead and shoeless in the snow.

"Go shit in the ocean," Dick says in flawless Yiddish.

They step toward each other, and the large man takes the small one into his embrace. [....]

There's more to this priceless dialogue. Dick also has more to say about his boundless suspicion of Jews (285).

There is more to the linguistic mix as well, as Jews of different social origins have different linguistic peculiarities.  Here is an example of something new to Landsman (p. 286).

"Hebrew?" Berko says. "Mexicans speaking Hebrew?"

"That's what it sounded like to me," Landsman says. "Not synagogue Hebrew, either." Landsman knows Hebrew when he hears it. But the Hebrew he knows is the traditional brand, the one his ancestors carried with them through the millennia of their European exile, oily and salty as a piece of fish smoked to preserve it, its flesh flavored strongly by Yiddish. That kind of Hebrew is never employed for human conversation. It's only for talking to God. If it was Hebrew that Landsman heard at Peril Strait, it was not the old salt-herring tongue but some spiky dialect, a language of alkali and rocks. It sounded to him like the Hebrew brought over by the Zionists after 1948. Those hard desert Jews tried fiercely to hold on to it in their exile but, as with the German Jews before them, got overwhelmed by the teeming tumult of Yiddish, and by the painful association of their language with recent failure and disaster. As far as Landsman knows, that kind of Hebrew is extinct except among a few last holdouts meeting annually in lonely halls.

I have no idea whether these graphic analogies are apt for any variant of Hebrew or Yiddish. They do in any case illustrate Chabon's vivid style, and they are suggestive of the social/political realities associated with these languages. Note also the reversal of the fates of Yiddish and Hebrew. Remember that in this alternative history the fledgling state of Israel is destroyed, and the Yiddish-speaking Jews dominate the Jewish settlement in Sitka.

The generation that settled in Alaska found a great disparity between the imagined fables of Alaska and the reality found there. Its songs mark this disillusionment. (291)

Two million Jews got off the boats and found no rolling prairies dotted with buffalo. No feathered Indians on horseback. Only a spine of flooded mountains and fifty thousand Tlingit village-dwellers already in possession of most of the flat and usable land. Nowhere to spread out, to grow, to do anything more than crowd together in the teeming style of Vilna and Lodz. The homesteading dreams of a million landless Jews, fanned by movies, light fiction, and informational brochures provided by the United States Department of the Interior--snuffed on arrival. Every few years some utopian society or other would acquire a tract of green that reminded some dreamer of a cow pasture. They would found a colony, import livestock, pen a manifesto. And then the climate, the markets, and the streak of doom that marbled Jewish life would work their charm. The dream farm would languish and fail.

Just a story, or is there more behind Chabon's fictional creation?

The Yiddish Policemen's Union (2)

I've now read 22 chapters of Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, approaching 200 pages.The plot moved quite slowly as the overall scenario of the Jewish colony in Alaska was in the process of being laid out step by step. Chabon's use of language is quite adroit, and his capacity for description is quite rich. Note that the narrative is written in the present tense, rather than in the past tense as is customary in the English language. I cannot comment on Chabon's dialogue, except for noticing some clever turns of phrase, as I am not conversant with Yiddish culture to judge how he re-creates it in his alternate universe.

The novel is heavily sprinkled with yiddishisms, which I do not understand. The characters, particularly the main character Landsman, always refers to Jews as 'yids'.  Whether or not this is a derogatory term in context I do not know, but it does not sound very flattering.

There are references to real-world Jewish public figures. There is a Max Nordau (pioneer Zionist) Street and a Peretz (I. L. Peretz, Yiddish poet) Street. There is an Einstein Chess Club. The murder victim who is the focal point of the plot is pseudonymously known as Emanuel Lasker (named after a chess champion, who also wrote about other games, e.g. Go).

The Jewish society we see here is not very attractive. There's a low class seediness about it, that begins with the run-down Zamenhof hotel, and the vista of crudity spreads out from there.The orthodox fanatics are referred to as 'black hats'. The Verbovers have their own island, and regard Landsman, who is there investigating the murder, as an interloper, and there is no love lost on his part either. They have inordinate political influence, and there is a fraction of them involved in organized crime. The Jews' relations with the Indians, i.e. the indigenous Alaskans, is none too friendly, either. The overall picture is not pretty. Other than storytelling, if there is a thematic purpose to Chabon's narrative, I do not know yet what it is.

Landsman is divorced, but his ex-wife Bina becomes his boss in the police department. Word comes down to scotch the murder case, but he can't leave it alone.  The Jewish settlement faces Reversion, which presumably means the loss of the Jewish franchise of the colony, which means a certain percentage of the Jewish residents will have to disperse.  Israel itself was destroyed in 1948. An interesting alternate history scenario, to be sure.

There is only one place so far where we learn more about the political factions that once were part of the fabric of the colony (p. 76):

For forty years--as Denny Brennan's series revealed--Hertz Shemets used his position as local director of the FBI's surveillance program  to run his own private game on the Americans. The Bureau first recruited him in the fifties  to fight Communists and the Yiddish Left, which, though fractious, was strong, hardened, embittered, suspicious of the Americans, and, in the case of the former Israelis, not especially grateful to be here. Here Shemetz's brief was to monitor and infiltrate the local Red population; Hertz wiped them out. He fed the socialists to the Communists, and the Stalinists to the Trotskyites, and the Hebrew Zionists to the Yiddish Zionists, and when feeding time was over, he wiped the mouths of those still standing and fed them to each other. Starting in the late sixties, Hertz was turned loose on the nascent radical movement among the Tlingit, and in time he pulled its teeth and claws, too.

As much care as Chabon takes to delineate this society, I found my attention flagging after a while, until, while visiting the Verboters, Landsman confronts the rebbe with the death of 'Emanuel Lasker', whose real identity has just been uncovered. From there I've been riveted to the narrative.

Now on to the Esperanto references.

'Elevatoro', an Esperanto word which appears twice so far, does not really mean 'elevator' in the sense of transporting people: that would be 'lifto'. An 'elevatoro' is more like a winch that lifts cargo.

Hotel Zamenhof is a centerpiece of the narrator. As for Zamenhof the man, he is thought to be a ghost:

"You know what Kohn says," says Tenenboym. Kohn says we got a ghost in the house." Kohn is the day manager. "Taking shit, moving shit around. Hohn figures it for the ghost of Professor Zamenhof."

"If they named a dump like this after me," Landsman says, "I'd haunt it, too."

"You never know," Tennenboym observes. "Especially nowadays." [pp. 12-13]

Much later, while Landsman is on forced leave while recovering from a bullet wound, his ex-wife Bina visits his hovel in the Hotel Zamenhof:

She wades through pieces of Landsman's gray suit and a bath towel and stands at the foot of the bed. Her eyes take in the pink wallpaper patterned with garlands in burgundy flock, the green plush carpet with its random motif of burn spots and mystery stains, the broken glass, the empty bottle, the peeling and chipped veneer of the pressboard furniture. Watching her with his head at the foot of the pull-down bed, Landsman enjoys the look of horror on her face, mostly because if he doesn't, then he will have to feel ashamed.

"How do you say 'shit heap' in Esperanto?" Bina says. She goes over to the veneer table and looks down at the last bedraggled curls of noodle pudding lying in the grease-streaked clamshell. [pp. 163-164]

Jewish peoplehood from Zamenhof to Jewdas

There is an interesting web site hailing out of Britain called Jewdas, subtitled "radical voices for the alternative diaspora". The contributors tout a countercultural version of Jewishness as an alternative to both Zionism and traditional religiosity. There is much of interest here, but for our purposes, I call your attention to this essay:

The Big Ethnic Love-In by Baruch Trotsky

Mr. Trotsky is skeptical about some contemporary propaganda in favor of Jewish "peoplehood", deeming it a dubious ideological metaphysical concept as problematic as nationalism or race. More importantly, he delves into the actual diversity and hybridity of real Jewish history and existence, and wonders what a unifying conception of Jewishness could possibly be. The readers' responses are also quite interesting, and in the process, the delineation of the question becomes refined.

Interestingly, this very question was debated over a century ago when a definable ethnic culture or meta-culture was easy to pinpoint, though even then the defining criteria of peoplehood proved to be elusive in the case of the Jews. One very interesting intervention, which is not brought into historical specialist or popular discussion as much as it should be, was that of L.L. Zamenhof, whose claim to fame is the creation of Esperanto, but who also went through a fascinating evolution in his engagement with the Jewish question perplexing Eastern European Jews. Zamenhof was an early proponent of Zionism, first recommending a settlement in the USA, later ceding to the Palestine option, and eventually categorically rejecting the whole project. Zamenhof also published a project for the reform and standardization of Yiddish, also later abandoned.

Ultimately, Zamenhof set his hopes on the reform of the Jewish religion itself, in a doctrine he called Hilelismo. Here he makes his most forceful arguments, mercilessly demystifying the notion of Jewish peoplehood, while posing the very questions now being asked in an entirely different historical situation. To learn more about this, you can follow the links on this blog. The key blog posts are:

L.L. Zamenhof's 150th birthday


L.L. Zamenhof and the Shadow People


Zamenhof & the new Jewish intellectual historiography (2)

Hilelismo was not Zamenhof's final formulation.While he sought to bring Eastern European Jewry into the 20th century, creating a modern people out of a "pseudo-people" nostalgic for a religion and a homeland it could no longer believe in (or at least the intelligentsia could not), Zamenhof generalized his religious reform program to include all who wanted to participate in a universal, common alternative religious practice, while recognizing or maintaining their inherited religious traditions if they so chose in a non-absolutist, non-theistic fashion, somewhat akin to Ethical Culture or Unitarianism. He dubbed his revised religious doctrine Homaranismo (not strictly translatable, but meaning considering oneself a member of humanity) which, along with his thinking about Jews and about Esperanto itself, continued to develop until his death in 1917.

Gustav Landauer vs / kontraŭ Esperanto (2)

"The State as a Social Relationship: Gustav Landauer Revived" by Dov Neumann, Jewdas (blog), 25 June 2010

This interview with Gabriel Kuhn, a scholar of anarchism and Gustav Landauer, amplifies on Landauer's irrationalism I alleged in my previous post. And Landauer's primitivist, organicist, mystical tendency is exemplified in his attitude toward Esperanto:

DN: Difference is a key word for Landauer. For example he vehemently opposes Esperanto for trying to unite humanity with one language. He makes an almost Tower of Babelesque critique.

GK: That’s a good example of Landauer’s opposition to rationalist measures of bringing people together. I guess Esperanto was to him a cold, mechanical idea of providing some kind of common structure of finding one another. Rather, people best do so through cherishing their own cultural traditions, expressions and language.

The idea of a homogenous socialist utopia was not something that appealed to him. If you’re not able to embrace all cultural forms that human kind has produced: you cannot embrace all of human kind, you cannot establish socialism. His idea of difference goes beyond a mere concept of tolerance. Socialism has to ‘grow’, that’s a word that appears often in his writings, it has to grow from the diversity of human beings and cultures that make up humanity.

Juda kosmopolitismo, Zamenhof, & la aktuala morala krizo

La aŭtoro maltranvilas pri la stato de la juda popolo kaj naciismo. Li deziras, ke judoj denove funckiu kiel liberaliga pontopopolo inter diversaj kulturoj. Li pensas pri la aktuala konflikto pri islamanoj en eŭropaj landoj.

The results of this closing of the national soul are very sad. For the first time in millennia, we are not at the forefront of influence on the world. In the past, there was hardly an era in which we did not have an influence. Take Jesus, for example. His teachings and values sprang from the Jewish core of the Second Temple period. Those who sowed the European renaissance included descendants of Jewish Marranos, who brought the wisdom and achievements of ancient Greece, which had been preserved by the moderate and tolerant Muslim philosophers, back home.

It is impossible to decipher the codes of modern times without Spinoza or Moses Mendelsohn. And what would the previous century have been like without Marx and his communism, on one hand, or Freud and the individual soul, on the other? That period also produced Trotsky, Zamenhof and others, and their dreams.

SOURCE: "The Jewish people's new task" by Avraham Burg, Haaretz, 10.09.07.

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

Alternate history, Jewish cognitive dissonance, & the Yiddish revival

Two State Dissonance
Gershom Gorenberg | The American Prospect, June 11, 2010

Meyer Landsman lives in the Hotel Zamenhof. Landsman is the hero of Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, in which the Jews lost the 1948 war in Palestine and have taken refuge in a Jewish autonomous region of Alaska. The run-down hotel is named for L.L. Zamenhof, the Russian-born Jew who invented Esperanto in order to bring world understanding and peace. In other words, Landsman's residence is a liberal Jewish dream that has seen much better days.

The turn to alternate history fiction is seen by Gorenberg as the outcome of cognitive dissonance among frustrated liberal Jews who can't see themselves in today's Israel.

What strikes me as I listen to the family fight between the hawkish Jewish establishment and other American Jews—the pro-peace Zionists, the furious anti-Zionists, the "don't ask me about Israel" non-Zionists—is that they're all dealing with a shared family problem: They have a hard time fitting Israel as it actually is into some of their deepest assumptions about the world. The easiest way for me to explain runs through Philip Roth's The Plot Against America and Chabon's Yiddish Policeman's Union.

While most Jews repress the disparity, Roth and Chabon make it very clear—by describing the world as it would be if the facts lined up with the beliefs. Roth describes an America that fits the assumption that Jews are at peril everywhere. Chabon invents a world in which the Jews are still weak and homeless. On one level these visions are dystopian—but on another they are somehow comforting, homey, because the gap between different things we "know" is gone.

I'm not going to comment on the rest of Gorenberg's political meditation. The non-religious Yiddish revival belongs to a different mental universe from what has become of the revival of Hebrew, itself a remarkable accomplishment, now associated with a powerful state far removed from the shleppers who might have once fantasized about it.

See also:

Yiddish is no joke
Antony Lerman, The Guardian, 5 March 2010

"The revival of this death-defying language shows that Zionism has failed to consign other forms of Jewish life to oblivion"

The Zionist movement was no friend to Yiddish, but now Yiddish is making a comeback. There's one comment on Zamenhof, Yiddish, and Esperanto.

Zamenhof & the new Jewish intellectual historiography (3)

Transnationalism and the Jews of the Nineteenth Century | Central European University, 2009/10 course syllabus & bibliography, Carsten L. Wilke, Instructor.

The sections of the bibliography are:

1. Diaspora, transnationalism, cultural transfer: fundamental concepts
2. Diaspora, patriotism and national fragmentation
3. Global economy, capital and consumerism
4. Non-Jewish models of internationalism
5. Religious constructions of ethic universalism in Germany and Italy
6. The intersection of Jewish solidarity and the universal "civilizing mission" in France
7. Beyond nationalisms in Central Europe

Marsha L. Rozenblit, Reconstructing a national identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 14-38. [pdf]

"A Jew's attitude toward the 'nationality fraud'", in: Wilma Abeles Iggers (ed.), The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia: a historical reader, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992, p. 144-145, 220-223. [pdf]

Ludwik Lazar Zamenhof, Dr. Esperanto's International Language, Warsaw: Zamenhof, 1889, p. 3-24. [link]

8. Modern "shtadlanut" and global philanthropy
9. The Alliance Israélite Universelle
10. The Jewish vision of East-Western reconciliation

Note: David A. Brenner, Marketing identities: the invention of Jewish ethnicity in 'Ost und West', Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1998, p. 22-28, 40-42, 63-71. [pdf]

11. Extremists in search of the stateless utopia

Note:  Michael Löwy, Redemption and utopia: Jewish libertarian thought in Central Europe. A study in elective affinity, trl. by Hope Heaney, London: The Athlone Press, 1992, p. 14-26; optional reading: p. 47-66. [pdf]

12. The anti-Semitic myth of Jewish transnationalism

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.

Zamenhof & the new Jewish intellectual historiography (1)

First, a list of references:

Clash Of Zionisms In Academia
(Group of scholars pressing idea of cultural Zionism, amid pushback)
[review of a recent conference & of Noam Pianko's Zionism and the Roads Not Taken: Rawidowicz, Kaplan, Kohn]
by Eric Herschthal
The Jewish Week (New York), June 23, 2010

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

David N. Myers, Dept. of History, UCLA

Michael Berkowitz, Review of Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, Reviews in History, review no. 973, 21 December 2010

My Articles | Noam Pianko, Professor of Jewish History, University of WA

David N. Myers’ “Between Jew & Arab: The Lost Voice of Simon Rawidowicz” by Jeremiah Haber, The Magnes Zionist (blog), June 2, 2009

When I say the new Jewish historiography, I mean, before anything else, new to me. It is, however, quite contemporary, judging from Herschthal. These scholars whom I am just encountering are deeply dissatisfied with Israel in its current state and are retracing their historical steps to uncover a variegated intellectual history prior to the hammering of history into a party line in conformity with the statism that congealed in Zionism in the 1940s. This means the highlighting of the cultural Zionism that was defeated by statism.

These authors appear to be historically scrupulous, not merely reshaping historiography to serve contemporary political needs in a crude instrumentalist fashion. They also are rethinking the nature of Jewish peoplehood from deep within that cultural milieu. Outsiders would of course not feel this weight in the process of pursuing identical research in the history of ideas, and perhaps they would see the political impetus connected with these scholars' work as ill-conceived or futile. However, if there is any way out of the current situation, those Jewish scholars emotionally connected to Israel will have to struggle their way into the future in their own terms, as part of the total process.

The most striking example among the authors of the articles listed above is Haber, a self-described Orthodox Jew with a heavy investment in Israel, with which he is now disgusted. One anonymous commenter stated the problem starkly: "I think that cultural Zionists lost ground to political Zionists since they were dealing with illusions while political Zionists were dealing with reality." But if you look at the debates outlined by Herschthal, you could also conclude that the conceptual basis for reforming the Zionist project is futile. Specific issues regarding Israeli policies and the treatment of Palestinian Arabs may be obvious and discussable within the cultural framework, but there is a deeper, absent discussion on the fundamental relation between cultural (trans)formation and political economy that suggests that this historiographical debate is trapped within ideological superstructures that were responsible for the illusions that gripped idealistic Jewish intellectuals a century ago.

It may be that these scholars, in reaching for an old perspective as a way to cope with a contemporary political impasse, are engaging in an illusory project, but as long as the scholarship on the past is sound, it can be very useful. By contrast, Berkowitz's review of Shlomo Sand highlights the dangers of reckless instrumentalization of the past in order to dislodge the reigning ideology of the present. Berkowitz finds Sand a shoddy scholar and a vulgarizer of far more exacting predecessors.

My project is really about understanding the evolution of social theory and is not immediately connected to contemporary politics except insofar as current exigencies oversimplify the historical trajectory that got us here. I am interested in two things:

(1) How did Jewish intellectuals conceptualize peoplehood in the last third of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th?

(2) How did social theorists—Marxists and others—conceptualize the nature of Jewish peoplehood in this same time span?

The upshot is the question whether social theory, from within or without the Jewish intelligentsia, had advanced in this time span to the point where it could adequately encapsulate the anomalous group cohesion of central and Eastern European Jews.

Now I want to introduce two of my bibliographies:

L. L. Zamenhof & the Cultural, Religious, Professional & Political Context of 19th-20th Century Eastern European Jewish Intellectuals: Selected Bibliography

Marxism & the Jewish Question: Selected Bibliography 

These reflect the interplay between the two questions I have posed, with the specific addition of the perspective of L. L. Zamenhof.  Zamenhof is best known as the creator of Esperanto; however, he passed through a number of other projects: Zionism, reform of Yiddish, reform of Judaism (Hillelism), and eventually a religious project (Homaranismo) transcending Judaism per se.  All along the line Zamenhof put forth bold conceptions of what did or would (re-)make of Jews a people.

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.

* * *

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]

L.L. Zamenhof's 150th birthday

Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof (1859-1917), is best known as creator of the Esperanto language. December 15 marks the 150th anniversary of his birth. Tonight I will get to meet his great-granddaughter, whose very existence is a near miracle.

I will broach the subject by enumerating three recent bibliographies/web guides I've compiled. Incidentally, I've learned, not much to my surprise though indeed to my disgust, that I can't bring up the subject of Jews in any context without being immediately assaulted by bigots. These additional bibliographies reveal more of the extent of my interests.

My first bibliography:

Marxism & the Jewish Question: Selected Bibliography
http://www.autodidactproject.org/bib/jews-marxism.html

This material is testing ground for a number of projects. Not only in terms of overt politics, but conceptually, how was historical materialism sufficiently evolved or not at any given stage or within any given tendency to explain exactly what bound the Jewish people--specifically of Europe (and more specifically of Eastern Europe, where conditions were worst)--as a people? Could historical materialism adequately encompass culture, and conversely, what did the culturalists leave out in their conceptualization of their situation?

On the plane of overt politics, one will find an emphasis here on the conceptions and policies of the Bolsheviks as compared to the Jewish Bundists (on which there is a thought-provoking new book out).

This is, however, only a portion of the elements needed for a full analysis. The late 19th century and early 20th century were filled with schemes of religious, cultural, linguistic, and political reform and radicalism. There were currents not only of socialism and Marxism, but of assimilationism, Zionism, cultural autonomism, liberalism, Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment)--formulated and argued by Jewish intellectuals, all involving different conceptions of the nature of the past and contemporaneous communities of European Jews and prospects and programs for their future. I attempted to cover as many of these currents as I could in my second bibliography:

L. L. Zamenhof & the Cultural, Religious, Professional & Political Context of 19th-20th Century Eastern European Jewish Intellectuals:
Selected Bibliography
http://autodidactproject.org/bib/jews-19thcent.html

Juxtaposing these two bibliographies suggests the extensiveness and complexity of the ideological ferment of the time, a topic which stands on its own, though the intellectually vacuous, ideologically degenerate, and juvenile politics of the present would gain some perspective from a study of this past.

Finally, all of this is related to a specific project. December 15 will mark the 150th birthday of the creator of the Esperanto language, L. L. Zamenhof, a product of this ferment. Tonight I will have the opportunity to meet Zamenhof's great-granddaughter, itself a remarkable occasion, all the more amazing because all of Zamenhof's children were murdered by the Nazis, and his grandson, a child at the time, escaped their clutches twice by a hairsbreadth (once under the protection of a Catholic priest), to eventually produce two daughters. Though Zamenhof is known mostly for the creation of Esperanto, underlying that project was a more general program of cultural and religious reform, all stemming from Zamenhof's preoccupation with the Jewish question.

Traumatized by the pogroms of 1881, Zamenhof, still a medical student, joined the early Zionist movement and embroiled himself in its debates. At the time various options--all utopian--were considered. Zamenhof opposed establishing settlements in the territory that is now Israel, and favored settlement in America. Ultimately he rejected Zionism altogether, and argued vigorously for years afterward that the project of settling in the Middle East would be either impracticable or disastrous. Another project involved the reform and standardization of Yiddish. (Zamenhof was born in the same year as Sholem Aleichem.) He gave up on that as well. In 1887 he published his first book outlining the basics of Esperanto. As the Esperanto movement took off internationally, he published two treatises in Russian under a pseudonym, in 1901, outlining a program for religious reform and a doctrine called "Hilelismo", inspired by Rabbi Hillel's famous aphorism concerning the golden rule as the essence of religion. Here the influence of Enlightenment thought (Haskalah) is evident, as Zamenhof rejects ancient superstitions and outmoded practices. However, Zamenhof's arguments were even more trenchant. Not only does he demolish the case for Zionism in every way possible, but he engages in a merciless demystification of the Jewish people, questioning the continuity that allegedly connects the Jewish people of today with their ancient homeland, and even questions the basis of their commonality across different nations and regions in the present.

Zamenhof enquires as to what binds peoples together in general, and in the case of Jews in particular. He settles on language and religion as the two shaping principles of peoplehood. This is the very obverse of historical materialism, as Zamenhof completely ignores material factors and concentrates all of his attention on cultural issues (I suppose what is now called by some "imagined communities"). Zamenhof rejects nationalism and in particular nationalistic religion. But curiously, he also pooh-poohs the culturalist Yiddishist option, which would be the logical choice for secularists who reject assimilation (as did Zamenhof). Yiddish is now just a "jargon" in his eyes; Hebrew is not (in 1901) a living language, and the Jews are a "pseudo-people", martyring themselves for a faith they can no longer believe in, and immersed in a nostalgia for a lost civilization with which they no longer have a substantial connection. Hence, a radical cultural reform is necessary, with a radically reformed religion for modern times, sustaining a connection between the intellectuals and the masses, aiming to create a modern, "neutrally-human" people for a cosmopolitan world. By this time Zamenhof sees Esperanto as the binding language, not a reformed Yiddish.

These ideas got Zamenhof into hot water with all parties concerned, both in Jewish circles and in the Esperanto movement, now internationally established, with its center of gravity having shifted from Eastern Europe to France. Within a few years his project underwent another transformation, and "Hilelismo" for the Jews was generalized to "Homaranismo" for everyone. ("Homaranismo" is not literally translatable but means being a member of the human family). Homaranismo bears similarities to Ethical Culture or Unitarianism, but has its own spin, intended as a mediator between inherited traditions and modern secularized consciousness, and between members of different religious traditions. While Esperanto thrived, Homaranismo sank like a stone. Zamenhof's prospective for either the Jews or of all of humanity based on linguistic and religious reform belongs to an alternative history, a timeline in a parallel universe for a strategy that had no chance in this one.

Zamenhof attempted a few other types of public interventions, a contribution to the Universal Races Congress of 1911, and a call to diplomats in 1915, proposing what nations should look like after the war. Zamenhof died in 1917.

There is a postscript to this story. Following the war, a separate workers' Esperanto movement sprang up and remained vigorous, until it was largely killed off by Hitler and Stalin. There arose within it two major factions--the anarchists/anationalists and the Soviets and their supporters. Zamenhof's idealist notions of society were criticized by Soviet Esperantists using the analytical tools provided by Soviet Marxism. They did not, however, wrestle with the Jewish question or delve into Zamenhof's specific arguments with respect to it. In any case, Zamenhof's Jewish origin was such a sensitive topic up to that time that scholars only delved into it substantively decades later.

Thus my third bibliography:

Zamenhof & Zamenhof Studies Web Guide (Zamenhof kaj Zamenhofologio)
http://autodidactproject.org/bib/zamenhofologio.html

Only a smattering of documents listed are in English, but some do tell this story, particularly in the sections on Hilelismo/Homaranismo & Jewish affairs.

Pursuing any portion of the intellectual terrain mapped out by these three bibliographies/web guides can be related to a number of conceptual issues.

___________________________________

“Scholars of Wisdom have no rest in this world or in the world to come.” -- Talmud