[Membroj] Mort-al Foot in Mouth

[Will Cubbedge]

Your gutter language and your association of my Catholic fath with  
anti-semitism on a public Esperanto email list does not help the  
language any more than Adler's dumb use of the word Esperanto.

Sent from my iPhone

On Oct 30, 2008, at 12:08 AM, Ralph Dumain <rdumain at autodidactproject.org 
 > wrote:

> Thanks for the info. I should put this book on my reading list,  
> given my interest in intellectual history, including the history of  
> middlebrow culture and ideological conflict.  It's one more mark  
> against Adler as a first-class asshole. However non-literally one  
> interprets Adler's expression, it's pretty ridiculous. By  
> "Esperanto", even if Adler means not strictly national, he doesn't  
> go beyond the bounds of his fetish for what he thinks of as western  
> civilization. As for "anti-Semitic", Adler's affinity for  
> Catholicism, his hatred of the modern world, and his retrograde  
> ideology explains this expression completely. Jewishness has been  
> associated with hated modernity, rationalism, liberalism,  
> radicalism, and democracy at least since the latter part of the 19th  
> century, on the threshold of  a new stage of both capitalism and  
> anti-Semitism. That Adler would turn against the progressive ideals  
> of much of the Jewish intelligentsia explains his phraseology.  On  
> the other hand, the use of "Esperanto" in this way as an adjective  
> is not only ungrammatical, it goes contrary to Adler's organic  
> conservative ideology, which in his time would likely have  
> abominated Esperanto, which is arguably the progeny of the Jewish  
> Enlightenment (Haskalah).
>
> One must look at the role of Adler and his pals at the University of  
> Chicago, as well as those who opposed his crowd.  These ideological  
> battles were being fought as the world reeled under the blows of  
> fascism in the 1930s and '40s-- the modernist, pro-science faction  
> (such as John Dewey and the refugee logical positivist philosophers)  
> and the reactionary, obscurantist, turn-back-the-clock faction. I  
> believe this conflict is documented in:
>
> Reisch, George. How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science.  
> Cambridge University Press, 2005.
>
> On the ideological development of anti-Semitism, see:
>
> Bronner, Stephen Eric. A Rumor about the Jews: Antisemitism,  
> Conspiracy, and the Protocols of Zion. New York: Oxford University  
> Press, 2003. (1st ed., 2000) Publisher description. Table of contents.
>
> H-Net review: Linda Maizels. " Review of Stephen Eric Bronner, A  
> Rumor about the Jews: Antisemitism, Conspiracy, and the Protocols of  
> Zion," H-Judaic, H-Net Reviews, March, 2004.
>
> On the politics of Enlightenment & Counter-Enlightenment:
>
> Bronner, Stephen Eric. Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a  
> Politics of Radical Engagement. New York: Columbia University Press,  
> 2004.
>
>
> At 08:48 PM 10/29/2008, Jim Ryan wrote:
>> Another entry in the long, strange saga of the (mis-)(ab-)use of  
>> "Esperanto" by non-Esperantists to mean heaven knows what.
>>
>> This one is from a book I'm reading, A Great Idea at the Time: The  
>> Rise, Fall and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books.  Great Books  
>> scholar and booster Mortimer Adler is describing his own background  
>> and temperament employing various contrasts, including:
>>
>> "Jewish and German by ancestry but anti-Semitic and Esperanto by  
>> nature."
>>
>> Huh?  In context, and knowing Adler, I think he means "not bound by  
>> Jewish or German (or presumably any other) culture or traditions,  
>> but rather international and cosmpolitan."
>>
>> But what a way to put it!  "Anti-Semitic and Esperanto"!  What an  
>> ironic turn of phrase, especially given how Zamenhof was  
>> intellectually nurtured by Jewish traditions, how he was a Yiddish  
>> scholar as well as a general polyglot and linguist, and how  
>> Homaranismo began as Hilelismo.  And how the Nazis persecuted  
>> Esperanto as being a tool of the Jews, and how Zamenhof's children  
>> died in concentration camps, etc. etc.  Esperanto was one of the  
>> many gifts of Jewry to the world.
>>
>> "Anti-Semitic and Esperanto" is the most ridiculous pairing  
>> since ... well, I'll let you all supply better examples of  
>> rhetorical "odd couples."
>>
>
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