[Membroj] Esther Schor in Pakn Treger

[Ralph Dumain]

Today I received a photocopy of this article in the mail from an old 
friend. It's about how the struggle with the Jewish Question was at 
the root of everything Zamenhof did from first to last. Esperanto is 
only one aspect of Zamenhof's overall cultural struggle. This much is 
known by most people who have a basic knowledge of Zamenhof's life 
and work, as are known Zamenhof's early involvement with and later 
rejection of the Zionist movement, his attempts to reform Judaism, 
resulting in Hilelismo, later universalizing it to Homaranismo. Fewer 
people know about Zamenhof's attempt to standardize Yiddish. But 
rarely for the general reader and almost never in English does one 
find an article chronicling and explaining the evolution of 
Zamenhof's perspective and interventions.

Schor's article is exactly the talk I would deliver in commemoration 
of Zamenhof's 150th and the Washington UK centennial. Or I should 
say, a substantial part of it. (My project regarding the Universala 
Kongreso of 1910 is much broader, but the deep background behind 
Zamenhof's "Lando de Libereco" speech renders it more 
comprehensible.) I like the connections she draws between Hilelismo 
and Ethical Culture and Reconstructionism (not that I know much of 
anything about the latter). Schor describes Zamenhof's perspectives 
on Zionism, language and religious reform. Her narrative is really 
good as far as it goes, but it does leave out various arguments and 
severe judgments Zamenhof makes about the past, present, and future 
of the Jewish people, some of which might displease a number of readers.

One's eyes will be opened by reading Zamenhof's argument for 
Hilelismo (1901, Homo Sum) and his "Alvoko al la Juda Intelektularo", 
both written in Russian and translated by Adolf Hauzhaus from the 
manuscripts and self-published in bilingual editions. One's image of 
mild-mannered Zamenhof could change from reading his anguished, 
passionate, and at times severe discourse on the Jewish question. You 
will learn the basis of Zamenhof's eccentric view that language and 
religion are the two significant sources of social conflict. It was 
precisely these two factors that for Zamenhof defined the basis of 
cohesion of peoples, and the people he was concerned about was the 
Jewish people. At the same time, Zamenhof, though motivated by the 
suffering of the Jews and little else, refused to the Jews any 
special status or characteristics apart from any other peoples or 
religions. His arguments all serve to demystify the Jewish question 
in ways that are not often heard, though of late certain dissident 
Israeli scholars are engaging similar arguments, whether on a sound 
basis or no and whether to a sound purpose or no. Zamenhof rejects 
the notion of undiluted continuity between the inhabitants of ancient 
Judaea and today's (1901) Jews. He expresses considerable skepticism 
about the cultural commonality of the Jews in various nations, who 
have adapted to their local cultural environments despite the 
hostility of their neighbors.

There are several arguments leading to the conclusion that the only 
solution is a reform of the Jewish religion, which Zamenhof considers 
obsolete in its inherited form. He even refers to the Jews as a 
"pseudopopolo", mired in an absurd existence, living out a nostalgic 
fantasy for a vanished peoplehood, its intellectuals allowing 
themselves to be martyred out of loyalty to an outmoded religion they 
don't really believe in. He also does not want the intellectuals to 
become isolated from the common people, and he rejects 
assimilationism. He does not see Yiddish, a mere "jargon" though a 
beloved one, as a tenable unifying instrument, and since he can 
locate no other unifying factor, he settles on a religion as the 
factor explaining the cultural cohesion of the Jewish people, 
particularly the nationalistic character of the Jewish religion. 
This, along with outmoded customs and superstitions, Zamenhof wishes 
to change. Hence the creation of Hilelismo as the vehicle of a 
modernized, "neutrale-homa" people.

There are some bizarre twists and turns in this line of argument. 
Zamenhof further evolved "Hilelismo" into Homaranismo as a future 
"neutrale-homa" religion for everyone, based on a nebulous adherence 
to some higher power or ethical order in which all peoples and all 
religionists could participate, and atheists, too.

It's not hard to see why the project dearest to Zamenhof was 
stillborn, nay, aborted from its conception. It is nonetheless 
interesting as one forgotten possibility, one configuration of ideas 
in a complex network of debates. It is both avant-garde and archaic 
in its thinking. Perhaps the strangest omission is Zamenhof's total 
disregard of politics, economics, forms of government, or organized 
opposition to an autocratic police state. His vision seems to be a 
semi-secular messianic cultural movement propagated as an ideal--of 
course, the ideal of a universal language many people wanted and a 
universal religion nobody would have anything to do with.

I don't know what other culturalists were thinking at the time; I 
haven't begun to research this angle, though of course I know there 
was a flowering of secular Yiddish culture. There is one thing I did 
not understand about Zamenhof's argument. I may or may not understand 
it if I re-read it. It would seem that the most logical option, given 
Zamenhof's rejection of Zionism and traditional Judaism, would be an 
embrace of secular Yiddish culture as the unifying force and the way 
to go. But Zamenhof rejects this option, for reasons I failed to 
grasp at first reading.  Nor do I understand how he thought a 
"nenormala" people could be converted to a normal one once it 
miraculously altered its self-concept and self-presentation. This 
picture makes no sense to me.

Schor doesn't discuss several of these aspects of Zamenhof's 
arguments, and I imagine they could muddy an introductory 
presentation of the subject. And then who knows how one's primary 
audience would react? I know a couple of individuals in the 
Zamenhofologo community who are revolted by Hilelismo. I know that if 
some of us were put in the same room to argue, somebody might wring 
somebody's neck, I won't say who on either end of the transaction.

Aside from purely cultural redefinition, a comparative analysis would 
have to take in alternative political pathways. The logical place to 
begin is the Jewish Labor Bund, which rejected Zionism, rejected 
political nation-building, embraced socialism and secularism, but 
also insisted on cultural and organizational autonomy, in this 
respect opposing the Bolsheviks. If any Bundist ever had anything to 
say about Esperanto, I sure don't know about it, but I'm putting that 
on my 'to research' list.


___________________________________

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