[Membroj] Zamenhof, cosmopolitanism, the melting pot

[Ralph Dumain]

Zangwill was the creator of the expression "the melting pot", 
indicating his American dream, i.e. his vision of the role of 
immigrants in the USA.


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

Full text available:

google books
http://books.google.com/books?id=OhN0rC21oKIC&vq=zamenhof&dq=zamenhof+Judaism&lr=&source=gbs_navlinks_s

or:

archive.org
http://www.archive.org/stream/voiceofjerusalem00zang/voiceofjerusalem00zang_djvu.txt

  "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 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]

                            *    *    *    *

"It was by their linguistic talents that the adventurous journeys of 
Arminius Vambery, Aurel Stein, Sven Hedin and Emin Pasha
were made possible. 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." [p. 183-4]

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