Esperanto and Modern Hebrew –“Artificial” Languages that Came to Life

by Norman Berdichevsky (February 2014)

The physical appearance of them both, marked by a frail build, modest demeanor, neatly trimmed beard, horned-rimmed pince-nez eyeglasses, was exaggeratedly bookish. Finally, both men had unusually devoted wives who gave unstintingly of their love and devotion, thereby enabling them to persist in their task against abuse and petty jealousies.

Lazar Ludwik Zamenhof was born in the then Russian-ruled province of Grodno (today in northeastern Poland near the Lithuanian border). He was the oldest child in a family of nine brothers and sisters. Both his father and grandfather were instructors of foreign languages (French and German) and supporters of the Haskala movement, which had encouraged Jews to seek secular learning and aspire to social integration with the surrounding society while stopping short of assimilation.

These deep ethnic, religious, and linguistic divisions deeply impressed the young Zamenhof, who had already mastered half a dozen languages before entering the local gymnasium. Although many Jews were bilingual in Russian and Yiddish, Zamenhof had also acquired Hebrew, Aramaic, German and French through the influence of his father and grandfather. He had learned Polish from friends and at the state-run elementary school, and then Latin and Greek as a high-school student. To these he added a good reading knowledge of English and Italian and perhaps several other European languages. Later he would make use of important elements from all of these languages in creating Esperanto.

The linguistic situation in the Diaspora today stands in sharp contrast to that of previous centuries, when Jews enjoyed a reputation for linguistic accomplishments. During the Middle Ages, translations by Jews of scientific, medical, and philosophical texts had helped bring about a revival of scholarly activity and secular interests. Jewish merchants in Europe and the Middle East were often, by necessity, fluent in or more languages. A linguistic consequence of the Holocaust was a drastic reduction in the number of Jewish speakers of German and Yiddish, Hebraists, and several million Jewish multi-lingual speakers of languages such as Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian, Dutch, Greek, Lithuanian and Ladino. The centers of Yiddish cultural activity in Europe were obliterated, although a handful of refugee authors were able to keep the spark of Yiddish literature alive in the new world.

If I had not been a Jew out of the Ghetto, the idea of the unity of mankind would either never have come into my head or it never would have held me so obstinately during the course of my entire life. The unhappiness of the disunity of mankind can never be felt so strongly as by a Jew out of the Ghetto who is obligated to pray to God in a long-dead language, and who receives his education and instruction in the language of a people who oppress him, and who has co-sufferers throughout the world with who he cannot inter-communicate.

Their arguments convinced Zamenhof to change his stance, a rare example of him being swayed by emotion. From 1881 to 1884 he became one of the most active leaders in the Hovevei Zion movement, collecting funds and writing articles while completing his medical studies. During the same period, Ben-Yehuda became the first habitual speaker of Hebrew, demonstrating by sheer force of will that the revival of the language was a necessary and logical consequence of Zionism.

Zamenhof achieved a major breakthrough as the result of an international congress in France in 1905 and the support he received from such intellectual giants as Tolstoy. He received the Order of the Legion of Honor from the French government, the first of many such awards which brought him recognition and made Esperanto a serious cultural force by 1914.

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