necessary for those determined to remake the world, only a shared
future—and the effort of his life was to forge a community that
would realize his vision.
Had Zamenhof been one of the great God-arguers, he’d have
taken God back to the ruins of Babel for a good harangue. God had
been rash (not to mention self-defeating) to ruin the human capacity
to understand, and foolish to choose one nation on which to lavish
his blessings and curses, his love and his jealousy. But Zamenhof was
not an arguer. Benign and optimistic, he entreated his
contemporaries, Jews and non-Jews alike, to become a people of the
future. And to help them to cross the gulfs among ethnicities,
religions, and cultures, he threw a plank across the abyss. As he
wrote in The Essence and Future of an International Language (1903):
Ludovik Lazarus Zamenhof, Doktoro Esperanto
[Österreichische Nationalbibliothek]
If two groups of people are separated by a stream and
know that it would be very useful to communicate, and
they see that planks for connecting the two banks lie right
at hand, then one doesn’t need to be a prophet to foresee
with certainty that sooner or later a plank will be thrown
over the stream and communication will be arranged. It’s
true that some time is ordinarily spent in wavering and
this wavering is ordinarily caused by the most senseless
pretexts: wise people say that the goal of arranging
communication is childish, since no one is busy putting
planks across the stream…; experienced people say that
their progenitors didn’t put planks across the stream and
therefore, it is utopian; learned people prove that
communication can only be a natural matter and the
human organism can’t move itself over planks etc.
Nonetheless, sooner or later, the plank is thrown across.
In time, he hoped—and, against strong evidence, believed—that this
simple plank laid down by one man would become a bridge of
words.
With the tools of modernity—reason, efficiency, pragmatism—he
sanded down the plank till it was smooth; people would cross over
without getting splinters from irregular verbs or knotty idioms.
Then, unlike most language inventors, Zamenhof renounced the
privileges of a creator, without reneging on a creator’s duties to his
progeny. He is the only language inventor on record ever to cede his
language to its users, inviting them to take his rudimentary list of
roots, combine them with a handful of affixes, and invent words for
new things, new occasions. And where roots were not to hand,
Esperantists were by fiat free to invent new ones. It didn’t matter
whether the plank was thrown across a stream or an ocean; if one
were determined to cross, it would reach.
The “international language,” as Zamenhof initially called it, was
designed not to replace national languages but to be a second
language for the world. While earlier lingua francas, such as Greek,
Latin, and French, had issued from empires, Zamenhof invented a
language that would commit its users to transcend nationalism. Free
of imperial or national identity, Esperanto would serve neither
dogma nor nationalism nor arms nor money but the conscience and
reason of its users, who had determined to become a better people of
the future. Perhaps no dream of the century was more quixotic,
except for Zamenhof’s other dream: that human beings would,
decade after decade, choose this inheritance, treasure it, and expand
its expressive reach. And yet, for well more than a century and on
six continents, people have done, and still do.
Esperantists, even in their most practical moments, have always
dreamed of change, but they have not always shared the same
dream. Zamenhof’s “international language” has been used by
anarchists, socialists, pacifists, theosophists, Bahá’ís, feminists,
Stalinists, and even McCarthyites; as sociologist Roberto Garvía puts
it, “Esperantists ended up speaking the same language, but not
dancing to the same music. ”1 Ironically, while Esperantists were
often vague about what united them, totalitarians, fascists, and
Nazis were not; sooner or later, Esperanto would always be reviled
as a cosmopolitan, subversive movement inimical to nationalism
and tainted by its Jewish origins. As we shall see, a few Esperantists
made strange bedfellows with imperial powers, but sooner or later,
they were forsaken. And being forsaken by an empire, for
Esperantists, usually meant being banned, imprisoned, or shot.
When Esperantists confronted the dreams of Hitler and of two latter-
day Josephs—Stalin and McCarthy—the results were at best
perilous, at worst murderous.
But the story of Esperanto is also a story of fantastic resilience,
adaptation, and renovation. The early concept of the fina venko—the
final triumph of Esperanto as a world language—has died a
thousand deaths, most notably in 1922, when the League of Nations
remanded a proposal to teach Esperanto in schools to a marginal
committee on intellectual cooperation. Since then the ranks of the
finavenkistoj have steadily dwindled. During the Cold War era, in
place of the fina venko, Esperantists raised the banners of human
rights, pacifism, and nuclear disarmament. In 1980, a later
generation of Esperantists would officially renounce the fina venko,
declaring themselves to be an autonomous, diasporic culture. With
the Raumists, as they were called (after the Finnish town where they
convened), Esperanto’s universalist ideology was recast in a late-
twentieth-century sensibility, askew, decentered, and skeptical of
grand narratives altogether. Instead, the Raumists addressed
themselves to the well-being, culture, and development of the
Esperanto community, devoting time and attention to Esperanto in
exchange for all manner of satisfactions: social, psychologial,
ethical, political, aesthetic, intellectual, sexual—everything, that is,
except political power and financial gain.
When I mention my work on Esperanto, I’m often asked, “How
many people speak it?” I too, have asked this question, to which
some Esperantists have offered answers. Amanda, ex-president of
the Australian Esperanto Association, replies, “How many people
collect stamps? How long is a piece of string?” Others point me to
the website of the Universal Esperanto Association, which records
“hundreds of thousands, possibly millions,” in seventy countries. The
only estimate with academic prestige is that of the late
psycholinguist Sidney Culbert, who in 1989 put the number at
between one and two million. Still, as Culbert conceded, “the
tendency to overestimate the number of speakers of one’s own
language is not uncommon”; 2 this particular psycholinguist spoke
only Esperanto at home and drove a Honda bearing plates with the
greeting “SALUTON”—Esperanto for “hello.” 3
The internet has augmented the number of learners, if not
speakers. The online lernu! course, between 2004 and 2016, chalked