ghost of Hillelism was to rise again.
5. Homaranismo
Six months before the Geneva Congress of 1906, Zamenhof
published, in Ruslanda Esperantisto, the twelve-point Dogmoj de
Hilelismo (Dogmas of Hillelism). Like his earlier Hillelist pamphlet,
published under the pseudonym “Homo Sum,” this one also
appeared pseudonymously, signed by a fictitious “Circle of
Hillelists.” In this iteration, Hillelism was to function as a
community-based, ethical quality control on religion, transacted in
Esperanto, with a few key social institutions attached: Hillelist
temples, religious schools, and elder-care programs. The spread of
Hillelism was to be nonviolent, a quiet, gradual cultural
transformation that left Hillelists free to speak “family” languages at
home. The Dogmoj entitled all Hillelists to their chosen or inherited
religions, but bound them to reject religious principles that failed to
meet the severe ethical standards of Hillelism, including nationalistic
ideals; national, racial, and religious chauvinism; and “doctrines
offensive to reason.” Hence, Zamenhof exhorted Esperantists of all
faiths and ethnicities to adopt a hyphenated Hillelist identity: not “I
am Swiss” but “I am Swiss-Hillelist.” In fact, since nations belonged
to all their inhabitants, of whatever ethnicity, Hillelists were to
reject country names based on ethnicity. For such countries, new
names were to be fashioned by combining the word lando (a
country) or regno (a sovereign state) and the name of the capital.
Thus Russians would call themselves, after their capital,
Peterburgregnaj-Hilelistoj; Poles, after theirs, Varsovilandaj-
Hilelistoj.
By March 1906, Zamenhof had come to realize that what was true
for Esperanto in France was also true for Hillelism: Jewishness, even
the mere perception of it, was too great a liability. He would do to
Hillelism what the French had done to him: rebrand and dejudaize
the Dogmoj as a “philosophically pure monotheism.” He now called it
Homaranismo—a hard-to-translate term meaning, roughly,
Humanity-ism.
Criticism was swift and harsh. Although Zamenhof had tried to
obscure its Jewish origins, Homaranismo openly espoused a spiritual
mission; even without invoking the Jewish rabbi Hillel, the doctrine
was distasteful to the rationalist French elite. Beaufront savaged the
project: “While we await the opening of the temples (Homaranist
temples!) … we could perform the rites beneath the green of the
forests, in green robes covered in gold or silver stars. Very poetic,
isn’t it?” 81 Another influential critic was the Lithuanian priest
Alexander Dombrovski, who charged Zamenhof with passing off the
central dogmas of Christianity as Homaranist. And Zamenhof’s
stated intention to present Homaranismo in Geneva met with a fierce
backlash from the movement’s Western European leaders. In the
months leading up to the Geneva Congress, as mathematician and
Esperanto historian Christer Kiselman has shown, he began
backpedaling. 82 Homaranismo was liable to be perceived as a
religion, he feared, not a “neutral bridge”; non-Esperantists would
quail at having to learn a new language. It was all too utopian.
Zamenhof consulted Javal, who warned him to avoid even
mentioning Homaranismo. Anxious letters flew back and forth
between Warsaw and Paris until Javal, worried about Zamenhof’s
health, advised him to forgo Geneva. He refused.
That June, after a ferocious pogrom in his native Białystok took
some two hundred Jewish lives, 83 Zamenhof began to write his
speech for the Geneva Congress. The message was urgent, and
stripped of obfuscation: in the end, it was neither about
Homaranismo nor about Hilelismo, but about Jews. In graphic and
unsparing terms, he decried the violence:
In the streets of my unhappy birthplace, savages with axes
and iron stakes have flung themselves, like the fiercest
beasts, against the quiet villagers, whose sole crime … was
that they spoke another language and had another
people’s religion than that of the savages. For this reason
they smashed the skulls and poked out the eyes of men and
women, of broken old men and helpless infants! 84
The Geneva speech was a watershed; in it, Zamenhof consecrated
Esperanto to the interna ideo, the “inner idea.” “According to your
advice,” he told Javal, “I threw out of my congress speech the last
part touching on Homaranismo—and speak only of the interna ideo of
Esperantism.” 85 The Declaration of Boulogne meant that the “inner
idea” could not be specified, since all ideological commitments were
the private affair of Esperantists. But by invoking the “inner idea” in
Geneva, Zamenhof identified it not only with interethnic harmony
but also with a mission to uproot anti-Semitism. Homaranismo would
wear the “inner idea” as a mask that enabled his Jewish outrage, as
well as his Jewish-based ethics, to pass in a wider world.
At Geneva, the “inner idea” had yet another use: Zamenhof used
it as a tool for marginalizing those who had opposed him at
Boulogne, portraying them as soulless individuals who regarded
Esperanto merely as a language. In his Geneva speech, Zamenhof
exhorted Esperantists to “break down, break down the walls”
between peoples, defying and mocking those—Beaufront chief
among them—who insisted that “Esperanto is only a language.” He
called for resistance from the “first fighters for Esperanto,” refusing
to let secularists and pragmatists “tear out of our hearts that part of
Esperantism which is the most important, the most sacred.” And a
year later, at the 1907 congress in Cambridge, England, he used the
“inner idea” to avenge the Boulogne Congress’s failure to specify a
democratic constitution for the Esperanto community. The
Esperantists, he claimed, were “citizens of an ideal democracy,” a
para-people, a quasi-nation, under its own green flag. He called this
entity Esperantujo:
Many people join Esperantism through mere curiosity, for
a hobby or possibly even for some hoped-for profit; but
from the moment when they make their first visit to
Esperantujo, in spite of their own wishes, they are more
and more drawn to and submit to the laws of this country.
Little by little Esperantujo will become a school for future
brotherly humanity. 86
Homaranismo, he believed, would school the diverse and voluntary
citizens of Esperantujo to become a people of the future.
The “inner idea” was an ancient prophetic strategy—those who
had “ears to hear” would understand—designed for modern
individuals of conscience: “I am leaving each person to clarify for
himself the essence of the idea, as he wishes.” There is pathos here,
the inventor of the language resorting to circumlocution to tell his
truth; but heroism too, for just as he had licensed the Esperantists to
become builders of the language, Zamenhof was entrusting to them
the invention, and perpetual reinvention, of its ideology. And as
Garvía has shown, so they did. In the years leading up to World War