bring Esperanto to the attention of the nascent League of Nations.
Just as Zamenhof was glimpsing, with his characteristic
grandiosity, a wider role for Esperanto on the world stage, he
became aware of more anti-Semitic attacks. This time, to his
astonishment, they were written by and for Esperantists. “I had the
illusion,” he wrote, “that among Esperantists [this] was not possible,
at least publicly. But in the May number of Pola Esperantisto
appeared an article that banished my illusion.” 108 A journalist
named Andrzej Niemojewski published a farrago of slurs against
putative Jewish customs, which included circumcision with a stone
and the mutilation of corpses. In a preface, the editor praised
Niemojewski as a “pioneer of liberal thought,” who had done “deep
research … in the Hebrew talmud, that frightful book of
superstitions and hatred of everything non-Jewish.” 109 In a searing
letter to the editor, Zamenhof pointed to the hatred expressed in the
Polish press “written in the civilized twentieth century … The
present population … persecutes Jews in a most cruel manner, while
the entire sin of the Jews consists only in this, that Jews also want
to live and have human rights.” 110 Instead of publishing the letter,
the editor ridiculed protests from unnamed Jews which “clearly
showed us the uncultured quality of the talmud-defenders.” It was
time to declare open war on the Talmud, wrote the editor, an
“ignoble spot on our brightness, human ethics and dogmas. ”111
Zamenhof pressed on with his proposal for a “neutral-human
religion.” Within two years of stepping down at Kraków, he told
Bourlet and Sebert that under the aegis of the upcoming Universal
Congress in Paris, he planned to convene the first congress for what
he now called a “Neutral-Human Religion.” Bourlet and Sebert
sensed an attempt to avoid the obstacles Zamenhof had faced in
Boulogne. This Universal Congress was to be the largest ever—
nearly four thousand had registered—and to avoid controversy,
Bourlet and Sebert urged Zamenhof to hold his congress in
Switzerland following the gathering in Paris. 112 He agreed, but in
early August, war broke out. The Paris Congress opened and was
immediately closed, but Ludovik and Klara Zamenhof, stranded in
Cologne en route to Paris, were not on hand. Instead, they were
forced to make a circuitous, two-week journey home to Warsaw, by
way of Denmark, Sweden, and Finland. According to Boulton, this
“was the beginning of his long dying.” 113
In fact, Zamenhof’s “long dying” had begun some time before. A
heavy smoker, he had had symptoms of heart disease for at least a
decade: shortness of breath and chest pain. In the early months of
the war, his condition worsened. By November, an “attack,”
probably angina rather than a heart attack, forced him to reduce his
work regime severely. His son, Adam, also an eye doctor, took over
his morning clinic and Zamenhof confined his medical practice to
two afternoon hours daily. The family was more comfortable
financially, and the following summer, while Warsaw was occupied
by German troops, the Zamenhofs left Dzika Street in the Jewish
quarter for a more spacious, seven-room abode at 41 Królewska
Street, with a view of the Saski Park. There he went for daily
outings: sometimes a ride, sometimes a stroll. There he entertained
important Esperantist visitors—the poet and translator Antoni
Grabowski, the pacifist Leo Belmont, and his future biographer
Edmond Privat, to whom he confided his dimmed hopes for the
future of human relations.
While Esperantists all over Europe fought for their national and
imperial armies, Hodler’s UEA, operating from neutral Switzerland,
implemented a service ensuring the safe passage of an estimated
two hundred thousand letters among enemy countries. 114 In 1916,
again thanks to the UEA, Esperantist POWs received a Christmas gift
of food, tobacco, and Esperanto books and magazines. 115 Hodler, a
pacifist in a time of war, looked ahead, exhorting Esperantists to
take the lead in rebuilding postwar Europe:
It is now the cannon’s turn to speak, but it will not sound
for eternity.… If we wish to build a new house on the
present ruins, we need those workers who are not
frightened away by the difficulties of reconstruction. Such
workers are the elites of various countries, who, without
prejudice and in a spirit of mutual toleration, will cast
their gaze above the horizon of national frontiers, and will
become conscious of a harmonious civilisation, broad
enough to include all national cultures, tolerant enough to
consider their diversity as a beneficial necessity.… Let
Esperantists be the embryo of those future elites. 116
Hector Hodler, heir apparent
For Zamenhof, despite the hopes he placed in the generation of
Hodler and Privat, it was a grim time. He was ill and weak,
reluctant to get enough rest and unwilling to stop smoking. His
beloved daughter Zofia was in the Ukraine, unable to return to
occupied Warsaw, and in 1916, his brother, Alexander, who had
tried and failed to start a Jewish agricultural colony in Brazil, 117
committed suicide rather than fight in the Russian army.
All his business seemed unfinished; perversely, Zamenhof seemed
to need it that way. No sooner had he completed his translation of
the Hebrew Bible (1907–1914) than he added the Koran and the
“holy books of Buddhism” to his list of world literature in need of
translation. 118 And even with the Language Committee in place to
anchor the living language to the Fundamento, he brooded on
language reform in the fear that someday, the work of reforming
Esperanto would be given over to “people with famous names, but
absolutely no experience in our affair … We must solve this
unhappy question, which constantly hangs over our language like
the sword of Damocles. ”119
As the war groaned on, frontiers shifting as armies shuffled a few
miles north, then a few south, Europe itself came to seem unfinished.
Like Hodler, Zamenhof envisioned postwar rebuilding as an
opportunity for social transformation. But whereas Hodler had
addressed himself to the Esperantists, Zamenhof audaciously turned
to the diplomats of Europe. His 1915 open letter, “After the Great
War,” dares the diplomats at the peace table to do more than move
borders on a map: “Proclaim loudly … the following elementary,
natural, but thus far, unfortunately unobserved principle: Every land
moral y and material y belongs of equal right to al its sons.” He called
for a “United States of Europe,” which required that minorities be
guaranteed freedom of language (or dialect) and religion, and he
urged that a permanent pan-European tribunal be set up to
remediate injustice and adjudicate conflicts.
No longer was he trying to secure the survival of Esperanto. In