At the end of 1878, when Zamenhof was still in secondary school, the first project of a 'lingwe uniwersala' was ready. He and a group of friends happily recited, very much under the influence of the educated ideas of human brotherhood, the first poetic lines in the new language:
Malamikete de las nacjes kado, kado, jam temp' esta! La tot' homoze in familje konunigare so deba![11]
But at this time Zamenhof still hesitated to go public with his project: 'Anticipating only mockery and persecution, I decided to hide my work from everyone.'[12] He finished secondary school in the summer of 1879 and left for Moscow to study medicine. He was there when, in March 1881, Tsar Alexander II was assassinated by anarchists; it is no exag- geration to say that this event had vital consequences for Zamenhof's future activities. Following the assassination, the political atmosphere in Russia degenerated rapidly, particularly for Jews. In April pogroms began. They spread across large parts of Russia and lasted for over a year, finally resulting in the greatest sustained persecution hitherto suffered by the Jews in the modern era. What made these pogroms even more significant was the fact that they not only displayed the cruelties of the ignorant but were accompanied by the silent and even direct approval of the Tsarist authorities.
Among the Jews of Russia the disillusionment accompanying this new explosion of anti-Semitism was particularly profound. The policies of the murdered Tsar had brought a number of changes for the better—changes which, especially among the more assimilationist Jews, encouraged wide- spread hope for the gradual achievement of equality of rights. But now, in 1881, the Russian Jews were made painfully aware that anti-Semitism was by no means exterminated and that their efforts to assimilate had encountered insuperable barriers. Many were persuaded of the need for a collective Jewish renaissance—and the search for a solution to the Jewish problem not through adaptation to a hostile environment but through a national rebirth that would restore to the Jews a territory of their own. In many Russian cities, beginning in the winter of 1881-82, groups emerged which, calling themselves Hovevei Zion,15 spread the idea of reviving a Jewish state in Palestine. A stimulus to this new, pre-Zionist movement came primarily from the brochure Autoemancipation! of Leon Pinsker,[13]a Jewish physician in Odessa. Pinsker had formerly been an ardent sup- porter of Haskalah, but in 1881, his hopes of continuing progress toward harmonious coexistence between Jews and Russians definitively dashed, he changed his view radically, beginning to argue among his fellow Jews that their salvation could consist only in self-sufficiency, national solidar- ity and the reacquisition of a territorial base.[14]
Zamenhof, now experiencing the rise of anti-Jewish feelings in Moscow, was also raised, as we have seen, in the ethos of those intellectuals who were most shocked at the return of anti-Semitism. It is in this light that we read his bitter observation in the letter to Michaux: 'I grew convinced that my love [for the Russian language and the Russian realm] was repaid with hate.' He added that people who claim a monopoly on the proper definition of Russian-ness saw in him the Jew 'only a foreigner without rights. Thus, Zamenhof was pushed back into his Jewishness, and as a consequence felt himself moved to help first those whom people 'hate, look down on and oppress'—his Jewish brothers and sisters.[15] While he was still in Moscow he worked on a grammar of the Yiddish language,[16]and it was also in Moscow that he was caught up in the idea of founding a colony 'in some uninhabited part of the world', from which an inde- pendent Jewish state might in due course emerge.[17]
In August 1881 Zamenhof returned to Warsaw to continue his studies. Shortly thereafter, the unexpected occurred: at Christmas a pogrom was launched against the Warsaw Jews. This event had the definitive effect of causing Zamenhof to focus his attention on the Jewish problem.[18] The resurgence of anti-Jewish activity politicized the hitherto non-political student.[19] He joined the ranks of the pioneers of the colonizing move- ment and in February 1882 founded, along with other Jewish students, the first Zionist society in Warsaw.[20] In the following years, primarily up to 1884, Zamenhof actively participated in the debates about reconstruc- tion of the old Israel or creation of a new homeland for Jews, among other things contributing articles to the Russian-language Jewish weekly Razsvet (Dawn), published in Saint Petersburg.[21]
But Zamenhof's activities, intense though they may have been, did not last long. Little by little, even as he prepared himself for a career as an eye doctor, he began to doubt whether Zionism would ever bring a solu- tion to the Jewish question, and to wonder whether he had the right to devote so much energy to his own people while leaving aside concerns for humanity as a whole. As he wrote to Michaux, from his earliest childhood his thoughts had always been 'dominated by the "human', but because of the wretched state of my people, there often awoke in my heart the idea of the "patriof who struggled with the "human"'.[22] In the year 1887 this conflict was decided in favor of 'the human': Zamenhof completely discontinued his activities on behalf of a territory for Jews,[23] devoting himself instead to the language which he presented to the public in that year under the pseudonym 'Doktoro Esperanto'. In the two decades that followed, his thoughts were dominated by the idea of a worldwide, neu- tral language that might erase not only hatred and persecution against Jews but 'all national hatreds'.[24] It was not that Zamenhof stopped think- ing about the Jews: he maintained his efforts to help the oppressed Jewish people, and it is evident that these efforts helped drive the enthusiasm that he dedicated to Esperanto. But the desire to help the Jews was now firmly embedded in the broader desire to contribute to the pacification and unification of all humanity.
Yet Zamenhof's inner thoughts are barely reflected in the 'First Book' (Unua Libro), as his initial 1887 publication on the language came to be known. Its introduction expresses the idealism of its author only moder- ately, primarily emphasizing practical arguments. It draws attention to the waste of time and material goods caused by the need to learn several foreign languages, noting how useful it would be if all people needed to depend only on the knowledge of two languages—their own, and the newly pro- posed neutral, international language. Linked to this practical argument were more idealistic formulations: Zamenhof asserts that the 'differences among languages present the essence of the differences and recipro- cal enmity between nations',[25] and he speaks of the special utility that a neutral language would have in countries with multilingual populations, thereby revealing that he was inspired by and continued to think about the situation in Russia. His choice of the pseudonym 'Esperanto', soon to be adopted for the language itself, reinforced this idealism.
That the language project was able to come into being at all is due, however, primarily to the practical side of Zamenhof's thinking. In the First Book he declares, An international language, like all national lan- guages, is a social possession, and the author renounces forever his per- sonal rights to it.'[26] In his 'Second Book' (Dua Libro) of 1888 he specifies that 'I do not want to be the creator of the language; I only want to be its initiator.[27] He believed that Esperanto 'must live, grow and advance according to the same laws as those by which all living languages are elaborated';[28] he did not wish 'to create, for his personal pleasure, the entire language from head to toe'.[29] Expressing for the first time the idea of the development of an international language on the basis of collective use, independently of personal authority, Zamenhof assigned to human society and to everyday practice the task of judging, sustaining and devel- oping Esperanto.