A boy in a quarrelling city
Eliezer Zamenhof, the boy who would sign himself Ludwik and become known to the world as “Doktoro Esperanto”, was born on 15 December 1859 in Białystok, then a town in the Russian Empire and today in north-eastern Poland. He was the first of the many children of Markus Zamenhof and Rozalia, née Sofer. His father and grandfather were both teachers of French and German, and his grandfather Fabian had been a pioneer of secular learning among Białystok’s Jews. At home the family spoke Yiddish and Russian; in the streets the boy heard Polish, Belarusian and German as well.
Białystok was a crossroads of peoples: a Yiddish-speaking Jewish majority, Polish Catholics, Russian Orthodox officials, Germans and Belarusians, each living in its own language and often in mutual suspicion. Zamenhof later explained that this divided town gave his whole life its direction. As a child he concluded that much of the hatred around him came from people simply being unable to understand one another, and that a neutral common language, belonging to no nation, might help to dissolve it. He was writing plays as a boy, among them a drama about the Tower of Babel, the biblical story of how humanity lost its single tongue.
A gift for languages
Zamenhof attended a traditional cheder until about the age of thirteen. In 1873 the family moved to Warsaw, where his father taught at the Veterinary Institute and later at a secondary school, and Ludwik entered a Warsaw gymnasium. There he studied Latin and Greek alongside his modern languages; from his father he had already learned French and German, and from his Jewish upbringing, Hebrew. He would later read English and Italian as well.
The international-language idea grew with him. His first attempts at a grammar were rich and complicated; studying English, with its spare inflections, convinced him that the new language should be simple. By 1878, still a schoolboy, he had finished a project he called Lingwe uniwersala, and he and a few friends celebrated it together. His father, worried that such a hobby could harm his son’s prospects in a Tsarist state suspicious of anything unusual, is reported to have discouraged him; Zamenhof had to rebuild his work from memory and notes in the years that followed.
Medicine and the Jewish question
In 1879 Zamenhof went to Moscow to study medicine, then returned to Warsaw to complete his studies, qualifying in the mid-1880s and training further in ophthalmology, including in Vienna. He would spend his working life as an eye doctor, never wealthy, much of it treating poor Jewish patients in Warsaw.
The pogroms that swept the Russian Empire in 1881–1882 shook him deeply. Like many young Jews of his generation he turned to the proto-Zionist Hibbat Zion movement, and he helped found an early Zionist student society in Warsaw. He drifted away from that movement after 1887. In 1901 he published, in Russian, a pamphlet on what he called Hillelism, named after the sage Hillel the Elder: a proposal that Jews might live as a community bound by ethical principles rather than by nationality or territory, and that the Zionist project would struggle because Jews lacked a single common language. He later broadened the idea into Homaranismo, a universal humanist creed for people of every faith. Neither idea found much support, even among his followers, but Zamenhof called it the object of his whole life.
His Jewishness and his universalism were never really separate. He described himself as a devoted son of his people, and he said that the plight of Jews, scattered among nations, divided by language and confined by ghetto life and prejudice, was among the strongest motives behind his search for a neutral language. Yet in 1914 he declined to join a new association of Jewish Esperantists, explaining in a letter that he had become convinced every nationalism, including that of the oppressed, ultimately brought humanity unhappiness. It was the position of a man who had watched nationalisms collide in his own childhood streets.
Doktoro Esperanto
For two years Zamenhof tried to raise money to publish his language. Help came from the family of Klara Silbernik, the daughter of a Jewish merchant from Kovno, whom he married in 1887. That year a slim booklet appeared in Russian, titled International Language: Preface and Complete Textbook, signed with the pseudonym “Doktoro Esperanto”, “a doctor who hopes.” Editions in Polish, French and German soon followed, and readers began calling the language itself Esperanto.
The design was strikingly economical. A short set of grammar rules with no exceptions, a vocabulary drawn mostly from Romance and Germanic roots familiar to Europeans, regular endings that mark every noun, adjective and verb, and a system of prefixes and suffixes that lets a learner build hundreds of words from a single root. Zamenhof also gave up any personal rights to the language, insisting that it belonged to whoever used it. The booklet included a pledge card: readers could promise to learn the language once ten million others had promised to do the same.
Building a world community
Esperanto spread by correspondence, little magazines and enthusiasts’ clubs. One of the first groups was founded in Nuremberg in the late 1880s by former followers of Volapük, an earlier invented language that Esperanto soon eclipsed. Zamenhof edited and wrote, translated and answered letters, and in 1905 published the Fundamento de Esperanto, a short foundational text meant to keep the core of the language stable while letting it grow.
That August the first World Esperanto Congress met at Boulogne-sur-Mer in France, with several hundred participants from some twenty countries, reportedly 688. For many it was a revelation: people who shared no native tongue talking, joking and singing together. The congress adopted the Declaration of Boulogne, which defined Esperanto as a neutral language that did not seek to replace anyone’s mother tongue. Zamenhof deliberately stepped back from formal leadership, partly so that prejudice against him as a Russian Jew would not be turned against the language; he renounced any official role entirely at the 1912 congress in Kraków. Congresses have met almost every year since.
Translator and writer
Zamenhof believed a language proves itself through literature, and he set out to supply one. He translated Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Gogol’s The Government Inspector, Schiller’s The Robbers, Goethe’s Iphigenia in Tauris, Heinrich Heine’s The Rabbi of Bacharach, and work by the Polish novelist Eliza Orzeszkowa and the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem. Above all, he translated much of the Hebrew Bible into Esperanto from the original, including Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Psalms and Ecclesiastes.
He also wrote poems in the language, among them “La Espero” (“The Hope”), which became the Esperanto movement’s anthem. Long before he was known for Esperanto, he had written, around 1879, one of the first grammars of Yiddish, proposing among other things that it be written in the Latin alphabet; the full text was published only in 1982.
A modest man
For all his fame among Esperantists, Zamenhof remained a working doctor of modest means. From 1897 to 1915 the family lived on Dzika Street in Warsaw’s Jewish district, where he saw patients and worked on Esperanto in the evenings; the street was renamed in his honour in 1931. Contemporaries describe him as shy, gentle and self-effacing. He was made a member of the French Legion of Honour in 1905 and a commander of Spain’s Order of Isabella the Catholic in 1909, and he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize twelve times without receiving it.
He and Klara had three children: Adam, who became an ophthalmologist like his father, and two daughters, Zofia, a paediatrician, and Lidia, who became a well-known Esperanto teacher and writer and joined the Baháʼí Faith. Klara was an active partner in the movement and carried on its work after his death.
War, death and what came after
The First World War shattered the internationalist hopes of Zamenhof’s generation, and his health, long weakened by heart disease, declined. He died in Warsaw on 14 April 1917, at fifty-seven, and was buried in the Jewish cemetery on Okopowa Street.
The movement he founded was persecuted by both of the great tyrannies that followed. In Mein Kampf Hitler cast Esperanto as a tool of Jewish conspiracy, and Esperantists were persecuted in Nazi Germany; in Stalin’s Soviet Union many were arrested during the purges. All three of Zamenhof’s children were murdered in the Holocaust. Adam was arrested in 1939 and shot by the Germans at Palmiry in January 1940. Zofia and Lidia were deported from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka in 1942 and killed there.
A language that survived
Esperanto never became the world’s second language, as Zamenhof dreamed, but it became by far the most successful invented language in history: a living tongue with its own literature, its own press, annual world congresses, and a small number of native speakers raised in Esperanto-speaking families. Estimates of the total number of speakers vary widely and are disputed, but it has been learned by people on every continent for more than a century.
His birthday, 15 December, is kept by Esperantists as Zamenhof Day. Hundreds of streets and squares bear his name, as does a minor planet; in Israel some street signs call him simply by his Hebrew name, Eliezer. In 2017, the centenary of his death, UNESCO included him among its eminent personalities for his contribution to dialogue between cultures. His deeper legacy is the idea itself: that understanding across borders is something ordinary people can build with their own hands, one learned word at a time.
Sources & further reading
L. L. Zamenhof, Wikipedia · 102nd anniversary of Ludwik Zamenhof’s death, Jewish Historical Institute · Zamenhof, Lazarus Ludwig, Jewish Encyclopedia (1906) · Klara Zamenhof, Wikipedia · Adam Zamenhof, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.