Speakers of ‘Jewish’ Esperanto meet in Italy

Two-thousand scholars and enthusiasts of Esperanto descended on Turin in northern Italy this week. Esperanto is a 136-year-old artificial language with Jewish roots, which Adolf Hitler condemned in “Mein Kampf,” in which he connected it to a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world.

After the war, the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin also targeted Esperanto. Ayatollah Khomeini initially urged Iranians to learn Esperanto after the Revolution, but he appeared to lose interest in it as he found that the Baha’i faith embraced it.

At the Polytechnic University of Turin, site of the 108th congress of the World Esperanto Association (UEA), interpreters are unnecessary, as participants — from more than 120 countries — come to speak Esperanto.

The association estimates, based on sales of textbooks and local society memberships, that “the number of people with some knowledge of Esperanto is in the hundreds of thousands and possibly millions.”

The language dates to 1887, when Polish ophthalmologist LL Zamenhof (1859-1917), who was Jewish, created Esperanto as a second language to be used internationally. Earlier in the decade, he tried to standardize Yiddish. (The root of the word Esperanto means “hope.”)

“It’s not clear exactly when Zamenhof gave up his Yiddish project. Still, the palimpsest of Yiddish in Esperanto remains clear: it was Yiddish, a mongrel of Germanic, Semitic, and Slavic words, that modeled for Zamenhof an international language,” wrote Esther Schor, an English professor at Princeton University, on the Yiddish Book Center website.

“What had happened to Yiddish over a millennium, in mass migrations of Jews from Western to Eastern Europe and back, Zamenhof would make happen to Esperanto — but at his writing desk, and in just a few years,” she added.

Zamenhof planned Esperanto,  which arose at a time when Europe was plagued by antisemitism and pogroms, to have a simple grammar, for ease of learning.

“Esperanto was born in the same era that the modern Hebrew revival was,” Amri Wandel, a senior astrophysicist at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and vice president of the World Esperanto Association, told JNS. “Some Jews opted for Hebrew, while others went for Esperanto.”

Many Esperanto speakers appreciate that the language’s founder was Jewish, and an estimated 100 speakers can be found in Israel, where they host weekly meetings, according to Wandel, who learned Esperanto 50 years ago.

When he began studying the language, he met Holocaust survivors who had learned it in Europe, he said. More recently, Wandel added terms from his field to the language, including “praeksplodo or “Big Bang.” (The best-known Esperanto word is probably mirinda (amazing) which is the name of a soft drink, which PepsiCo distributes.)

Paul Frommer, clinical business communication professor emeritus at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business, is a linguist who created the Na’vi language for James Cameron’s 2009 film “Avatar.”

“Esperanto is by far the most successful of all artificial languages,” he told JNS.

Frommer, who does not speak Esperanto, thinks that its success shows that “well-constructed” languages can function as natural languages do. 

Some 2,000 people speak Esperanto as a first language, Wandel told JNS. (George Soros has been said to be a native Esperanto speaker, although that has been disputed.) Frommer told JNS he finds it inspiring that so many people speak the artificial language as a first language.

Esperanto was spoken in the 2004 film “Blade: Trinity,” and it appears in some of the signs in the 1940 silent Charlie Chaplin film “The Great Dictator” which parodied Nazi Germany.

The founder had three children, all of whom were murdered in the Holocaust. Agreat-granddaughter, Dr. Margaret Zaleski-Zamenhof, told JNS that she remains active in the Esperanto community and plans to attend the Congress and “represent the family.” 

Esperanto appears poised to make further inroads in Africa. Next year, the congress will be held in Tanzania — the first time it will come to the African continent.