Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof created the language of Esperanto to bridge the language divide around the world. Zamenhof has been chosen as a Humanist Hero by Ian Fantom, David Curtis and Paul Gubbins.

Dr L.L. Zamenhof by Ian Fantom

Dr L L Zamenhof was a life-long campaigner for humanitarian values. He developed a form of humanism, which he called ‘Homaranismo’, meaning ‘philosophy of belonging to the human race’. It was an inclusive humanism, based on what was common in the world’s religions. The type of God one believed in, if one did believe in one, wasn’t the point. The point was how to live together as co-operative humans, rather than as animals.

It all started when young Leyzer Samenhof was growing up in the 1860s in the far-western Russian town of Bielostok, then in Lithuania. His father was influenced by Haskala, the Jewish Enlightenment, which encouraged education and integration, with a strong emphasis on languages.

But how could this have made sense to the young Leyzer, as he looked out onto the street and saw four language groups fighting amongst themselves? What was this outside world that they were supposed to be integrating into?

Language was, of course, the main identifier of ethnic group, but it was also needed for practical purposes of communication. Yet as soon as a person opens his mouth he may convey an ethnic superiority or inferiority, depending on the language he chooses.

Leyzer moved on to secondary school in Warsaw, where his father had gained a higher position, but now he adopted a Christian name, Ludovik. It was while he was at that school that he worked on his idea of a common language, which would be ethnically neutral. At least, he thought, that would remove the practical problem of communicating without immediately being thrown into language wars. Such a language would be learned as a second language in schools, and so it would have to be easy to master. Little remains of his first project, apart from the words of a song which he and a group of friends sung together.

Ludovik Samenhof went on to study medicine at Moscow University, and it was there that he started again on his language project, after his father had burned his original papers, believing he was wasting his time. That was the origin of what is now known as Esperanto, the pseudonym under which Dr L L Zamenhof was to publish his new language in 1887.

For the next twenty years, the new language went from strength to strength. The eureka moment came at the first Universala Kongreso de Esperanto in Boulgne-sur-Mer in 1905, when 688 people from 20 countries, who had previously only corresponded in the language, met for the first time, and found that they could communicate freely, face to face, across language barriers.

Zamenhof had been expecting opposition to Esperanto from the nations who were vieing for their own languages to be accepted as world languages. That would have meant France, Britain and the US. Instead, he found the language was warmly accepted in those countries. Indeed, a certain Marquis Louis de Beaufront was building up an Esperanto association in France which would come to dominate the whole of the Esperanto movement. In 1907 Zamenhof was warmly received by the authorities in London and Cambridge, during the third Universala Kongreso.

However, there was something wrong. Although Marquis Louis de Beaufront was building up the French Esperanto movement, he was also expressing views opposed to the humanitarian purpose of Esperanto. The Esperantists were perplexed as to Beaufront’s intentions.

In 1906, Zamenhof prepared to launch his ideas on Homaranismo at the second Universala Kongreso in Geneva, but his friends advised him not to. Instead, he presented just the first part of his speech, in which he spoke of recent pogroms, saying, that it wasn’t the Russian people who were responsible for the butchery in Bielostok, it wasn’t the Tartars and Armenians elsewhere; they only wished to live in peace. “Now it’s quite clear”, he continued, “that those responsible are a group of despicable thugs, who by various nefarious means, with widely put about lies and calumnies, are artfully creating terrible hate between some ethnic groups and others”.

In 1907 Zamenhof agreed to allow Beaufront to represent him at a recently formed academic body for the selection of an international language. It wasn’t clear what authority this body had, and the whole thing was later exposed as a fraud. Instead of representing Zamenhof, Beaufront put forward his own language, thus creating a split in the Esperanto movement. Only after Beaufront’s death was it revealed that he was not a marquis, but plain M. Louis Chevrier. The source of the funding was never discovered, but it was clear that the Esperanto movement had been usurped by a group of French speakers, opposed to the movement’s humanitarian values.

In 1909, Zamenhof was reluctant to attend the Esperanto congress in Barcelona, fearing a whipping up of antisemitism by Beaufront and others, in order to undermine the cause. He eventually did attend, but refused to take to the stage.

When war broke out in 1914, Zamenhof carried on developing his ideas. He envisaged something like the League of Nations. In 1916 he drafted out a ‘Letter to Diplomacy’, in which he pinpointed the key factor in avoiding mass butchery in the future: that every country should “morally and materially fully belong to all of its people”. He died in 1917.

Not much has changed since those days. We are at war. Humanitarian and Humanist values are being cast aside. Zamenhof had realised that languages and religions, which should have been uniting peoples, were being used to divide them. He realised that conflicts can be provoked by third parties. In 1908 he told the Esperantists: “From the time past, we should learn lessons for the time to come”. They didn’t, though. In every generation for a hundred years there were similar interventions, which ensured that in the long run nothing changed.

Zamenhof is my humanist hero, because so many lessons could be now be learned from a study of the Zamenhof story which could lead to a more humanitarian world today.

Ludoviko Lazaro Zamenhof by Paul Gubbins

Ludoviko Lazaro Zamenhof (1859-1917) was a Polish doctor and optician who wrote the international language Esperanto. Esperanto, published in 1887, has speakers in more than 100 countries of the world and is among the most widely used languages on the internet. Because of its logical and regular structure – based, like humanism, on reason – Esperanto can be acquired far more speedily than languages such as English, French, German or Spanish. At the same time it is an expressive language with a rich original and translated literature. The Scottish Esperanto poet, William Auld, was the first writer in this language to be recommended – in 1999 – for the Nobel prize for literature.

Zamenhof might have been surprised to discover himself described as a humanist. He was brought up in the Jewish faith but outgrew the confines of his religion. His international language – easy to learn, and therefore a tool to help bring together different peoples of the world – was to be but a part of a wider universalist scheme he termed “hillelism” (after the Hebrew scholar Hillel).

Hillelism (“hilelismo” in Esperanto) would emphasise humanity and herald a universal neutral “religion” (“religio ne?trale-homa”) with humankind at its centre. The neutral language Esperanto would break down the barriers of religion, race, creed and colour and liberate the essential humanity in everyone. God, for Zamenhof, became a vague mysterious power (“forto mistera”) analogous to the spirituality all of us – whether religious not – experience in the presence of sublimity: a mountain, a symphony, a Coronation class locomotive, or whatever sends that shiver down the spine.

Zamenhof’s supporters in the Esperanto movement urged him not to pursue hillelism. The idea, they believed, was too avantgarde, simply too crazy, and would be likely to taint the progress of the more acceptable international language. Zamenhof bowed to their wishes. Nevertheless his language flourishes and, through countless meetings and gatherings every year, where speakers of different languages convene without the need for interpreting or translation, an essential part of Zamenhof’s humanist ideal is realised.

Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof by David Curtis

My humanist hero, Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof, was born on December 15, 1859, in Bialystok, Poland,. He was a doctor and linguist who dreamed of a universal second language that could unite people around the world. He had grown up in a very contentious, divisive location in Poland, where there were speakers of at least four different languages near each other, and this led to a lot of ethnic animosity. Zamenhof’s analysis was that they couldn’t understand each other and that they were segregated into enclaves by their languages. Because he was a humanist, Zamenhof decided to create an easily learned second language that could be used to transcend barriers.

According to some experiments, Esperanto is about five times easier to learn than “natural” languages such as French or German. Writing under the pseudonym Doktoro Esperanto (Doctor Hopeful) and drawing on a variety of Indo-European languages, including English, Spanish, German, and French, Zamenhof created a language with a simple syntax and morphology, which he eventually called Esperanto. Importantly, a few years after he had fine-tuned his language, Zamenhof gave up control of it to its users. Esperanto, which sounds like Italian to many non-speakers, is still learned and used by people around the world, but it’s by no means a widely spoken language, because, in my experience, professional language teachers give it little support, for fear of losing their power over international communication. Estimates peg the number of Esperanto speakers worldwide at around half a million to a few million. Many of them are concentrated in Japan, Korea, Brazil, Bulgaria, and Poland. There’s a tendency for people in countries whose languages are rarely learned internationally to learn Esperanto. Like me, they learn it by private study, helped enormously in modern times by the internet.

The closest thing to a universal human language today is English, but English in many ways fails to live up to Zamenhof’s dream, which was to help create a more egalitarian world. He would say that the widespread use of English is the right result with the wrong language. It will permanently classify most of the world as second-class citizens. Zamenhof invented the language because, although he was born a Jew, he was a humanist. His philosophy was expressed in the following humanistic terms:

“I am a human being, and I believe that our ideals are human, linked to the country of origin. Every ideal which brings hatred among peoples and entails the power of one ethnicity over another is nothing but human egoism, which sooner or later must disappear and to which disappearance I must contribute according to my abilities. I believe that every people is equally a part of human kind, and I value every person only according to his personal values and actions, and not according to his/her origin. Every offence or persecution of people because they belong to a different ethnicity, with a different language or religion, is a barbarity. I believe that a country does not belong to a particular group of people, but equally to everyone who lives in it, regardless of their language or religion. The mixing of the country’s interests with those of one or other group of people, language or religion I regard it as reminiscent of barbarian times, when there was only the right of fist and sword. I believe that in his/her own family life each person has the natural and indisputable right to speak whatever language or dialect he/she wants and to confess whatever religion he/she wants; nevertheless, when communicating with people from other origins he/she must, when it is possible, aim to use a neutral language and to live according to neutral religious principles. Every attempt by a person to impose his/her language or religion to other people when it is not absolutely necessary, I regard as a barbarity.”

Accordingly, he invented a neutral language, and he is my humanist hero.

These posts are part of a series written by members, friends and Distinguished Supporters of the British Humanist Association about their own “humanist heroes”.

You can find out more at www.humanism.org.uk/humanism/humanist-tradition/heroes

Ian Fantom is an information scientist and a researcher into the recent history of Esperanto in Britain.

Paul Gubbins is a member of the South Cheshire and North Staffordshire Humanist Group. He had no idea he was a humanist until he read an article about it in the 1960s in a Sunday colour supplement. Suddenly he realised the article was describing his beliefs and giving a name to them. At the same time he realised he was not alone in pursuing opinions that some of his classmates considered “heathen”. He now visits schools to talk about humanism and loves to see the same light going on among young people with no religious faith and – up to that moment – no name for it. Paul Gubbins teaches media law at Staffordshire University.

David Curtis is a retired teacher who actively supported the Primary French Project in Britain, from 1965 to 1970, in order to provide primary-school children with a second language, and when the project was shelved because French was too complicated, he discovered Esperanto and realised that it was exactly what was needed. He has been a humanist all his life, and in 1958, when he was a part-time youth leader as well as a full-time teacher, he welcomed H.J. Blackham to his club, to give a talk under the heading, ”Why We Should Be Good”.

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