An International Language for an Empire of Humanity: L. L. Zamenhof and the Imperial Russian Origins of Esperanto

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article emphasizes Esperanto's imperial Russian origins as an essential frame for understanding the larger history of Esperanto and its creator, L. L. Zamenhof (1859–1917). Despite Esperanto's global popularity in the early twentieth century, historians have little explored the history of this international auxiliary language and the utopian philosophical principles that Zamenhof invested in Esperanto's mission to transform Jews, Russia, and the world. Yet scholars have recently reconsidered Zamenhof as a political actor who launched Esperanto in 1887 as a means of solving the Jewish Question. While building from their work, this article integrates the history of Esperanto into the history of late imperial Russia. The fraught political culture of the late Russian empire inspired a variety of radical, utopian ideological movements and Esperanto should be counted among them. Zamenhof offered Esperanto as a program for uniting all the world's peoples into a moral community of global citizens bound together by a shared international auxiliary language and universalist ethics. Conceived in the multiethnic borderlands of a Russian empire that he felt had failed him and his fellow Jews, Esperanto was Zamenhof's utopian vision for a harmonious empire of humanity.