Bridge of Words

In fact, the biblical narrative says nothing about the multiplication and dispersal of languages. The proverbial name for the story, from the Middle Ages on, is "the confusion of tongues" (confusio linguarum), not "the diffusion of tongues." In fact, the Hebrew word for "language" (safah, a lip rather than a tongue) is always singular in the story, as it is in the Latin Vulgate and the English King James Version. The "curse of Babel" renders all language as opaque as if it were what we call "foreign" language, and though "the same language and the same words" spoken at the beginning are spoken after the tower falls, translation has become necessary, even for speakers of the same tongue. If mortality is what it is like to live after Eden, misunderstanding—to speak perpetually in need of translation—is what it is like to live after Babel.

But the ruin of understanding was only one consequence of Babel. After destroying the tower, the builders' hedge against being "scattered abroad," God scattered them throughout the world. What better way to punish their arrogation of peoplehood for themselves, their choice to be a people? To give God his due here, we can imagine God's weariness, his exasperation with humanity. "I will never understand them," God might have thought. "I made them Eden, they sinned; I dried up the flood and they sinned again. Twice I filled their lungs with heaven and twice they spent my breath in evil. I have tried twice, twice, to make humans.

"Now I will make Israel."

When God renamed Abram Abraham, the curse of Babel was complete; with one carefully interpolated syllable, an idolator's son became the first Israelite. God's crowning revenge on the builders of Babel was the choice of Israel, and there, on Israel, God's attention rested, leaving the rabbis of the Talmud to finish off the builders of Babel. Which they most certainly did, declaring "the generation of the scattered" personae non gratae in the world to come.

The Tower of Babel story is not only a myth of misunderstanding; it is also a myth of the diaspora as an existential condition. From the Babel myth, Zamenhof intuited that the perpetual impulse of humans to stake "a name for themselves" on a piece of territory only compounded the problem of misunderstanding. And while Zamenhof accepted misunderstanding as part of the human condition, he refused to accept its human costs: lives lost to tribalism, anti-Semitism, and racism; pogroms just yesterday and perhaps a war of empires tomorrow. Instead, he set about to convince misunderstood and scattered human beings that they had the capacity, without divine intervention, to understand one another better by joining together not over land, not over a tower, but over language. (Even the people Israel, he pointed out on numerous occasions, were now among the scattered, and if they were going to claim any authentic, modern identity, they, too, needed to take the matter of language into their own hands.) Perhaps the language of Adam was given by God, but the language that would rescue Adam's and Eve's heirs from their worst impulses would be a very human thing.

2. West of Babel

Zamenhof's radically humanist revision of the "curse" of Babel sets him apart from the history of language invention in Western Europe, where Babel's curse was taken to be the doom of linguistic difference. To reverse this "curse" was not only to dream of language which was divine and perfect; it was also to dream of human beings capable of perfect understanding—beings who are different from us.

The most audacious of those who sought to reverse the "curse" of