Lidia

To thejews, their own ways were the precious legacy ofgenerations - their bond through the ages to Moses and the Hebrew prophets, back to the very Covenant God had made with Abraham. When they were tormented in the street, beaten and called 'mangy Jew' and 'onion- eaters', such cruelty only convinced thejews that their own ways were best. They never fought back, but withstood the blows, trusting that God would send them the Messiah and lead them back to their ancient homeland, Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel. 'Next year', they always said at the close of the Passover service, 'injerusalem.'

The Jews saw their persecution as an inevitable part of the suffering they must endure during their exile. Those Jews who were martyred because of their faith, they believed, died for the 'sanctification of the name of God'. When, in the seventeenth century, a hundred thousand Jews were massacred during a decade of violence which had begun with a bloody Cossack uprising in the Ukraine, many Jews thought this unprecedented holocaust a sure sign that the coming of the Messiah must be near and their sufferings would soon end.

During the late 1700S, the Kingdom of Poland was abolished and its territory divided among Russia, Austria and Germany. The eastern territory became part of the Russian Empire. After 1815 the central part of Poland, which included Warsaw, became a semi-autonomous kingdom, subject to Russian rule. The Russian Empire now contained the largest population of Jews in the world, and the Jews would become a convenient scapegoat to divert the discontented masses from economic and political problems into mob violence against helpless men, women and children and the wanton destruction and plundering of their homes, shops and synagogues. The word for these savage attacks became a familiar and terrifying one to the Jews of Eastern Europe: pogrom.

As a young boy in Bialystok, Ludwik Zamenhof was not aware of all the complex reasons for the hatred and prejudice he saw around him, but he saw the suffering it caused, and this made a lasting impression on him. His sensitivity to the plight of his own Jewish people would eventuaUy lead him to a concern for the plight of all mankind. 'Had I not been a Jew', he later said, 'the idea of a future cosmopolitanism would not have exercised such a fascination over me, and never should I have labored so strenuously and disinterestedly for the realization of my ideal.'

The most obvious barrier that young Ludwik saw between peoples was the difference of languages. He knew the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, which explained the confusion of tongues as God's punishment for the transgression of the descendants of Noah, who had attempted to build a tower that would reach heaven. As Zamenhof would later say, at that time the confusion of languages had been the result of sin; now it itself had become the cause ofevildoing. Diversity of languages was, he felt, 'the only, or at least the chief cause that separates the human family and divides it into hostile factions. I was educated as an idealist: I was taught that all men are brothers, and meanwhile on the street and in the courtyards everything at every step caused me to feel that men did not exist: there were only Russians, Poles, Germans, Jews, etc. This always greatly tormented my young soul ... I told myself that when I was older, I would not fail to do away with this evil.'

Ludwik Zamenhof vowed to give the world a language that all its peoples could use to communicate with one another, and thus, he hoped, to bridge their differences.

But what kind oflanguage would serve as a tongue for all mankind? Of the thousands of languages and dialects in the world, which one to select? Quickly Ludwik abandoned the idea of choosing a living tongue for his 'human language'. No matter which one was chosen, there would be some people who would object. And those people whose native tongue it was would have an advantage over all the others. Choosing any one language could only imply that it was

i. Markus and Rozalia Zamenhof, Lidia'sgrandparents, iti 1878

 

 

 

2. Courtyard oĵ the building u>here the Zamenhofs lived in the iSjos. Here the schoolboy Ludu>ile made his first attempts at creating a language

superior in some way and others inferior.

Zamenhof became convinced that the only possible international language would be a neutral one, belonging to none of the living nations. After rejecting the idea of a classical language such as Greek or Latin, he began to dream of creating a new language for all mankind.