First, I am a Jew, a now secular Jew, and Esperanto was created by a Jewish polyglot of the Haskalah, Jewish Enlightenmet, period. As such, modern Hebrew and Esperanto naturally appeal to me. But, further, let’s look at the history of this time period and better understand why I am devoted to the survival of Jewish languages in this world of humans.
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“A Jewish homeland, he argued [in 1882], was a necessity, but it need not – in fact, should not – be located in Palestine, also sacred to Christians and Muslims. A place where religious beliefs ran high would place Jews in danger, sapping the resources with which they were to build a state.”*
Why did Jews form a nation-State in Palestine? … To be historically fair, Hitler dispossessed European Jewry and no nation was willing to accept the survivors who, ultimately, ended up in Israel to avoid being returned to the lands of Holocaust. From there, Islam controlled nations dispossessed Arab Jews from their ancestral homes, leaving them no choice but to go to Israel or the United States (who didn’t accept the European Jews at first). Zamenhof and other zionist European Jews of the Haskalah period were suggesting an unpopulated track of land in America for a new Zionist Homeland well before Hitler changed everyone’s mind on this matter. So, the only issue is not that we, as a people, returned to our ancestral homeland, but that the nation-State of Israel is complicating the two-state solution with governmental policies on settlements.
Also, the concept of a “chosen” people has to do with the responsibility of Jews following the commanded laws of the national god of Torah. Though the Masoretic text has been altered to exclude this, the original teaching of ancient times was that Elohim – the Creator god of the continent that Israel exists on (thus, high god of the ancient Israeli version of the Canaanite pantheon) – decided which gods get which nations (a lower god per nation), keeping Israel-Judea for “himself”. Hence, the concept of “chosen”, chosen to obey the divine laws decreed from the mountain top (according to our ancient myths).
*- Esther Schor, professor/author at Princeton University, “Bridge of Words”, published 2016
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“Unlike his Yeshiva-educated contemporary, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the founder of modern Hebrew, [Ludwic] Zamenhof, [the founder of Esperanto], decided that “ancient Hebrew,” as he put it, could never serve the Zionist dream. Instead, he devoted more than two years to updating Yiddish for use in a Jewish state. In the early 1880’s, a modernized Yiddish must have seemed far more practical than Hebrew; after all, fully two-thirds of the world’s ten million Jews were Yiddish speakers.”*
Zamenhof’s original intent for his Esperanto language was to facilitate communication between people who were different ethnically, religiously, and nationally from each other. Because of his Zionism from all the racial/anti-Semitic persecutions of Jews in Russia and throughout Europe, he later proposed Yiddish for the future nation-State of Israel. When Zamenhof became disillusioned with Zionism as a solution to Jewish survival in a world that systemically hates and targets Jews, he proposed and gathered a multi-national following of Esperantists speaking Esperanto as a “meta-Jewish” international language, based in the ideas of “Hillelism”, to facilitate peace among all nations on this earth, through understandable commonly shared communication. Adolph Hitler, during his German Christian nationalist genocidal attempt to purge the world of Jews, specifically targets Zamenhof and the use of Esperanto in his writings that justify the need to kill every Jew on planet Earth.
*- Esther Schor, professor/author at Princeton University, “Bridge of Words”, published 2016
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