Microsoft Word llz-bio-En doc

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Aleksandr Korzhenkov 

 

 

 

 

 

Zamenhof 

The Life, Works, and Ideas 

of the Author of Esperanto 

 

 

 

 

 

Abridged by the author from 

Homarano: La vivo, verkoj kaj ideoj de d-ro L.L. Zamenhof  

Kaliningrad-Kaunas: Sezonoj, 2009 (kun Litova Esperanto-Asocio) 

 

 

English translation and notes 

by Ian M. Richmond 

© Esperantic Studies Foundation, 2009 

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I. A Russian Jew 

Lazar’ Markovitch Zamenhof (later to be known more widely as Ludovic Lazarus 

Zamenhof)

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 was born on the 15

th

 of December, 1859, into a Jewish family in what was 

then the Russian city of Bialystock.  

Although Bialystock is now in Poland, the city and the region around it changed 

hands many times over the centuries, passing mostly back and forth between Poland and 

Russia. From 1569 to 1795, for example, the city was in the Polish part of the Polish-

Lithuanian Commonwealth

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. Following the breakup of the Commonwealth and its 

division among the Prussian, Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, for a short time 

Bialystock became part of Prussia. Under the 1807 Treaty of Tilsit, however, the Russian 

empire gained the city and the surrounding region.  

By the time the Zamenhof family settled there in the 1850s, Bialystock was the 

regional centre for the Russian administrative district of Grodna, which was located 

outside the boundaries of the Polish kingdom in a region ceded to the Russian empire by 

the 1815 Congress of Vienna. Nevertheless, the Kingdom of Poland and the Russian 

empire shared a very personal connection, the Russian emperor being also the king of 

Poland. Bialystock's complex political history helps to explain why there is often some 

confusion about Zamenhof's true nationality. 

In the second half of the 19

th

 century the population of Zamenhof's birthplace was 

65–75% Jewish with the remainder made up of Polish, Russian, German and Belarusian 

minorities. The surrounding villages were populated mostly by Belarussians and Poles. 

At that time, Bialystock was known for its rapidly developing textile industry, from 

which it got the nickname “Manchester of the North.” Ninety percent of Bialystock's 

manufacturers and merchants were Jewish. 

It was to this thriving centre of manufacturing and Judaism that Zamenhof's 

grandfather moved his family in 1857 from the smaller city of Tykocin, not far from 

Bialystock. In their new home, the younger son of the Zamenhof family, Mark 

(Mordecai), met and married Liba Rachel Sofer, the daughter of a prominent Jewish 

merchant, and moved into number 16 Jatke-Gas, called “Butcher Shop Street” by the 

Jewish population. Here, the young couple's first child, Lazar’ (later known as Ludovic), 

the future creator of Esperanto, was born on December 15

th

, 1859, the 19

th

 day of 

Kislevo of the year 5620 in the Jewish calendar. 

Ludovic Zamenhof always identified himself as a Russian Jew, but that designation 

needs some clarification, because the Russian empire was home to various groups of 

Jews, including Caucasian, Crimean and Bukharan groups. The Zamenhofs belonged to 

the group known as Litvak Jews. This particular group of Ashkenazi Jews, originally 

from the former Litva, which included the present-day Lithuania and large parts of 

north-east Poland, Belarus and Ukraine, spoke a specific dialect of Yiddish, Litvish 

Yiddish, and looked to Vilnius as their cultural centre. Besides their dialect and their 

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geographical origin, the Litvak Jews differed spiritually and intellectually from other 

Jewish groups in Russia. Hasidism

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, for example, which flourished in Ukraine and 

southern Poland, was less widespread among the Litvak Jews. On the other hand, the 

intellectual Haskalah movement, which was inspired by the Enlightenment and had first 

appeared among German Jews toward the end of the 18

th

 century, had more followers 

among the Litvaks than among the other groups. 

For Zamenhof, his Jewishness was at the very heart of his identity. As he wrote 

much later, when Esperanto was becoming widely known: 

[...] I am a Jew, and all my ideals, their birth, maturity and steadfastness, the 

entire history of my constant inner and external conflicts, all are 

indissolubly linked to my Jewishness. I have never hidden the fact that I am 

a Jew; every Esperantist knows my ethnicity. I am proud to count myself a 

member of this ancient people, which has suffered so much and fought so 

hard, and whose sole mission in history consists, in my opinion, of uniting 

the peoples of the world under the banner of “one God”, that is to say, in a 

single ideal for the whole of humankind; [...] 

If I had not been a Jew from the ghetto, the idea of uniting humanity either 

would never have entered my head or it would never have gripped me so 

tenaciously throughout my entire life. No one can feel more strongly than a 

ghetto Jew the sadness of dissension among peoples. [...] my Jewishness is 

the main reason why, from my earliest childhood, I gave myself wholly to 

one overarching idea and dream, that of bringing together in brotherhood 

all of humanity. 

That idea is the vital element and the purpose of my whole life. The 

Esperanto project is merely a part of that idea; I am constantly thinking and 

dreaming about the rest of it. (Mi estas Homo 99,100) 

Zamenhof’s Jewishness would later be the cause of much unease among leading 

Esperantists of the early period, who often tried to obscure his ethnicity with the neutral 

statement that he was a Warsaw physician. Following the first Universal Congress of 

Esperanto in Boulogne-sur-mer in 1905, for example, the Parisian Esperantist Émile 

Javal wrote to Zamenhof that of more than seven hundred articles about Esperanto 

published on the occasion of the Congress only one mentioned his Jewishness. For their 

part, Polish Esperantists, including “the first historian of Esperanto,” Adam Zakrzewski, 

tried to present Esperanto's creator as a Pole, rather than a Russian, because he lived for 

many years in Warsaw.