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Essence and Future and that he was not just presenting a resumé of that text. 

After the Washington congress, Zamenhof and Sébert produced the set of rules that 

were to govern future congresses. According to these rules, only the “regularly elected 

delegates from Esperanto groups and associations” with more than twenty-five paid-up 

members registered at the Central Office, the Rajtigitaj Delegitoj (Authorized 

Delegates), would have the right to vote at the congresses. Zamenhof made this project 

the subject of his speech at the seventh congress in Antwerp (1911). In Antwerp, the 

creation of the Authorized Delegates was approved by the Authorized Delegates 

themselves, and the ordinary congress participants lost the right to vote at the Universal 

Congresses. 

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The eighth Universal Congress took place in Cracow in 1912 and had as its theme 

the quarter-century anniversary of Esperanto. At this congress, Zamenhof announced 

that he was giving up any role in Esperanto so that his political and religious ideas 

would not be considered those of the Esperanto movement. 

Although Zamenhof had often spoken of the congresses as celebrations, they were 

tiring for him. According to his brother Lev, even during the first congresses he was ill 

with arteriosclerosis and each congress caused his health to deteriorate further. Lev 

wrote that being present during the congresses was for Zamenhof “not a joyous triumph, 

but a painful duty”. The first two congresses, during which he suffered from the bullying 

of the leading Parisian Esperantists, demanded enormous amounts of nervous energy 

from him. 

The jubilee congress in Cracow was also difficult for him. Having learned that the 

Local Congress Committee was planning to honour him in Cracow, he asked that it not 

do so. The reason for his request was that articles often appeared in Poland denouncing 

Esperanto. These negative articles were different from those of other countries, however, 

because instead of criticizing the idea or the language, they were directed against 

Zamenhof himself, whose faults were that he was a Jew and he was born in Litva. He 

knew that honouring him would incite Polish patriots, who rejected Esperanto as having 

been created by a Litvak. He asked also that he not be identified as a Pole, so that Polish 

nationalists would not be able to claim that he had adopted the guise of a nation to which 

he did not belong in order to receive an honour. 

After the Cracow congress, Zamenhof was attacked anyway, but by Jewish patriots, 

because of an episode during the congress in which he had not supported a proposal by 

the Jewish participants to bring greetings to the congress in the name of the Jewish 

people. Jewish journalist took note of this and criticized Zamenhof in two post-congress 

articles: La juda demando en kongreso de Esperanto (The Jewish Question at the 

Congress of Esperanto) by Dov Ber Borochov in Di Varhajt (The Truth) (New York, 15 

September, 1912) and Skandalo ĉe Esperantista kongreso (Scandal at the Congress of 

Esperantists) published anonymously in Togblat (Daily Paper) in Lvov (16 August, 

1912). Zamenhof had to publish a response to Di Varhajt in order to disavow the 

statement the paper had attributed to him: “In order not to damage Esperanto, I have to 

hide my Jewishness”. In his response, he wrote: 

Every Esperantist in the world knows full well that I am a Jew, because I 

have never hidden the fact, although I do not shout it chauvinistically from 

the rooftops. Esperantists know that I have translated texts from the Yiddish 

language; they know that for more than three years I have devoted all my 

free time to translating the Bible from the Hebrew original; they know that I 

have always lived in an exclusively Jewish quarter of Warsaw (where many 

Jews are ashamed to live); they know that I have always had my works 

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printed by a Jewish printer, etc. Are these the acts of someone who is 

ashamed of his origins and who is trying to hide his Jewishness? (Mi estas 

Homo 201)