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reŝenija jevrejskogo voprosa (Hillelism: A
Plan for Solving the Jewish Problem). The book was published under the pseudonym 36
Homo Sum, Latin for “I am a human being”. Since this text is a key to understanding Zamenhof’s philosophy, it is worth taking some time to understand the background. The name Hillelism alludes to the rabbi Hillel, who presided over the Jewish tribunal in the time of Herod. A number of his pronouncements are found in the Talmud, including the Golden Rule, in which he summed up God's laws: “Do not do unto others that which is hateful to you. Therein lies the entire Law; all the rest is mere commentary.” The situation of the Jews in Russia had changed by the end of the 19 th century. In his two articles for Razsvet, written twenty years before Hillelism, Zamenhof talked about the Jews of the previous era, who were mostly small merchants, middlemen, tradespeople, factory owners. There were almost no capitalists and highly educated scholars among them. By the beginning of the 20 th century, however, there were several Jews among the major capitalists and bankers. The most drastic change, though, was in the intellectual sphere. For centuries the Jewish kahals, or governing councils, had resisted the government's attempts to provide Jews with a secular education, with the result that Jews still received a traditional cheder education in Hebrew and Jewish religion, which was of little use in the professions. Little by little, however, the influence of the cheders' leaders and the rabbis diminished and Jews began to study in Gymnasiums and universities in great numbers. Although Jews comprised less than four percent of Russia's population, they represented 14.5% of the students in Russian universities in 1887 and, despite the limits on their numbers imposed later, they still made up 12.1% of university students prior to the 1917 revolution. Furthermore, many Jews—including also Zamenhof's children Adam and Sofia later on—attended foreign universities. Consequently, many university- educated Jews appeared in Russia: cultural activists, scientists, physicians, financiers, lawyers, etc. These intellectuals lived mostly in Petersburg, Moscow and large administrative district capitals beyond the border regions of eastern Russia. They spoke the Russian language and had little connection with the old-style small-merchant Jews. As first- or second-generation intellectuals, however, they had still not fully assimilated into Russian society. Chibat Zion's activity gradually lost its influence among the Russian Jews. Poor Jews still migrated to the United States, but there was very little migration to Palestine. In his 1896 book The Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution to the Jewish Question, the Austrian Jew Theodore (Binjamin Zeev) Herzl proposed founding an independent Jewish state not through gradual emigration, but through the political decision of major governments. Adhering to the concept of The Jewish State, the first Zionist Congress (Basel, 1897) adopted the programme of the Zionist movement and founded the World Zionist Organization with Herzl as chairman. Several theoretical solutions to the Jewish problem are generally known:
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• Assimilation is the absorption of the Jews into the majority group in their country through gradual linguistic and cultural identification and through mixed marriages, whose offspring consider themselves members of the majority group. In earlier times the assimilated Jews kept their religion, but, beginning in the 20 th century, they also lost their religion and considered their national identity to be much more important than their ethnic or religious one. •
from all over the world would come in order to the majority group with all the majority's privileges and duties. •
cultural groups that differ according to the country in which they live. The theory of autonomism was defined by the Russian Jew Simeon Markovitch Dubnov in they years 1897 to 1902. According to his theory, the whole world is the Jewish homeland, because the Jewish people is the first to have arrived at the highest level of existence, at which the Jews no longer need their religious traditions expressed in the Hebrew language, but only their culture and spirit expressed in Yiddish. •
Other proposals for the solution to the Jewish problem include, among others, the assimilation of other ethnic groups by the Jews, assigning to Jews the status of foreigners with a corresponding absence of responsibilities and rights, and the “final solution” carried out by the Nazis. In 1901 Zamenhof dealt only with assimilation and Zionism. Assimilation is not a suitable solution, he argued, because the majority group does not accept the Jews as equals, even if the Jews have the same names and speak the same language as themselves. The assimilationist formula, “we are Frenchmen/women, Germans, Poles, etc. with a Mosaic religion”, was judged by Zamenhof to be a compromise based on sophistry and falsehood and rejected by the majority group. The first part of the formula is a falsehood, because Jews are Jews and not Frenchmen/women, Germans and Poles. The second part is inexact, because there cannot be Frenchmen/women, Germans and Poles with the Mosaic religion, which is reserved exclusively for Jews. Even if this formula were true, he argued, educated Jews are not religious and so do not meet the criterion of having the Mosaic religion. Next, Zamenhof analyzes the Zionist idea: “We are not Frenchmen/women, Germans, Poles, etc., but Jews, not only by religion but also ethnically. Therefore, we must strive for independence in Palestine.” Against this idea, Zamenhof attempts to prove that it is only a tradition to call the 38
Jews a people. For him, a people is a human group that lives in a given territory, speaks the same language, practises the same religion, and has political independence. Jews, he maintains, meet only the religious criterion and therefore cannot be a people. They do not even have the same language. Hebrew was spoken in antiquity and later served as the language of religion, but it is as foreign and difficult for Jews as it is for non-Jews. As for Yiddish, it is spoken only by some of the Eastern-European Jews. Having rejected the Zionist thesis, Zamenhof explains that the Jewish state cannot be built in Palestine for three reasons: 1.
Palestine is administered by Turkey, which will never permit an independent state to be created on its territory. 2.
more than a million Jews would be able to immigrate to it, while the remaining nine million would remain in the countries they now inhabit. Furthermore, the situation of the nine million would become worse, because the antisemitic majorities would consider them even more foreign than before and would have a moral basis to shout, “Go to your Palestine!” 3.
Despite Turkey's administration of it, Palestine belongs and will continue to belong to the powerful Christian world, which has its most holy places throughout there. The presence of these holy places will cause eternal conflict with Christians. What, then, is the solution to the Jewish problem? To solve the problem, it is necessary to know its causes. According to the Zionists, the main cause is the two- thousand-year exile, but Zamenhof believed that the Jews' specific situation was caused not by the loss of their land and independence, losses experienced by all ancient peoples, but rather by the merging of ethnicity with religion. Because of this merging of two identities into one, the Jews can neither be absorbed into another ethnic group nor themselves absorb different peoples. The Jews remain an abnormal people, despised by every other. Christianity, Islam and Buddhism are open to all ethnicities, argued Zamenhof. They do not have the ethnic character of Judaism, which favours only one chosen people. This discriminates against the other peoples. Therefore, it is necessary to change the Hebrew religion and remove from it everything ethnic. Because it is not possible to quickly change the religion of ten million people, however, Zamenhof proposed that a small Hillel community should be founded first and that it would later absorb all Jews. Hillelism is therefore a religious fraction in the heart of the Hebrew religion, but freed from the incidental admixture that had long made it an anachronism. It is interpreted not according to the strict letter of Moses' words, but rather in accordance with their spirit, which can be formulated in a few basic principles: 39
1. We feel and acknowledge the existence of the highest Force that rules the world, and we name this Force God. 2.
God placed his laws in every person's heart in the form of the conscience. Always obey the voice of your conscience, therefore, because it is the never silent voice of God. 3.
The essence of all laws given to us by God can be expressed by the following formula: Love thy neighbour and do unto others as you would have them do unto you and never commit acts openly or in secret that your inner voice tells you would not be pleasing to God. All other instructions that you may hear from your teachers and leaders and that do not fit into the three main points of religion are merely human commentaries, which could be true, but which could also be false. The Hillel temple will always be a temple of pure philosophy so that questions about the “high Force”, about morality, about life and death, about the human body and spirit, etc. can be freely discussed and studied. As the language of communication, education and liturgy, Homo Sum proposed Esperanto. This Hillel group, with its purified religion and Esperanto, is to choose a place to which will come all Jews who decide to emigrate from their normal homeland and who wish to live among their own kind. The final goal of Hillelism is to integrate the Jew with the peoples of the whole world:
Through our ideas we can acquire the whole civilized world, just as the Christians have succeeded in doing until now, even though they began as a small group of Hebrews. Instead of being absorbed into the Christian world, we will absorb it. (Mi estas Homo 253) Zamenhof distributed his book to “a small number of intelligent Jews” and presented it at one of the “Monday meetings” at Nahum Sokolov's house, 15 but he
received few reactions. In fact, history has shown that Zamenhof was on the wrong track:
•
the assimilationists found their solution in emigration to the United States; •
the Zionists won with the creation of Israel; •
the chief obstacle to the Jews in Palestine became Islam rather than Christianity; •
the ancient Hebrew language became a spoken language adapted to the needs of modern life; 40
• the ancient Hebrew religion became the official religion of Israel. Zamenhof had another goal that he did not reveal to the Jews. He needed a stable social base for Esperanto, which otherwise could disappear, as Volapük had. In his own words: An international language will become forever strong only if there exists a group of people who accept it as their family, hereditary language. One hundred such people are hugely more important to the idea of a neutral language than a million other people. The hereditary language of even the smallest and most insignificant human group has a much stronger guarantee of a continued existence than a language without a people even if it is used by millions. (Mi estas Homo 97) Zamenhof wavered, however, on the question of the composition of his neutral people. Several years later, he said of his hesitation: In the course of time, I have arrived at the strong conviction that the first group of Hillelists should not be multicultural, but should be an ethnically homogeneous group that will add a Hillelist character to its own existing traditions and ideals. In this way, acting as a sect, it will form a hereditary, existing and historically-based group that will engulf first its own people, then the whole of humanity. Only one group can do this, namely the Hebrew people. Not until I have decided definitively to reject the idea of Hebrew Hillelism will I propose in one of the Esperanto congresses the creation of multicultural, Esperanto-speaking Hillelists. (Mi estas Homo 119)
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