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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: 



37 

 



 

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. 

 

Zionism involves the creation of a separate Jewish state to which Jews 



from all over the world would come in order to the majority group with 

all the majority's privileges and duties. 

 

Autonomism means living in a Jewish diaspora in autonomous ethnic-



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.

 

Even if the proposed state could be built, its territory would be too small. No 



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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