An Optometrist in Białystok Designed a Language to End Antisemitism

Lazar Zamenhof grew up in Białystok in the 1860s, in the western edge of the Russian Empire, in a city whose Jewish, Polish, German, and Russian neighborhoods conducted business in four mostly mutually unintelligible languages. The Jewish neighborhoods — including his own — were periodically the target of pogroms. Zamenhof, who would later train as an ophthalmologist and run a small practice, came to believe in his teens that the underlying engine of the violence was linguistic: people who shared no common language would always treat each other as foreign, and a politically neutral second language might break the pattern. He started building one as a high-schooler.

The finished product appeared in 1887 in a 40-page Russian-language pamphlet titled International Language, published under the pen name "Doktoro Esperanto" — "Doctor One-Who-Hopes." The pseudonym became the language's name. The grammar fits on a postcard: 16 rules, no exceptions, regular endings, Romance and Germanic vocabulary. It is fluent enough that you can read a novel in it after roughly 150 hours of study, fluent enough that Tolstoy reportedly took up reading it for fun.

Zamenhof himself was natively bilingual in Yiddish and Russian and learned Polish, German, Hebrew, French, Latin, and Greek as a child. He had also written in 1879 the first formal grammar of Yiddish, proposing a Latin-script reform that was not actually published until 1982. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize twelve times beginning in 1910 and never won. France made him a Knight of the Legion of Honour in 1905. He died in 1917; all three of his children were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust.