Born in Russian-ruled Bialystok in 1859, Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof was fascinated by languages from a young age and, like many of his day, saw linguistics and politics as deeply intertwined. In the early 1880s, Zamenhof became an enthusiastic “territorialist”—believing that Jews should create a homeland somewhere outside the Middle East, in his view on the Mississippi River—and then a Zionist, although one who thought the Jewish state should be Yiddish-speaking. He then took another about-face and settled on the idea that would drive him for the rest of his life: the elimination of strife and prejudice through the end of linguistic differences—a problem he hoped to solve by creating a universal tongue, later known as Esperanto. As his Esperanto movement gathered steam, Zamenhof created an ideology to go with it, as Saul Jay Singer explains:
[Zamenhof] argued that the Jews, “chained to a cadaver,” had to free themselves from the Mosaic covenant and be subject only to the Golden Rule, which he considered to be the exemplar par excellence for ethical universalism. [He] named this new faith “Hillelism,” [after] the 1st-century rabbi’s [famous] explication of the Golden Rule [in the Talmud].
In Der Hilelismus (1901), Zamenhof promoted Hillelism as the solution to the “Jewish problem” [and] advocated a Judaism of “pure monotheism” with no law other than the Golden Rule. By 1906, however, Zamenhof changed the name of the movement to “Humanitarianism” as a sop to non-Jewish Esperantists.
Zamenhof’s Judaism, [however, had become] a burden to the movement he created to the point that [the Esperanto organization] went to great lengths to conceal his Jewishness, particularly from the French press, then deeply embroiled in the Dreyfus Affair.
World War I devastated Zamenhof’s hopes of uniting all people, and his disappointment, coupled with his over-ambitious work schedule, adversely affected his health and led to his death by heart attack in 1917.
Read more on Jewish Press: https://www.jewishpress.com/sections/features/features-on-jewish-world/the-zionism-and-judaism-of-esperanto-founder-ludwik-zamenhof/2020/03/12/