But the Jews of the Russian empire spurned both of his gifts—Hillelism and Esperanto. As the Jewish Chronicle of London put it in 1907, “The sect which Dr. Zamenhof sought to establish has never been represented by more than one person—himself.” By the time Hilelismo appeared in 1901, the First Zionist Congress of 1897 had already convinced many Jews of Eastern Europe that a political solution to the Jewish question was close at hand. It is not that Zamenhof was out of step with developments; on the contrary, Hilelismo was a rebuke to political Zionism, and he was not the only Jew to write one. So did Ahad Haam, the religious conscience of the early Zionists, who derided Herzl for his “idolatrous” failure to root nationalism in Jewish ethics. As for the Jews and Esperanto, some were drawn to it from the start. In the earliest Esperanto adresaro (directory), there are nearly 200 Jewish names among the 900-odd Esperantists living under the Czar. But most Russian Jews, as Jeffrey Veidlinger has recently shown, were consumed with endless debates on the relative merits of Yiddish and Hebrew, and would continue to be for decades.

While Zamenhof smarted from the failure of Hillelism, the neutral, artificial language he had offered the Jews had taken on a life of its own. As Esperanto, his “beloved child,” became a cranky adolescent, journeying from provincial Eastern Europe to worldly Paris, the Jewish father with his prophetic talk of justice and brotherhood became an embarrassment. Zamenhof’s hope for the first World Congress of Esperantists in 1905, to take place in Boulogne-Sur-Mer, was that the Congress would be “a heart-warming religious center.” He addressed these words in a letter to the organizer, the eminent French attorney Henri Michaux, who alerted the other French members of the committee to his concerns about Zamenhof’s “mysticism.” When the poem Zamenhof intended to read at the opening ceremony (his own composition, called “Prayer under the Green Standard”) was read aloud to the Committee, the result was explosive. In Michaux’s words, “one could hardly grasp the wonderment and scandal of these French intellectuals, with their Cartesian … spirit, these representatives of lay universities and supporters of secular government, accustomed to and identified with freethinking and atheism, when they heard this flaming prayer to ‘the high moral Power.’ … ‘But he’s a Jewish prophet,’ cried [Carlo] Bourlet, and [Theophile] Cart for his part: ‘That Slav! Michaux will never be able to control this crazy man!’ And [General Hippolyte] Sebert lamented: ‘We’ll be ruined and a laughingstock.’” In the end, Zamenhof recited his prayer, minus the final stanza, which began: “Together brothers, join hands, /Forward with peaceful armour!/ Christians, Jews or Mahometans, /We are all children of God.” After reading it, Zamenhof received an ovation so long and ardent that it startled him. Still, the French organizers of the 1905 Congress went to great lengths to obscure Zamenhof’s Jewishness, and the result was noted—with evident pride—by Zamenhof’s close Jewish associate, the oculist Emile Javal: “Of 700 articles in the press, only one mentioned Zamenhof’s Jewishness.”

But the bloody events of the revolutionary year 1905 renewed Zamenhof’s determination to inculcate Esperantists with the values of Hillelism. In January 1906, a fictitious “Circle of Hillelists” issued “The Dogmas of Hillelism,” a twelve-point credo treating religion, language, morals, and customs. It was clear that he was no longer addressing it to Jews; all Hillelists were entitled to their chosen or inherited religions—entitled also to their various “family languages” at home—but each would vow to reject those elements that failed to meet the severe ethical standards of Hillelism: nationalistic ideals; national, racial and religious chauvinism; and doctrines offensive to reason. In short, it was to be a sort of ethical quality-control on religion, transacted in Esperanto, with a few key social institutions attached. (Think, your neighborhood JCC: Hillelists would someday convene in Hillelist temples with Hillelist religious schools and Hillelist programs for the elderly.) The goal, to form a new people, had not changed, but the strategy had. It was to be a quiet, gradual transformation, conscience by conscience, “unremarked and without any disruption.”

Before the year was out, Zamenhof lightly revised the declaration, changing the name from Hillelismo to Homaranismo (Humanitarianism). He was de-Judaizing a movement grounded in Jewish ethics, presenting it anew to the Esperantists as a “philosophically pure monotheism.” But his intention to present Homaranismo at the Second World Congress in 1906 evidently met with a fierce backdraft from the movement’s leaders. In the months leading up to the Geneva congress, as Christer Kiselman has shown, Zamenhof began backpedaling on Homaranismo. It would have trouble gaining adherents, he wrote, if it required the adoption of a new language; if it were perceived as a religious dogma rather than a “neutral bridge” among religions; if it sounded too utopian. A mere three weeks before the opening of the Congress, his confidence low, he wrote to Javal, “According to your advice, I threw out of my congress speech the last part touching on Homaranismo—and speak only of the interna ideo—the internal idea—of Esperantism. I am leaving each person to clarify for himself the essence of the idea, as he wishes.” There is pathos in his concealment of Homaranismo at the behest of the movement’s most prestigious, mainly French, leaders; in this encoding of his most dearly held belief as the interna ideo. Pathos, but heroism too, since Zamenhof was in fact trusting the Esperantists themselves to understand the interna ideo as the mandate for a modern, ethical community.