Esperanto and Zamenhof: Happy Birthday

Who, you may say. L. L. Zamenhof, aka Dr Esperanto, the man who invented the world's most successful artificial language. Well, maybe after Elvish and Klingon. His 150th birthday was 15 December. There is an excellent article about him and his language movement, which was for him much more than a language movement, here, by Esther Schor.

To Esperantists, the man who created the language-movement is a household god, a patron saint. As for non-Esperantists who are aware of Zamenhof, he’s too unthreatening nowadays to be derided as a quixotic dreamer. Most regard him with mild condescension as a MittelEuropean, Jewish Geppetto, hammering together his little toy language in the hope that it might someday become real.

But inside this Geppetto was not only the dream of a new language, but also of something far stranger and unimagined: a new people altogether, and neither the Jews nor the Esperantists were the people he envisioned. Project by project, credo by credo, member by member, he tried to build a new people, a Geppetto with the audacity of Frankenstein.

Esperanto, here, here, and, of course, here.

By the way, he was born in Bialystock, Poland.

Think Max Bialystock.

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Ahmadinejad's family Jewish?

I don't know what to make of this report claiming that Ahmadinejad of Iran's family actually were Jewish and changed their name when they converted.

File it under 'interesting, if true.'

Khazars become Kosher

I promised to write this in response to a response about the new Turkish game show, called something like "You Bet Your Eternal Soul." But I got distracted by Mr Sobrino's adventures in his ancestral homeland. It was the equivalent of "hiking the Appalachian Trail" as we say here in the Carolinas. But, now I am back on task with something important to do, so I'll do this first.

So - the Khazars. They were a Turkic tribe who put together an empire out in the steppes north of the Black Sea in the 8th and 9th Centuries. For awhile everybody was afraid of them, but they had a serious problem. While they seem to have been happy with that old time religion (shamanism, apparently), they were stuck into between powerful Christian and Muslim powers who wanted to convert them. They figured they were going to have to go one way or the other.

And, after all, they reasoned, going monotheistic was all the rage, so why not give it a try. So the Khazar khan called together all the nobles of his court to listen to a debate by a Priest, a Rabbi, and an Iman (sounds like the set-up of a bad joke, doesn't it?). They asked each only one question: what books do you regard as sacred?

The Rabbi said: the Testament of the Jews, of course.

The Priest said: the Testament of the Jews and the New Testament of the Christians, of course.

The Imam said: the Testament of the Jews, the New Testament of the Christians, and the Holy Koran, of course.

The Khazars thought about it and responded "Well, you all agree on only one thing: the Testament of the Jews is sacred. So we will convert to the faith of the Jews."

And that is why a fierce Turkic tribe became Jewish. There is even a theory that most of the Jews in Eastern Europe are not actually Semitic, but Turkic.

I once planned to write and illustrate a children's book about this for a little red-haired Jewish girl I knew in Manhattan. It was going to end with the line: "... and some of Khazars had red hair, but I am the only one who knows this. And now so do you," with a picture of a little Khazar girl pulling off her head cloth to reveal masses of red hair. It went nowhere.