Naftali Naymanovich, 1896. Schwad Reference 02 14 20. Avraham Shevdron Collection – Portraits. National Library of Israel.
This article by Denis Eckert, Director of Research (CNRS / Géographie-cités), published in the journal East European Jewish Affairs, focuses on the publication of the first Esperanto textbook in Yiddish in Warsaw in 1888.
The publication of the first Esperanto textbook in Yiddish in Warsaw in 1888, just one year after the birth of the language, is a remarkable event, but one that is practically unknown. Its author, Naftali Naymanovich (1843–1898), a journalist and writer known to specialists in Yiddish culture and the Jewish press, wrote a text which, unlike the texts of L. L. Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, was aimed at the relatively uneducated.
This textbook, called Di veltshprakh (the world language) is remarkable, since it aims to enable self-learning, even for people who have not attended school. After Esperanto, Naymanovich went on to write other language manuals, all designed to enable numerous people with a limited amount of education to break out of their cultural and linguistic isolation. Di veltshprakh can therefore be seen as a prototype that the author would reproduce for the self-learning of German, Russian, Polish and Biblical Hebrew.
[…] at the end of the 1880s, the Esperanto proposal was set in a dual context: On the one hand, that of a bourgeois European universalism, in tune with the acceleration of exchanges linked to the “First Globalization” of pre-1914. As goods and ideas circulated ever more rapidly, the improvement of communication in general became an issue,Footnote19 and the question of a universal language was therefore a topical one. It was also a time when none of the imperial languages that had emerged from Europe could boast genuine supremacy, whether for trade, science and technology, or diplomacy.
On the other hand, however, the Esperanto project was strongly rooted in the specific political and social conditions of Eastern Europe. This was a time when the dominated peoples of the big Empires, and in particular the Jews, were facing a series of challenges in asserting their cultural, religious, linguistic and economic rights. Neutralizing relations of linguistic domination by adopting a “neutral” international language is therefore a proposal that made particular sense in this Europe of the Borderlands, for all dominated peoples.
Eckert, D. (2025). Naftali Naymanovich and the first Esperanto textbook for Yiddish speakers (1888). East European Jewish Affairs, 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/13501674.2025.2564410
