Collectiion: East European Jewish Affairs

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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.