The Doctor Stalin Feared

Added: 2026-05-24

[00:00:00]Hitler. Ever heard of him? Pretty bad guy. Mortal enemy of this other pretty bad guy. But as evil as those two were, there was one man who they both feared.

[00:00:14]This guy, Polish opthomemologist LL Zaminhoff. Ever heard of him?

[00:00:31]In 1859, in a town that has since changed its name, in a country that has since changed its name, a child would be born who would be forced to change his name. His parents called him Elisure.

[00:00:44]That's Hebrew for Lazarus.

[00:00:47]But born in a city that is now considered Eastern Poland, that infant Lazarus would enter life as a subject of the Empire of Russia. an empire that yet unknown to him was not all too accepting of Hebrew names. So on his birth certificate, his parents had written the Yiddish Leger. Although the Russians who ruled over him would only ever call him Lazar.

[00:01:08]Yet even that was not enough for the bureaucracy of empire because his last name was also unacceptable. Salmanhof from the German. On his paperwork, it would be rewritten Zenov.

[00:01:18]In university, that boy would take yet another name, Ludvik, because why not?

[00:01:23]It wasn't like the others were truly his either. And to make that even easier, in the 1870s, he'd shorten it to what we now remember best, LL Zaminhof.

[00:01:34]Born to a Yiddish-speaking family in a world governed in Russian, ll personally preferred the local Polish. From his language teacher father, he'd learned German and French from religion Hebrew and from his friends Bellarusian. In school, he'd be taught Latin, Aramaic, and Greek. And as a hobby, he'd study Lithuanian and English. By the time he reached university, he spoke over a dozen European languages fluently.

[00:02:01]But in his mind, the most important language he'd ever learn, I doubt you've even heard of. It's called Folipuke, which presumably sounds better to its practitioners, or at least you'd hope so, because it sounds pretty bad in English. But to LL, it symbolized something he'd been looking for his entire life. Folipuke was hope invented by a German Catholic priest so his half- literate flock could write their sons in America to LL and others like him. Folipuke offered a solution to life's most pressing problem. For the Jews of Poland to ever be treated as equals, LL believed that all Europeans needed a single language to unite around. Because if a Gaskin could become French, then surely a Frenchman could become European and then he could be just like everybody else. By speaking Volipuke, it was like he was bringing that dream to life.

[00:03:05]But these weren't times of hope. Not for a man like LL, not for a Polish Jew, and nor had they been for over a century.

[00:03:16]When the Russians took eastern Poland in the partition of 1795, they conquered the single largest group of Jewish people that existed anywhere on the planet, an area called the Pale of Settlement.

[00:03:29]As a long-standing homeland for Europe's Ashkanazis, the Pale presented a bit of a kink in the gears of the continent's growing nationalisms. Because on the one hand, they were everything these nationalists claimed should be free.

[00:03:42]They spoke a different language, prayed to a different god, sustained a different culture, and in the pale made up nearly 80% of the local population.

[00:03:49]So, was this not their nation?

[00:03:54]But on the other hand, they were Jews. This was a Christian continent, and none of their neighbors would ever allow them freedom. They'd barely even allowed them to exist at all.

[00:04:08]And so in 1804, Zar Alexander I would issue the empire's first specifically anti-Jewish restrictions. With Poland in constant revolt, those Russians felt it best that they assimilate the minority living along the German border, or as he would call it, modernize the state.

[00:04:25]Those who refused conversion would be forced into small villages and restricted from any jobs that might earn them too much money. in 1827 to Russify their children. Jewish boys would be taken from their homes and forced into military service before they were even teens. The promise was simple. Speak the Russian language, serve its army, and love its Zar, and we won't treat you like a Jew.

[00:04:50]Or at least that was the promise.

[00:04:53]In practice, however, conversion hadn't always quite turned out like they'd claimed. The most famous example coming in 1818 when a child was born in Trier, who was the exact ideal of what those 19th century European nationalists demanded of their Jews. His parents had taken a German identity and given their son a German name. He spoke no Yiddish, attended a Lutheran church, and was baptized under a German god. His thoughts on the Jews were no less negative than anybody else's, possibly even worse. It's just he had the wrong politics, so he could never be Lutheran.

[00:05:27]And yet in 1844 that 26-year-old Karl Marx would write that capitalism was actually a Jewish trick and that the otherwise pious Christians had fallen for it. Secular Jews had no gods except money, no allegiance except self-interest, no nation outside their banks. So to engage in capitalism was therefore a fundamentally Jewish act. It degraded the gods of men. And the only way to convert these nationless merchants, Markx would say, was to take away their money.

[00:06:01]But the ruling class weren't just going to take this on the chin, especially from him. He was no true convert, they'd say. He was a fraud, a snake in the grass. Look at what he stood for.

[00:06:11]Internationalism, communalism, rights for the workers. Who does that sound like to you? No, no, no, no, no. It It wasn't capitalism that was Jewish. It was the Bolsheviks and the government owed a lot more newspapers than Marx did. Which in Tarist Russia was a job that fell mainly to a man named Yakov Broman. Born a destitute orphan. He learned very young that you do what it takes to survive.

[00:06:36]And since Judaism had given him nothing, he would give it nothing in return. When he converted to Orthodox, he saw an opportunity in propaganda. And from there, he worked his way up to becoming one of the empires, if not history's leading anti-Jewish voices. The more hate in his words, the bigger the platform he'd be given to share them.

[00:06:56]Newspaper articles, books, they'd call him a missionary. They'd even make him a professor. And in 1866, he'd publish his most influential work, also called the Jewish question.

[00:07:07]In it, he'd claimed that the average Jew actually loved the Russian government.

[00:07:12]They wanted to convert like he did. It's just that they were too afraid of their leaders to admit it.

[00:07:19]The real enemy, according to Bravman, was called the Cahal, the collectist government of the Ashkanazi. It's from him where we get the popularization cabal. Bravman promised that if you removed that cabal, the entire pale would turn Russian overnight.

[00:07:36]Three years later, and he'd take it even further, it wasn't just the Polish cabals that were scheming. It was all of them together. A cross-continental conspiracy to hold back the nationalists, to emancipate the workers, and above them all, a mastermind. That Frenchman, the one who'd freed the slaves, the human rights campaigner, if you killed him, he wouldn't just save Poland, but the entire world. The Jewish question would no longer need an answer because everyone would have converted.

[00:08:05]And then all those hard questions about nationalism are just going to go away.

[00:08:13]That was 1869.

[00:08:16]LL was just 12 years old.

[00:08:21]By 1881, Broman's words would already have sprung to life. As LL was finishing university, anarchists assassinated his. They weren't Jewish. Their cause wasn't Jewish. The guy being assassinated had been the most liberal ruler towards Jews to ever exist in that empire. But none of that mattered. Brothman had already told them who were to blame. If they weren't Jews doing it, then that just meant they were tricked by them.

[00:08:49]In response would come over 200 anti-Jewish riots all across the empire, destroying thousands of homes and businesses and lives, which of course would also be considered their fault.

[00:09:00]The government blaming the pograms on that vast Jewish conspiracy, alleging that they'd attacked themselves to throw patriotic Russians off the scent. Their community's destruction was actually just a false flag to help them play the victim. Their dead were just crisis actors. And maybe not everybody swallows that, but its supporters certainly weren't hard to find.

[00:09:24]In 1882, that dead zar's replacement would capitalize on the hate and create sweeping new restrictions for the people of the pale. No longer would they be allowed mortgages to settle outside their cities or to represent themselves before the state. Quotas would be set up to make sure no schools ever included too many of their students. And the media's rhetoric against their very existence would darken dramatically. It was no longer just Brothman spewing hate, but now an entire codra calling for his eradication.

[00:09:56]In short, it wasn't a time for hope.

[00:10:01]And in the pale itself, those pograms would raise an entirely new Jewish question. How do we survive this nationalism?

[00:10:11]Every five people had 10 ideas. To some, the answer was to run, to flee to whatever colonies or European cities would open their doors, which after 1867 generally meant Vienna, which is why LL's museum is there. From the time of his birth to when he graduated university, that city's Jewish population would blossom from around 300 to over 120,000.

[00:10:33]Others saw escape as just resetting a timer that was always going to click. No Jew would be safe during ultra nationalism unless they controlled the nation doing the killing. And it was clear that no Jewish nation would ever be allowed in Europe. So if they wanted to take part in the politics of the era, they'd have to go somewhere else to do it.

[00:10:55]And although he'd dabble in both of those ideas, ultimately LL would settle on a third. Hope.

[00:11:02]Dreaming of a world united, he would invent a universal religion, a bridge between the Jewish community and those who wished them dead, which frankly flopped pretty hard. Had that been all he ever done, we probably wouldn't remember his name. But a linguist at heart, just like with the Hebrew and the Latin he'd been taught as a child, for a guy like LL, the real fun of making that new religion was actually just in giving it a language. And so building off his critique of Volipuke, he'd come up with a genuinely panuropean ideal, the best language to have ever been constructed. A masterpiece truly, but also a very dangerous thing to do.

[00:11:48]This was internationalist. This was communalist. And those weren't safe things to be associated with. So when LL published that first dictionary in 1887, he'd be forced to invent yet another name, a pseudonym, the Doctor of Hope, or in his new language, Doctor Espironto.

[00:12:11]The first to learn ll's new language, originally known as lingvo internia, would be his close friends and colleagues, or put another way, Russian Jews. Mostly educated, mostly collectivist, mostly meet them in the middle types. That wasn't his intent. He wanted everyone. Those were just the people he knew. But that's still kind of crazy, right? I don't think my friends would do that for me. The second to learn were the Volipukes, hobbyists like himself, linguists, amateurs, idealists.

[00:12:39]You might even call them nerds. To them, Espiranto wasn't about some new religion. It wasn't about saving Poland's Jews. It was just the height of linguistic innovation. It set a standard for what a constructed language might be able to achieve.

[00:12:53]And yet, constructed or not, language is politics. And there's always someone willing to kill over politics. So, the third group, the most influential group, would join for reasons of revolution.

[00:13:04]In the wake of the anarchist assassinations of the late 19th century, revolutionaries of the postmarks left saw in espiranto an easily learned set of code words that the government couldn't overhehere. In 1894, author Leo Toltoy, then one of Russia's most famous anarchist voices, presented it as the language of the cause. And from there, it spread wildly all across the planet.

[00:13:27]Which meant that whether that was fair or not to the capitalist media, this new language Espiranto had started to seem a lot like the missing link between Judaism and Bulcheism.

[00:13:38]Proof that their propaganda had been right all along. Look at them talking in secret, spread across the world.

[00:13:45]Turns out LL was correct. His language was a bridge between worlds, just not the ones he intended. And like some wish on a monkeykey's paw, Espirantes would develop into a new international identity. It would boast over a million speakers from every conceivable background.

[00:14:03]But in the eyes of the authorities to the man in the street, it would never be anything more than a tool of Jewish bullsheism.

[00:14:12]And therefore, anyone who spoke it was a threat.

[00:14:19]In 1903, as Marxism started to become a genuine concern for the empires, perhaps the most famous piece of anti-Jewish literature ever written would appear in Russia. Called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, it was presented like a secret text stolen straight from the Cabal. Sure, at its heart, it was just another reworking of the essays that Braman had written a full generation before, but in this new generation, it found new strength.

[00:14:46]All those same old hits, everything was the Jews fault. The riots, the assassinations, the economic troubles, it was all the work of that international cabal. So don't blame Thesar. He's still a good guy. The real puppeteer here is the Jews.

[00:15:03]And while that dogma certainly founded zealots, propaganda does have its limits. You can call leftism Jewish a thousand times over, but the people supporting it still know you're lying.

[00:15:14]You can blame the failures of capitalism on their secret backstabbing, but everybody can see your mansions still grow. It takes more than propaganda to stop that.

[00:15:26]So they added repression. And who better to start with than that missing link?

[00:15:32]Espiranto would be banned in France. Too Jewish. They said if people wanted to keep speaking it, they'd have to remove LL's influence entirely, which actually they did. In 1922, it would be denied place among the League of Nations to anarchist, they said. And in 1925, Hitler would take it even further. In mine, he'd write that Espiranto was a Jewish threat to German superiority. And when he took power in 33, one of his very first acts was to send the Gestapo to close their schools.

[00:16:01]Two years later, and he'd ban the language entirely.

[00:16:05]In 1934, Stalin began his own great purge. To him, the espirontes were too international to be trusted as Soviets and too Jewish to be Russians. So anybody who could speak it would be sent to the gulag if they weren't just shot on site.

[00:16:22]In 1936, Japan would join alongside.

[00:16:25]They would call them watermelons, green with red inside, implying that the star on their flag meant that they were actually communist.

[00:16:34]A year later and General Franco would execute thousands of international espirontes who'd fought alongside the rebels when he won in 39. To even speak, it would be a death sentence. Starting in 1940, the Nazis began to round up their own espirontes. Be they Jewish, anarchist, or nerd, it didn't matter.

[00:16:51]They shipped them to concentration camps where they'd be worked to death or, as the war went on, executed as traitors.

[00:16:58]By the time the Allies won, where a million people had been before, only a few thousand remained. All across Europe, snuffed out like a light.

[00:17:08]It wasn't linguistics, it was politics.

[00:17:15]It's now been over a hundred years since LL died, and these two are not times of hope. The war for what defines a nation still rages, no less violent today than ever before.

[00:17:27]Broman's words are still as popular as when he wrote them. People still widely believe that Jews control both the left and the right, especially when things go wrong. So yeah, LL didn't save the world. His religion didn't stop the Holocaust. It didn't stop Stalin and it won't stop whatever comes next.

[00:17:49]But it has survived.

[00:17:51]And that's got to count for something today. Nearly as many people speak Espiranto as they do Latvian. Over 2,000 have been raised with it as their native tongue. His words still echo through the ages. His dreams are like Lazarus in every spoken word. And whether he saved the pale or not, that's a pretty incredible feat for a nerd.

[00:18:20]This is rare earth.