Back to Babel

Back to Babel tells the remarkable story of how Esperanto found its way to Japan and China between 1905 and 1930, and why it captivated so many there. Drawing on sources in Chinese, Japanese, French, German, Russian, Yiddish, English, and Esperanto, Joshua A. Fogel traces the movement across two generations of enthusiasts—scholars, anarchists, socialists, feminists, and imperialists among them—who embraced Zamenhof’s vision of a world beyond the nation-state, yet often bent it toward their own ends. Where Zamenhof intended Esperanto as an auxiliary to one’s native tongue, some Chinese advocates wielded it as a weapon against their own language and culture. Others saw in it a vehicle for transnational solidarity that could make national boundaries irrelevant.

Fogel argues that East Asian Esperantists, as outsiders to the European movement, often grasped Zamenhof’s deepest aspiration—homaranismo, a universal humanitarianism—more clearly than his European followers did. Singular in its command of sources across multiple languages and traditions, Back to Babel reframes the history of modern East Asia through the lens of internationalism, offering a new perspective on what it meant to imagine a world beyond Babel.