Harvard Professor Prefers Volapük to Esperanto

Leo Wiener.
Guess who he knew

When the New York Sun spoke with Professor Wiener of Harvard in 1907, the Volapük movement had collapsed about eighteen years before. Professor Wiener was truly flogging a dead horse, and the article acknowledges this, noting that “now Volapük is mute, and many of its former devotees are working and playing at Esperanto, the language of hope.” (Kudos to the Sun for remembering the umlaut in Volapük.)

From the perspective of the United States, in 1907, Esperanto was still pretty new, even though it was coming up on the twentieth anniversary of its publication. It had not reached the heights of interest that Volapük had achieved, then again, Volupük was published only seven years before Esperanto and Volapük’s fate already seemed to be sealed.

Still, in the Sun article of March 24, 1907, Professor Wiener made unfavorable comparison between Esperanto and Volapük. It seems likely that Wiener was a Volapükian, but there are indications that he was a disaffected Esperantist. Of course, one can be both, as the early twentieth century has plenty of examples of individuals who first favored Volapük, then Esperanto, then Ido (and then went on to invent their own languages).

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Esperanto and Blood Libel

The synagogue where Beilis's
funeral was held

“Blood libel” is the anti-Semitic claim that Jews use Christian blood in the manufacture of Passover matzah, which despite its utter absurdity persisted for many years.[1] The 1913 trial of Menahem Mendel Beilis in Kiev (then within the Russian empire) was last such trial, and it has been noted that it was the only one backed by a central goverment. The Beilis affair was international news, since in most places the blood libel was a superstition that had been cast off in the Middle Ages.[2]

Even at the time, suspicion fell on one of the witnesses for the prosecution, Vera Cheberyak. In an article on the Beilis trial on October 24, 1913, the Salt Lake Tribune has a section headed “Evidence Against Vera.” Cheberyak was described in the paper as being part of a “gang,” later she was found to have had the victim, Andrey Yushchinsky, murdered because he found out about her criminal activities through being friends with her son (whom she also possibly killed). At the time of the report, the Czar’s case against Beilis was crumbling, and suspicion was turning to Cheberyak.

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