The publication in Warsaw of the first Esperanto textbook in Yiddish 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 (he was a regular contributor of Nahum Sokolow’s Ha-Tsefira), wrote a text which, unlike the texts of L. L. Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, was aimed at the relatively uneducated. His desire to offer the new “international language” to the broad Jewish public is consistent with his position as a Maskilic intellectual, concerned with improving the lot of the people. 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 lan- guage 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 - the main languages in the Yiddishland environment.