Albert Einstein is one of the most famous Jews of the 20th century. He was best known for simply being a genius. Most recently, he was honored as Time Magazine’s person of the century.
Most people recall his scientific achievements, which have profoundly affected our everyday lives. I wanted however, to focus on Albert Einstein the Jew. Throughout his life, Einstein always identified with Zionism and maintained a sense of fairness and justice.
More importantly, he remained fiercely loyal to Jews. Whenever his name could help, he always made it readily available.
For instance, he allowed Yeshiva University to name its medical school “The Albert Einstein College of Medicine.” Also, many other Jewish sponsored hospitals in the 1930’s carried his name.
There is a very telling story about Rabbi Telushkin’s aunt. It seems she was on the board of a Jewish sponsored hospital in New York. She sent a letter to Albert Einstein asking for his support. Within a week he accepted and lent his name for their letterhead.
A brief timeline of 1905 gives us a glimpse into his world. In February of that year, he completed his PhD thesis. The following month he discovered that light travels in both wave and particle form. In May, he proved the existence of atoms with experiments on boiling water. He disproved Isaac Newton’s theory of absolute time with his special theory of relativity in June. His contemporaries at the time said this was perhaps the greatest achievement in the history of human thought. All this was done while working as a clerk at a patent office.
In 1914, Germany declared war on Russia, and Einstein was conflicted between his ideals of nationalism and pacifism. He was appointed to a position at the League of Europe, and called for peace by signing the Manifesto of Europe. The following year he published his second major paper, “The General Theory of Relativity.” This paper included a section explaining how gravity can bend light.
At the start of World War I, Chaim Weitzman was a biochemist working for the government of England. He had just discovered a particular strain of bacterium that could synthesize acetone. This was essential for the manufacture of the explosive cordite. Before Weitzman’s discovery, explosives were very unstable and could blow at any point. At the outbreak of war, he moved to a lab under the direction of A.J. Balfour.
At this time, Einstein was known as the German that opposed the war. But he was prepared to use his fame to heal the world’s wounds by preaching world peace, reforming educational systems, restoring international scientific cooperation, and ensuring the welfare of European Jews.
But as his fame grew he was attacked at lectures and in the press. The majority of scientists still could not understand relativity.
When the war ended, Germans as a whole were bitter about their defeat. Einstein became the focus of their hatred. At this point he was not considered a German or Swiss, but a Socialist and a Jew. He was indeed a pacifist and Zionist.
After the war, the dismal economy in Germany was blamed on the Jews. The ranks of unemployed provided recruits for the extremist political views that were taking hold in Germany.
An interesting thing happened in 1919. On the morning of November 7th, a solar eclipse expedition confirmed Einstein’s theory about gravity bending light. Einstein awoke to find himself famous worldwide. He was initially puzzled by his celebrity status, but immediately put it to his advantage. He sold pictures of himself to journalists and sent the money to an orphanage for war refugees.
In 1922, the same year that Hitler started the Nazi party, Einstein accepted an intellectual position in the newly formed League of Nations—the precursor to the United Nations. The problem with the League was the victors of the first world war excluded Germany from the multinational organization. That put Einstein in a precarious political position with German nationals.
Later that year, Einstein’s friend Walter Rathenau, Foreign Minister of Weimar Republic, was assassinated by right wing extremists. He was Jewish, and had just established diplomatic relations with the Bolshevik Soviet State.
Albert Einstein knew he was a target for Nazi aggression and wanted to leave. His contemporaries like Max Plank strongly urged him to stay in the name of German nationalism.
Chaim Weitzman, the leader of the Zionist Movement, went on a fundraising tour of the United States in 1922. The goal was to establish a Jewish homeland. He brought Einstein—who had just received the Nobel Prize for his 1905 paper—along with him. This was Albert Einstein’s first trip to America. His superstar status was still on the rise.
On his Judaism, Einstein said, “I am not much with people, nor a family man. I want my peace. I want to know how G-d created this world. I am not interested in this phenomenon, or that spectrum, or this element. I want to know His thoughts. The rest are details”.
Sadly, Albert Einstein could not get personal with Hashem. His G-d appears as the physical world itself—with its infinite beauty at the atomic level. He did not believe in life after death. His G-d stood for an orderly system obeying rules. Those rules could be discovered by those who had courage, imagination, and persistence. Albert Einstein tried to find “the law within the laws of nature.” He wanted science to pick up where he felt religion left off. Later in life, he saw both as different sides of the same coin.
In the early 1930’s, Einstein recognized the threat of Hitler, and worked through harsh immigration quotas imposed against Jews. He wrote countless affidavits and helped as many refugees as possible. So many, in fact, that by 1938 his signature on a document no longer carried any weight.
At the same time, he was busy raising funds for organizations like United Jewish Appeal, and continued his work toward securing a Jewish homeland.
In Germany, Albert Einstein and his work became seen as a Jewish plot to pollute science. There was a division in the physics community between the perceived right of Aryans and the perceived wrong of the Jews.
“True physics is the creation of German Spirit” said one German paper. Nazis claimed all the great discoveries from Galileo to Newton as Aryan accomplishments.
By the late 1930’s, the world was poised for another war. Einstein still had friends in Germany—physicists who were working on separating uranium for Germany’s atomic bomb. They kept Einstein informed as to their progress. It was he who alerted Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1939 that Germany’s labs were getting close to success.
Einstein helped establish the Manhattan Project and received an appointment in the US Navy. He actually opposed the use of atomic bombs, and instead urged the US to demonstrate the weapon to foreign governments rather than use it on an actual target.
Germany had all the minds to create the atomic bomb, but because of their anti-Semitism, they chased Albert Einstein, Lise Meitner and hundreds of other qualified Jewish minds out of Germany and into Allied nations.
Throughout the 1940’s, Einstein was at the forefront of the campaign waged by atomic scientists to educate the public and world leaders about the implications of nuclear energy. In a letter to David Ben Gurion he wrote, “My relationship to the Jewish people has become my strongest bond ever since I became aware of our precarious situation among the nations of the world.”
In 1952, after the first president of Israel, Chaim Weitzman died, Albert Einstein was offered the presidency by Ben-Gurion. In a touching letter, he wrote, “I am deeply moved by the offer from our State of Israel, and at once saddened and ashamed that I cannot accept it.”
Einstein’s profoundly simple, childlike nature was the epitome of the absent minded professor. He was the Jew that it was impossible to hate.
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Steve Zagha is a student of zoology and an avid reader of all sciences.
