A funny lot, these Germans. To them I am a stinking flower, and yet they keep putting me into their buttonhole.
Comment by Einstein in his travel diary in Argentina, April 1925
Einstein’s growing fame and generous personal welcome in England in 1919–21 must have been a piquant experience for him. For back home in Germany, in striking contrast with England, this same period saw the birth of a vociferous anti-relativity movement – among a few notable scientists and some philosophers but also among the general public – culminating in the publication in 1931 of an anti-relativity book in German with the revealing title, A Hundred Authors against Einstein. Although this was not essentially an anti-Semitic publication, the anti-relativity movement coincided with increasing abuse of Einstein as a Jew, accentuated by his declared sympathy from 1921 onwards for the Zionist goal of establishing a Jewish national home in Palestine, in addition to abuse of his increasing sympathy for international pacifism.
As a result, during the first half of the 1920s, Einstein found himself in a disturbing position. He was promoted and hailed as an important cultural ambassador for the Weimar Republic when he travelled and lectured in many countries – ranging from the United States and then England in 1921 to Japan in 1922, Palestine in 1923 and South America in 1925. Yet he was also fiercely attacked by many Germans, at home and abroad, and even placed at risk of assassination by right-wing extremists – as had happened to Walther Rathenau in 1922. In Argentina, for example, the German ambassador reported to his masters in Berlin on Einstein’s 1925 visit: ‘For the first time, a world-famous German scholar came here, and his naïve, kindly, perhaps somewhat unworldly manner had an extraordinary appeal for the local population. One could not find a better man to counter the hostile propaganda of lies, and to destroy the fable of German barbarism.’ And yet, the ambassador admitted, the local German community in Argentina had boycotted all Einstein-related events because its members objected to his pacifism. Several times in this period, Einstein seriously contemplated leaving Germany for good. Such personal tribulations gave him advance warning – ahead of most other Germans – of what to expect from the Nazi Party a decade later.
The anti-relativity movement – dubbed the ‘Anti-relativity Company’ by Einstein – was started in 1920 by a graduate engineer and covert anti-Semite with journalistic and political ambitions and hidden financial backing, Paul Weyland. For scientific respectability Weyland recruited Ernst Gehrcke, an experimental physicist at the Reich Physical and Technical Institute and professor at the University of Berlin, who had been attempting to refute relativity in print since 1911. Neither Weyland nor Gehrcke was of much distinction. But they were soon supported by the physics Nobel laureate Lenard, who had won the prize in 1905. Even before the First World War, Lenard resented what he saw as insufficient British recognition of his experimental physics. During the war he apparently wrote to a physicist colleague fighting at the front ‘expressing his hope that the defeat of the English would make amends for their never having cited him decently’, noted Philip Ball in Serving the Reich, his history of German physics under the Nazis. Antagonistic by nature, Lenard became an anti-Semite after the war, and a follower of Hitler as early as 1924. ‘He invented the difference between “German” and “Jewish” physics,’ commented Born much later; and after 1933 (along with another Nobel laureate, Johannes Stark), he would set about cleansing German science of Jews. (In his book, German Physics, published in 1936, Lenard wrote: ‘In contrast to the intractable and solicitous desire for truth in the Aryan scientists, the Jew lacks to a striking degree any comprehension of truth.’) Einstein’s very public appreciation by English physicists, combined with his Jewishness, infuriated Lenard from the start. ‘This, however,’ Ball suggested with black humour, ‘was no more than one could expect from a nation of vulgar materialists – Lenard would surely have sympathy with Napoleon’s remark about shopkeepers – who knew nothing of the heroic selfless Germanic Kultur.’
During August 1920, the movement announced twenty meetings to be held in the biggest towns in Germany. With its headquarters in Berlin, Weyland and his sponsors hired the Berlin Philharmonic Hall for a set-piece opening demonstration against both relativity and its internationally celebrated author, sche-duled for 24 August. Einstein, and some distinguished physicist friends, made an unscheduled appearance by hiring a box to watch the proceedings – and be watched by the audience. ‘As the speakers went on, attacking relativity, omitting, distorting, unbalancing, appealing to the good Aryan common sense of their audience and invoking its members not to take such stuff seriously, the clown that lies not far below genius began to show itself,’ noted Einstein’s biographer Clark. Sometimes Einstein was observed to burst into laughter and clap his hands in mock applause. At the end of the meeting he told his friends: ‘That was most amusing.’ But behind this façade he was really furious, because Weyland and Gehrcke had accused him not only of scientific charlatanry and self-advertisement but had also implied that he had plagiarised the work of an obscure Pomeranian schoolmaster, Paul Gerber. For two days after the event, he first toyed with the notion of abandoning Germany, as was reported in the Berlin press. In an interview, he remarked: ‘I feel like a man lying in a good bed, but plagued by bedbugs.’
Stung by the public meeting’s accusations, Einstein hit back with an article published on 27 August, headlined ‘My response. On the Anti-relativity Company’, in the columns of a liberal daily newspaper, the Berliner Tageblatt – an unprecedented forum for a respected university scientist in the more staid scientific world of those days. He began:
Herr Weyland and Herr Gehrcke recently delivered a first lecture in this tenor at the Philharmonic; I myself was present. I am very well aware that both speakers are not worthy of an answer from my pen, because I have good reason to believe that motives other than the striving for truth are at the bottom of this business. (If I were a German nationalist with or without a swastika instead of a Jew with liberal international views, then . . .). I only answer because well-meaning circles have repeatedly urged me to make my opinion known.
First, I want to note that today, to my knowledge, there is hardly a scientist among those who have made substantial contributions to theoretical physics who would not admit that the theory of relativity in its entirety is founded on a logical basis and is in agreement with experimental facts which to date have been reliably established. The most important theoretical physicists – namely, H. A. Lorentz, M. Planck, Sommerfeld, Laue, Born, Larmor, Eddington, Debye, Langevin, Levi-Civita – support the theory, and most of them have made valuable contributions to it. As a pronounced opponent of the theory of relativity among physicists of international reputation I would have to name only Lenard. I admire Lenard as a master of experimental physics; but he has not yet produced anything outstanding in theoretical physics, and his objections to the general theory of relativity are of such superficiality that up to now I did not think it necessary to answer them in detail. I intend to make up for this.
I have been accused of running a tasteless advertising campaign for the theory of relativity. But I can say that all my life I have been a friend of well-chosen, sober words and of concise presentation. Highfalutin phrases and words give me goose bumps whether they deal with the theory of relativity or with anything else. I have often made fun of effusions that are now finally attributed to me. Besides, I am happy to let the Herren of the Company have their fun.
Having gone on to deal with some of Gehrcke’s scientific objections to relativity (including his egregious omission of the celebrated confirmation by foreign astronomers of general relativity in 1919), Einstein concluded his salvo with a reference to Holland and Britain: ‘Seeing how the theory and its creator are slandered in such a manner in Germany will make a strange impression in foreign countries, especially with my Dutch and British colleagues H. A. Lorentz and Eddington, gentleman who worked intensively in the field of relativity and repeatedly gave lectures on this subject matter.’ The accuracy of his prediction is revealed by an internal memo dated 2 September 1920 from the German chargé d’affaires in London to the foreign ministry in Berlin: ‘The attacks on Prof. Einstein and the agitation against the well-known scientist are making a very bad impression over here,’ it reported. ‘At the present moment in particular Prof. Einstein is a cultural factor of the first rank, as Einstein’s name is known in the broadest circles. We should not drive out of Germany a man with whom we could make real cultural propaganda.’
Einstein’s best friends in Germany were horrified by his newspaper article, and told him so. Ehrenfest could not believe that some of its phrases were from the pen of Einstein himself. Sommerfeld reported that various people had told him the article did not seem worthy of the Einstein they personally knew, though Sommerfeld supported Einstein’s aggressive comparison of his critics with ‘bedbugs’. Born and his wife felt that Einstein had been ‘goaded into that rather unfortunate reply in the newspapers’. To which Einstein responded: ‘Don’t be too hard on me. Everyone has to sacrifice at the altar of stupidity from time to time, to please the Deity and the human race.’
Drawing of Einstein by William Rothenstein, 1927. Rothenstein was principal of the Royal College of Art in London and a leading British portraitist. Einstein sat for the artist in his study in Berlin, where there was a single framed print on the wall, according to Rothenstein: a portrait of the physicist James Clerk Maxwell.
In truth, the article’s tone was an expression of Einstein’s lifelong ‘impudence’ towards authority (to recall the word he used of his graduate student self, back in 1901). And it would define the tenor of his contradictory relationship with politics in Germany, whether under Kaiser Wilhelm or the Weimar Republic. Although he felt a deep loyalty to German science, about Germany itself Einstein was always ambivalent. As he had written in 1915 in a contribution to a wartime patriotic book requested by the officers of the Berlin Goethe League: ‘The state, to which I belong as a citizen, plays not the slightest role in my emotional life; I regard a person’s relations with the state as a business matter, rather like one’s relations with a life assurance company’ – a comment which the League had refused to publish.
JEWISHNESS AND ANTI-SEMITISM
No doubt Einstein’s Jewishness contributed to his ambivalence, although its role is difficult to analyse, not least because it altered over time. While trying to get established as a scientist in his twenties Einstein knew very well that his search for an academic post had been hampered by his Jewishness. A 1901 letter from his future wife, Mileva, to her best friend makes it plain: ‘you know that my darling has a very wicked tongue and on top of it he is a Jew’. That said, in Switzerland Einstein was not confronted with ‘the virulent anti-Semitism common among German students of this period’, as Ze’ev Rosenkranz noted in Einstein before Israel. However, discreet anti-Semitism was evident in Einstein’s first successful academic appointment, at the University of Zurich in 1909. The dean of the department wrote confidentially:
Herr Dr Einstein is an Israelite, and . . . the Israelites are credited among scholars with a variety of disagreeable character traits, such as importunateness, impertinence, a shopkeeper’s mind in their understanding of their academic position, etc., and in numerous cases with some justification. On the other hand, it may be said that among the Israelites, too, there are men without even a trace of these unpleasant characteristics and that it would therefore not be appropriate to disqualify a man merely because he happens to be a Jew.
Einstein’s own attitude at this time was summarised in his private comment on the Jews from wealthy families in Zurich who were Privatdozents (teaching assistants – the position for which he himself was rejected in 1907) but who continued to aspire to be professors, purely for reasons of social acceptance, despite being repeatedly passed over for promotion. ‘Why are these fellows, who make out very comfortably by private means, so anxious to land state-paid positions? Why all that humble tail-wagging to the state?’ Their subservience showed a lack of proper pride, he felt.
Although Einstein’s parents and immediate family believed in pursuing a high degree of Jewish assimilation into German society, he himself was less persuaded, and moved further and further away from this view with age. His Jewish friend Haber’s desire to be a Prussian – to the extent of having himself baptised a Protestant in the 1890s – was quite beyond the pale for Einstein, who never felt that he ‘was Jewish, but wished he weren’t and tried to pretend that he wasn’t’ (as was said of the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, Einstein’s colleague at Princeton). Nor did he agree with another Jewish friend, Born, who came from a highly assimilated family and regarded the anti-Semitic expressions and measures of pre-1918 Germany as ‘unjustified humiliations’. Einstein’s basic view, prior to the appalling excesses of the Nazi period, was that anti-Semitism, though unquestionably unpleasant, was to be expected in any multi-ethnic society, and was ‘not to be got rid of by well-meaning propaganda. Nationalities want to pursue their own path, not to blend. A satisfactory state of affairs can only be brought about by mutual toleration and respect.’ (As Born admitted in the 1960s: ‘History has shown that Einstein was the more profound.’)
The corollary to this attitude, for Einstein, was that Jews should build up their own sense of self-assurance and look after their own kind, rather than seeking acceptance and help from their host societies. In 1920, he therefore declined to attend a meeting organised by the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith intended to help fight anti-Semitism in academic circles. ‘I am neither a German citizen, nor is there anything in me which can be designated as “Jewish faith”,’ Einstein informed the organisers. ‘But I am a Jew and am glad to belong to the Jewish people, even if I do not consider them in any way God’s elect. Let us calmly leave anti-Semitism to the non-Jew and retain our love for people of our own kind.’
Einstein felt that he was bound to other Jews by tribal ties, not by ties of religion. Hence the German word, Stammesgenossen, he would typically use when referring to fellow Jews, meaning ‘tribal companions’, rather than the more orthodox ‘co-religionists’. His earliest use of it appears to have been in 1914 in a letter he sent from Berlin rejecting an invitation from the Academy in St Petersburg to visit Tsarist Russia, because of the Russian empire’s history of anti-Jewish pogroms: ‘It goes against the grain to travel without necessity to a country where my tribal companions were so brutally persecuted.’ He used the term again in 1921, while arguing with Haber about why, by contrast, he was willing to visit the United States as part of a Zionist fundraising mission for settling Jews in Palestine: ‘Naturally, I am needed not for my abilities but solely for my name, from whose publicity value a substantial effect is expected among the rich tribal companions in Dollaria.’
FOR AND AGAINST ZIONISM
His growing feeling of solidarity with the Jewish tribe was, of course, what first sparked Einstein’s interest in Zionism. In his Berlin-based talks in 1919–20 with a German-Jewish writer, Alexander Moszkowski, published as Conversations with Einstein soon after, Zionism was not even mentioned (nor was Judaism). It was the anti-Semitism Einstein experienced in Germany after August 1920 that sharpened his commitment and drew him towards the Zionist fold.
However, being Einstein – a self-confessed ‘lone traveller’ – he never formally joined the Zionist organisation. ‘The Zionists’ always remained ‘them’ for Einstein, noted Rosenkranz; ‘they did not make the all-important transition to “us”’. Freedom and independence always came first for him; tribal loyalty second. From 1921 onwards, he would be selfless in helping the Zionists to raise money, especially for the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, but he would not toe the Zionists’ line when he disagreed with their nationalism, especially their antagonism towards the Arab population in Palestine.
His very personal, dichotomous amalgam of commitment and rejection led Einstein both to admire and to condemn Chaim Weizmann, the leader of Zionism from the 1920s and the first president of the state of Israel. The prickly synergy between the two men involved not only Jewish tribalism and German nationalism but also British colonial politics, and even science. (Weizmann struggled to understand relativity but joked that after Einstein had explained it to him many times, ‘I was fully convinced that he understood it.’) According to Sir Isaiah Berlin, a Jew born in Russia who made his career as a political philosopher at the University of Oxford, who knew both Weizmann and Einstein personally:
Weizmann’s relationship with Einstein, despite their deep mutual admiration for each other, remained ambivalent; Weizmann was inclined to regard Einstein as an impractical idealist inclined to utopian attitudes in politics. Einstein, in his turn, looked on Weizmann as too much of a Realpolitiker, and was irritated by his failure to press for reforms in the [Hebrew] University away from what he regarded as an undesirable American collegiate pattern. Nevertheless, they remained allies and friends to the end of their lives.
Weizmann, like Berlin, was a Russian-born Jew, whose twin careers in science and politics were made by England. He emigrated there, via Germany, in 1904; established himself as a biochemist at the University of Manchester; became a British citizen in 1910; and retained British citizenship until his appointment as the first president of Israel in 1948. During the First World War he was a key scientist for the Allied cause – like Haber for imperial Germany – with his discovery of a particular strain of bacterium that could synthesise acetone, a compound vital for the manufacture of the explosive cordite. Throughout the war Weizmann worked in British government service, and became director of the Admiralty’s laboratories from 1916 to 1919, initially under A. J. Balfour, the first lord of the Admiralty.
He had been actively interested in Zionism since the 1880s and had first visited Jerusalem in 1907. While undertaking his war-related research, Weizmann also laboured to promote Zionist interests in Palestine with the support of the British government. In 1916, Balfour left the Admiralty for the Foreign Office. By mid-1917, Weizmann’s influence through Balfour was such that the issue of Palestine was discussed in the war cabinet. In November 1917, the Balfour Declaration of the British government’s support for a Jewish national home in Palestine was announced in a letter to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community. In early 1919, Weizmann represented the Zionist organisation at the Versailles peace conference. In the following year, the British Mandate of Palestine was created out of the former territory of the Ottoman Empire; it would last until the creation of Israel, led by Weizmann, in 1948.
Soon after this key British political development in 1920, Weizmann began to cultivate Einstein as an ally of the Zionist cause. It was a propitious moment to do so, coming in the wake of the anti-relativity movement and the rise of German anti-Semitism against Einstein, plus the confirmation of general relativity in November 1919 (news of which was first communicated to Einstein in Berlin by the Central Zionist Bureau in London) that made Einstein a worldwide political asset for Jews. By 1921, ‘Einstein and the Zionist movement very much needed each other’, according to Rosenkranz. ‘Indeed, his personal needs and their organisational needs coalesced to form a highly advantageous constellation for both parties.’
In February that year, Weizmann – who was yet to meet Einstein in person – sent a telegram from England to Germany addressed to a key Zionist in Berlin, Kurt Blumenfeld. Weizmann knew that Blumenfeld had been courting Einstein since early 1919 without fully persuading him of the merits of Zionism. ‘I was to stir up Einstein,’ Blumenfeld reported in his memoirs, and convince him to accompany Weizmann to the United States in order to raise funds from American Jews, particularly for the proposed Hebrew University.
When Blumenfeld went to see Einstein with Weizmann’s telegram, he initially met with a refusal. Einstein said he was not fully convinced by the idea of the Jerusalem university. ‘Besides, I consider that the role which is expected of me is an unworthy one. I am not an orator. I can contribute nothing convincing, and they only need my name which is now in the public eye.’
Blumenfeld chose not to respond to this, and instead read the telegram aloud again. Then he added: ‘Weizmann represents Zionism. He alone can make decisions. He is the president of our organisation, and if you take your conversion to Zionism seriously, then I have the right to ask you, in Dr Weizmann’s name, to go with him to the United States and to do what he at the moment thinks is necessary.’
To Blumenfeld’s ‘boundless astonishment’, this exhortation to obey authority proved unexpectedly powerful. Einstein answered: ‘What you say now is right and convincing. With argument and counter-argument we get no further. To you Weizmann’s telegram is a command. I realise that I myself am now part of the situation and that I must accept the invitation. Telegram Weizmann that I agree.’
When this news was announced by the Zionist organisation, there was universal opposition in Germany, particularly among Jews. Einstein’s friend Haber wrote him a heartfelt and eloquent four-page letter begging him to change his mind. According to Haber, Einstein’s affiliation to Zionism would damage, not assist, the prospects of German Jews:
To the whole world you are today the most important of German Jews. If at this moment you demonstratively fraternise with the British and their friends, people in this country will see this as evidence of the disloyalty of the Jews. Such a lot of Jews went to war, have perished, or become impoverished without complaining, because they regarded it as their duty. Their lives and death have not liquidated anti-Semitism, but have degraded it into something hateful and undignified in the eyes of those who represent the dignity of this country. Do you wish to wipe out the gain of so much blood and suffering of German Jews by your behaviour? . . . You will certainly sacrifice the narrow basis upon which the existence of academic teachers and students of the Jewish faith at German universities rests.
Replying by return, Einstein admitted some reservations about the timing and nature of the US visit, yet argued for its fundamental validity on grounds that went beyond the particular situation of assimilated German Jews such as Haber: ‘Despite my internationalist beliefs I have always felt an obligation to stand up for my persecuted and morally oppressed tribal companions as far as is within my power.’ Therefore much more was involved in his decision than an act of loyalty or disloyalty. The establishment of a Jewish university ‘fills me with particular joy, having recently seen countless instances of perfidious and loveless treatment of splendid young Jews, with attempts to cut off their chances of education’.
In the event, during Einstein’s visit to the United States in April–May 1921 – his very first overseas trip – and in his other world travels during the 1920s, Einstein’s Jewishness received less attention abroad than it did in Germany (with the obvious exception of his visit to Palestine), except in Jewish and Zionist circles in those countries. In England, for example, in June 1921, it was naturally prominent when Einstein addressed the Manchester University Jewish Students’ Society on the subject of the Jerusalem university. But it went unmentioned in newspaper reports on his lectures on relativity in Manchester and London (and also in Lord Haldane’s lengthy philosophical book, The Reign of Relativity). So much so, in fact, that a commentator in the Jewish Chronicle felt obliged to complain:
Recall Einstein’s visit a week or two ago. He was acclaimed as the greatest mind of our age; his simplicity of demeanour, his ability to produce sweet music were favourably commented upon. But not once did I see it stated that Einstein is a Jew. I do not think that this point needs stressing. Jews may sometimes produce a great genius: other peoples may sometimes do no less. But when (in breach of the ninth commandment) the mass of the public is informed in season and out of season that Jews are revolutionaries, that they are a disruptive element in modern society, that the British Empire itself is in danger of their secret machinations, it is only fair surely to expect that when a popular hero who is a Jew appears on the horizon, his Jewishness should be pointed out. Why is it that this small point is overlooked?
In 1922, Jewishness was certainly a factor in triggering Einstein’s visit to faraway Japan. On 24 June, his friend Rathenau was gunned down in a Berlin street. Immediately, Einstein realised that he too, as a prominent Jewish liberal in Germany’s public life like Rathenau, was at risk. At first he considered leaving the country for good, as he had considered doing in 1920 at the time of the ‘Anti-relativity Company’ event. Four days later, however, after the initial panic had subsided, Einstein decided to stay in Germany, but resign from his public offices and avoid public appearances, such as the centenary celebration conference of the Society of German Scientists and Physicians, scheduled for September. ‘For, I am supposedly among the group of persons being targeted by nationalist assassins,’ he informed Planck, one of the conference organisers, in a letter from Kiel on 6 July. ‘I have no secure proof, of course; but the prevailing situation now makes it appear thoroughly credible.’ After disappearing from view in Berlin as far as possible, at the beginning of October Einstein and his wife were able to get away from Germany for almost six months, during which Einstein lectured to large and respectful audiences in Japan, at the invitation of a Japanese publisher that had first been extended to him in 1921.
While the Einsteins were there in December 1922, the trial of the would-be assassins of Rathenau took place in Berlin. One of the witnesses, a German-Jewish journalist, Maximilian Harden, testified in court that ‘The great scholar Albert Einstein is now in Japan because he does not feel safe in Germany.’ This comment was picked up from a news agency report by the Japan Advertiser, causing embarrassment to the German ambassador to Japan, Wilhelm Solf. He requested Einstein by cable to allow him to deny the story by cable publicly. But as Einstein conveyed to Solf in a letter, the true situation was somewhat more complicated than it appeared. He explained: ‘Harden’s statement is certainly awkward for me, in that it aggravates my situation in Germany; nor is it completely correct, but neither is it completely wrong. Because people who know the situation in Germany well are indeed of the opinion that a certain threat to my life does exist.’ He then admitted that his own assessment of the threat had changed as a result of the murder of Rathenau. Before the murder, ‘A yearning for the Far East led me, in large part, to accept the invitation to Japan’; after the murder, ‘I was certainly very relieved to have an opportunity for a long absence from Germany, taking me away from the temporarily heightened danger without my having to do anything that could have been unpleasant for my German friends and colleagues.’
Even more complicated was Einstein’s relationship with Palestine, which he visited on the way back to Germany from the Far East, over twelve days in February 1923. For it involved both his fellow Jews – German and otherwise – and the British colonial servants running the political affairs of the Mandate founded in 1920. Although Einstein had formed a positive impression of what he saw as British ‘enlightened colonialism’ and its ‘civilising mission’ in the places he visited on his way to and from Japan, such as Ceylon and Hong Kong, their application to Palestine was clearly a more sensitive matter, about which Einstein would express neither a positive nor a negative view in 1923.
On arrival by train in Jerusalem, the Einsteins were met by a British army officer, who took them by car up the Mount of Olives to Government House on the summit, the official residence of Sir Herbert Samuel, a British Jew who was the first High Commissioner of Palestine, where they were to be his guests for a few days. Einstein thought the building enormously pretentious and dubbed it ‘Samuel’s Castle’. Originally conceived as a hospice for German pilgrims in Jerusalem by Kaiser Wilhelm II on his visit to Jerusalem in 1899, its chapel boasted a mosaic mural depicting the Kaiser, accompanied by his wife, holding a replica of the building: ‘very Wilhelminian’, noted Einstein laconically in his diary.
But he got on well with Samuel and his small family, and formed a friendship that would last for many years; when Einstein visited London in 1930 to speak at a Jewish fundraising dinner, he again stayed with Samuel. He appreciated Samuel’s ‘English formality’, his ‘superior, multifaceted education’ and his ‘lofty view of life tempered by humour’. Samuel, for his part, described Einstein in his memoirs as ‘a man of kindly disposition and simple ways. Recognised everywhere as the greatest scientist of our age, he carries his immense fame without the smallest self-consciousness, without either pride or diffidence. . . . His sense of humour is keen, and laughter comes readily.’
On the first day, which happened to be the Sabbath, Einstein and Samuel walked together on a footpath past the city walls to an ancient gate into the old city of Jerusalem, where they were joined by a Zionist thinker, Asher Ginsberg. According to Einstein’s diary:
Continue on into the city with Ginsberg. Through bazaar alleyways and other narrow streets to the large mosque on a splendid wide raised square, where Solomon’s temple stood. Similar to Byzantine church, polygonal with central dome supported by pillars [the Dome of the Rock]. On the other side of the square, a basilica-like mosque of mediocre taste [the Al-Aqsa Mosque]. Then downward to the temple wall (Wailing Wall), where obtuse ethnic brethren [Stammesbrüder] pray loudly, with their faces turned to the wall, bend their bodies to and fro in a swaying motion. Pitiful sight of people with a past but without a present. Then diagonally through the (very dirty) city swarming with the most disparate assortment of holy men and races, noisy and Oriental-exotic.
After this distinctly mixed introduction to Jerusalem, most of Einstein’s visit was chiefly concerned with introducing the world’s most celebrated Jew to a wide range of local Jews (very few Arabs) in various places, including Tel Aviv, at the behest of the Palestinian Zionist organisation, which was determined to give him as favourable an impression as possible of Jewish Palestine. For example, three days after his arrival, Einstein spent the morning at two Jewish settlements west of Jerusalem with a workers’ cooperative dedicated to training newly arrived settlers without any experience of the construction trades. In the afternoon, he met another philosopher, Hugo Bergmann from Prague, who was trying to establish the Hebrew University’s library, followed by a local Jewish high-school teacher of mathematics, who showed him some interesting investigations in matrix algebra. The evening was then free for Einstein to accept the invitation of an English couple and their guests, where he made music for a long time, because he had become starved of western music in the Far East.
Norman Bentwich was an army officer stationed in Palestine who was attorney general in the British administration. His wife, Helen, left a lively account of their Einsteinian evening in a letter to her mother in England, mentioning her musical husband and his two musical sisters, Margery and Thelma. ‘The great event has been Einstein,’ she wrote.
He is very simple and rather bored by the people but very interested in the music provided for him. Mrs Einstein is a mixture between a Hausfrau and a Madonna. Tuesday evening they came to dine, and there was music. Margery, Thelma, Norman, a man Feingold and Einstein played a Mozart quintet. Norman on the viola and Einstein on Norman’s violin. He looked very happy whilst he was playing, and played extraordinarily well. He told some interesting things about Japan and his visit there, and talked of music, but not of his theories. He said of some man – ‘he is not worth reading, he writes just like a professor’ – which was rather nice. He only talks French and German, but his wife talks English. She said they got so tired of continual receptions and lectures, and longed to see the interesting places they visit alone and simply.
The general truth of this picture, especially the last comment, is borne out by Einstein’s none-too-enthusiastic reaction in his diary to perhaps his most important formal engagement in Palestine: the first lecture of the nascent Hebrew University on 7 February. It took place in a hall of the British police academy on Mount Scopus, which had been hung with Zionist flags for the occasion, alongside the Union Jack, a portrait of the high commissioner, Samuel, and a portrait of Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism. The audience of about 250 people consisted of government officials (including Samuel and the Bentwiches), Dominican Fathers, missionaries and of course many Jews. Einstein was introduced by the local president of the Zionist organisation, Menachem Ussishkin, with this concluding flourish: ‘Mount the platform which has been waiting for you for 2,000 years.’ Einstein then began lecturing on relativity with a single sentence in Hebrew, a language that was ‘evidently unfamiliar’, noted Samuel (Einstein never learned Hebrew as a child), immediately switched to French and concluded in German. After he had finished, he was formally thanked, quite wittily, by Samuel, who then strolled back and forth with Einstein on the hill road, engaging in philosophical conversation. Later, there was a banquet in his honour at Government House, attended by a range of British Mandate officials including the chief justice and the head of education, the Arab mayor of Jerusalem and a well-known American archaeologist, William F. Albright, and his wife. ‘That evening, well and truly satisfied with all these comedies!’ noted Einstein.
Einstein and his wife Elsa at Government House, Jerusalem, February 1923, during his first, and only, visit to Palestine, which was then under British administration. Between the Einsteins in the front row stand the high commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel, and his wife Beatrice. Behind Sir Herbert is the attorney general, Norman Bentwich, who invited Einstein to his house, where he relished playing his violin after a long gap in the Far East.
On the last day of his visit, the diary included Einstein’s most insightful comment on his attitude to Palestine, at the end of a busy day with yet another lecture:
Drive from terraced, very scenic Nazareth across the Jezreel Valley, Nablus, to Jerusalem. Quite hot at departure, then severe cold with pelting rain. En route, road blocked by a truck sunk in the mud. People and car take separate detours over ditch and field. Cars get heavily battered about in this country. In the evening, lecture in German in Jerusalem in a packed hall with inevitable speeches and presentation of diploma by Jewish medical doctors, the speaker scared stiff and froze. Thank heavens that there are also some with less self-assurance among us Jews. I am wanted in Jerusalem at all costs and am being assailed on all fronts in this regard. My heart says yes but my mind says no.
Einstein left Jerusalem on 14 February 1923. He would never return to Palestine. In 1952, he declined the presidency of Israel offered to him on the death of Weizmann. Instead, he worked assi-duously for Jewish causes internationally from the 1920s through the Nazi period and the post-war impact of the Holocaust right up to his death. Indeed, his very last piece of writing is an unfinished draft of his proposed address for Israel’s Independence Day in 1955, petering out with these cautionary words: ‘Political passions, once they have been fanned into flame, exact their victims . . .’.
PACIFISM AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS
No doubt from the beginning of his involvement with the Jewish cause Einstein had sensed that Zionism – like all forms of nationalism – carried within it the seeds of armed conflict. He had lived through the German nationalism that led to the First World War, Germany’s military defeat and the fierce international sanctions that followed it, which nourished the nationalist myth that Germany’s collapse was the result of being ‘stabbed in the back’ by internal enemies, represented by Jews such as the soon-to-be-murdered Rathenau. From 1921 onwards, therefore, along with his support for a Jewish national home in Palestine, Einstein was simultaneously active in trying to promote world peace.
To begin with, his efforts focused on encouraging international understanding between scientists divided by war. In late 1921, he wrote a statement on ‘The International Character of Science’, intended for publication in German in a pacifist handbook. He commented that during the recent war, when nationalist delusions were at their zenith, Emil Fischer (the Nobel laureate in chemistry for 1902) had made an emphatic statement to a Prussian Academy meeting: ‘You can do nothing, gentlemen, science is – and shall remain – international!’ Then Einstein noted that scientific conferences were still being organised with the deliberate exclusion of professional scientists from former enemy countries. ‘Solemnly argued political considerations stand in the way of the supremacy of purely factual considerations so essential in fostering the great causes.’ What could well-intentioned people do to counteract this policy of exclusion? The most effective policy for them would be to maintain close contacts with ‘like-minded fellows’ from all the other countries and to advocate persistently the cause of internationalism within their own national spheres of influence. No doubt the success of such efforts would take time, but they were sure to bear fruit. ‘I would not like to let this opportunity pass without pointing out with admiration that, particularly among a large number of our English fellow professionals, the effort to uphold the intellectual community has remained alive throughout all these difficult years.’
Soon after this, the League of Nations – founded in 1920 – decided to establish an advisory International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, to promote international exchange between scientists, researchers, teachers, artists and intellectuals. The committee would formally exist until 1946, when it was dissolved and succeeded by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).
Einstein, along with Marie Curie, the Dutch physicist Lorentz, the French philosopher Henri Bergson, the British classical scholar Gilbert Murray and other thinkers of international renown, were mooted as potential committee members. Since this was four years before Germany’s admission to the League of Nations, when German scientists were still boycotted by scientific conferences organised by the former Allies (as noted above by Einstein), his name inevitably provoked some controversy. Murray – who was chairman of the committee from 1928 to 1939, following Bergson and Lorentz – recalled these early arguments at the end of his life in the 1950s, as follows:
I was naturally eager to get Doctor Einstein made a member of the Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, partly because he would, in a sense, count as a German, and partly for his eminence, but there were two or three obstacles – some of my French colleagues objected to having a German so soon while some Germans argued that he was not a German at all but a Swiss Jew. Another difficulty was Einstein’s own mistrust of the Committee on Intellectual Cooperation as merely a committee formed by the victors. A conversation with some leading members of the committee very soon satisfied him as to our real international and peaceful spirit. The German objection was not one that could be maintained; if he was a Swiss, the Germans had no ground for objecting to him.
In mid-May 1922, Sir Eric Drummond, the British secretary general of the League, formally invited Einstein to join the committee. He promptly accepted, if with a note of doubt: ‘Although I am not clear at all as to the character of the work to be done by the committee, I consider it my duty to accept your invitation. In my opinion, no one, in times such as these, should refuse to take part in any effort made to bring about international cooperation.’
But soon he had second thoughts and decided to withdraw. The principal reason was probably Rathenau’s assassination on 24 June and Einstein’s wish to withdraw from German public life. He advised a French League of Nations official whom he knew personally: ‘the situation here is such that a Jew would do well to exercise restraint as regards his participation in political affairs. In addition, I must say that I have no desire to represent people who certainly would not choose me as their representative, and with whom I find myself in disagreement on the questions to be dealt with.’
Murray pleaded with Einstein not to withdraw. So did Curie. She wrote to him:
I have received your letter, which has caused me a great deal of disappointment. It seems to me that the reason you give for your abstention is not convincing. It is precisely because dangerous and prejudicial currents of opinion do exist that it is necessary to fight them and you are able to exercise, to this extent, an excellent influence, if only by your personal reputation which enables you to fight for toleration. I think that your friend Rathenau, whom I judge to have been an honest man, would have encouraged you to make at least an effort at peaceful, intellectual international collaboration. Surely you can change your mind. Your friends here have kind memories of you.
For whatever reason, Einstein did again change his mind and accept membership of the committee. However, he still felt unable to attend its first meeting in Geneva in August 1922. Instead he sent a telegram of support, before departing for the Far East in early October.
It turned out that a pattern had been set. Einstein truly believed in fostering internationalism among thinkers, yet he was uncomfortable to be seen as a representative of Germany; and by nature he disliked committees.
In March 1923, soon after returning from his Far Eastern trip, and without having attended any meeting of the Interna-tional Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, Einstein once again resigned from it. This time he was provoked by the French government’s unilateral decision to send occupation troops into the Ruhr district of Germany in January 1923, as a reprisal against Germany’s failure to fulfil its obligations to pay war reparations, agreed at the post-war Versailles peace conference. For once, Einstein found himself on the side of German nationalists. But his reasons were different from theirs, as he explained to the League: ‘I have become convinced that the League possesses neither the strength nor the sincere desire which it needs to accomplish its aims. As a convinced pacifist, I feel obliged to sever all relations with the League.’ He therefore requested that his name be removed from the roster of committee members.
Once again, he heard from Murray. ‘I fully understand your action, and even feel the strongest sympathy with it, but I hope and believe that you are wrong,’ Murray wrote.
I believe that the right line would have been for a number of us to say that it was impossible for the Committee on Intellectual Cooperation to function while the French were refusing to submit their case to arbitration and were creating practically a state of war in Europe. I believe that some other members of the committee would have been willing to take that line. The committee itself consists largely of people who have nothing particular to do with the League and are not, I fear, permeated with the League spirit.
Einstein stuck to his guns, so to speak, with reluctance. He told Murray in his reply: ‘the League functions as a tool of those nations which, at this stage of history, happen to be the dominant powers. Thus, the League not only fails to uphold justice but actually undermines the faith of men of goodwill who believe in the possibility of creating a supranational organisation.’
But when Murray, with the unanimous support of the com-mittee, tried to lure Einstein back a year or so after his 1923 resignation, he was again open to discussion. He assured Murray: ‘I do not hesitate to tell you that my closest and most enlightened friends were the ones who expressed the deepest regret over my resignation. I myself have slowly come to feel that I was influenced more by a passing mood of disillusionment than by clear thinking.’ Certainly, thus far the League had often failed; yet in such challenging times as these he recognised that the League was the institution that offered the greatest likelihood of effective action if its members were to strive honestly for international reconciliation.
Einstein re-joined the committee in June 1924 and remained a member, formally speaking, until 1932. But it has to be said that he was never an assiduous attender of its discussions, or an enthusiast for them, because he found the committee to be trapped between France’s desire for political domination and Germany’s desire to restore its political respectability.
Perhaps the only committee project that really caught Einstein’s imagination was its commitment to encouraging and publishing ‘an exchange of letters between leaders of thought, on the lines of those which have always taken place at the great epochs of European history’. From this emerged a pamphlet, Why War?, based on Einstein’s own exchange with Sigmund Freud in 1932. It attempted to answer his opening question to Freud, ‘Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war?’, and his concluding question, ‘Is it possible to control man’s mental evolution so as to make him proof against the psychosis of hate and destructiveness?’ On which Einstein commented provocatively, bearing in mind his own exposure to the behaviour of German academics during the First World War: ‘Here I am thinking by no means only of the so-called uncultured masses. Experience proves that it is rather the so-called “intelligentsia” that is most apt to yield to these disastrous collective suggestions,’ because, he said, ‘the intellectual has no direct contact with life in the raw but encounters it in its easiest, synthetic form – upon the printed page.’
Why War? was published by the League of Nations Inter-national Institute of Intellectual Cooperation in 1933 – ironically the year in which the Nazis seized power in Germany – with the active help of some German intellectuals, including physicists such as Lenard, and the silent cooperation of others, such as Planck.
Probably, Einstein’s growing disillusionment with the League of Nations was what kindled his belief in militant pacifism. Dislike of war had been implicit in his childhood in Germany; hatred of it explicit in some of his statements during and after the First World War, including his participation in the ‘Manifesto to the Europeans’ published in 1917. However, he did not actually ally himself with war resistance movements until the later years of the 1920s.
In early 1928, he told the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, which had arranged a conference on gas warfare to be held in Geneva simultaneously with a meeting of the League of Nations Disarmament Commission:
It seems to me an utterly futile task to prescribe rules and limitations for the conduct of war. War is not a game; hence, one cannot wage war by rules as one would in playing games. Our fight must be directed against war itself. The masses of people can most effectively fight the institution of war by establishing, in time of peace, an organisation for absolute refusal of military service. The efforts made in this direction in England and Germany appear rather promising.
That same month, Einstein accepted election to the board of directors of the German League for Human Rights, which was then the leading pacifist movement in Germany.
Later in 1928, he sent a message to the No More War Movement in London, the British section of War Resisters’ International, which was more emphatic than his earlier message:
I am convinced that the international movement to refuse participation in any kind of war service is one of the most encouraging developments of our time. Every thoughtful, well-meaning and conscientious human being should assume, in time of peace, the solemn and unconditional obligation not to participate in any war, for any reason, or to lend support of any kind, whether direct or indirect.
Finally, in 1930, he made his most pungent statement about militarism in an article, ‘The World as I See It’, which soon became a key text on Einstein the humanitarian:
I feel only contempt for those who can take pleasure marching in rank and file to the strains of a band. Surely, such men were given their great brain by mistake; the spinal cord would have amply sufficed. This shameful stain on civilisation should be wiped out as soon as possible. Heroism on command, senseless violence and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism – how passionately I despise them! How vile and contemptible war seems to me! I would rather be torn limb from limb than take part in such an ugly business.
Einstein speaks at a Jewish fundraising dinner at the Savoy Hotel, London, October 1930, along with George Bernard Shaw (on the right). Between them sits Lord Lionel Rothschild, a leading British Jew. In his speech, Shaw counted Einstein among the ‘makers of universes’, in the company of Pythagoras, Ptolemy, Aristotle, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton.
And that same year, at a meeting in New York, he declared himself a militant pacifist in a speech – the so-called ‘Two-per-cent speech’ – which quickly became a symbol for the international pacifist movement, both figuratively and literally, in the form of pacifist lapel buttons with the legend ‘2%’. He said: ‘Even if only two per cent of those assigned to perform military service should announce their refusal to fight, as well as urge means other than war of settling international disputes, governments would be powerless, they would not dare send such a large number of people to jail.’
Soon afterwards, Bertrand Russell publicly welcomed this speech. But in a private letter to the secretary of War Resisters’ International, Russell warned: ‘The next war will, I think be more fierce than the war which as yet is still called “Great”, and I think governments would have no hesitation in shooting the pacifist two per cent.’
The rise to political power of Nazism in Germany in 1933 put Einstein the militant pacifist in an extremely awkward position, in which he would feel forced to change his mind about military service. But before coming to that turbulent period of his life, let us revisit his science. In the late 1920s, at the same time as he embraced militant pacifism, Einstein became a militant critic of the theory of quantum mechanics, developed from work done by his scientific friends and colleagues in Britain, Germany and several other countries inspired by Einstein’s original quantum theory of 1905.
