It was much less our own fault or that of our neighbors than of the Mandatory Power, that we did not achieve an undivided Palestine in which Jews and Arabs would live as equals, free, in peace. If one nation dominates other nations, as was the case in the British Mandate over Palestine, she can hardly avoid following the notorious device of Divide et Impera. In plain language this means: create discord among the governed people so they will not unite in order to shake off the yoke imposed upon them. Well, the yoke has been removed, but the seed of dissension has borne fruit and may still do harm for some time to come—let us hope not for too long.
The Jews of Palestine did not fight for political independence for its own sake, but they fought to achieve free immigration for the Jews of many countries where their very existence was in danger; free immigration also for all those who were longing for a life among their own. It is no exaggeration to say that they fought to make possible a sacrifice perhaps unique in history.
I do not speak of the loss in lives and property fighting an opponent who was numerically far superior, nor do I mean the exhausting toil which is the pioneer’s lot in a neglected arid country. I am thinking of the additional sacrifice that a population living under such conditions has to make in order to receive, in the course of eighteen months, an influx of immigrants which comprise more than one third of the total Jewish population of the country. In order to realize what this means you have only to visualize a comparable feat of the American Jews. Let us assume there were no laws limiting the immigration into the United States; imagine that the Jews of this country volunteered to receive more than one million Jews from other countries in the course of one year and a half, to take care of them, and to integrate them into the economy of this country. This would be a tremendous achievement, but still very far from the achievement of our brethren in Israel. For the United States is a big, fertile country, sparsely populated with a high living standard and a highly developed productive capacity, not to compare with small Jewish Palestine whose inhabitants, even without the additional burden of mass immigration, lead a hard and frugal life, still threatened by enemy attacks. Think of the privations and personal sacrifices which this voluntary act of brotherly love means for the Jews of Israel.
The economic means of the Jewish Community in Israel do not suffice to bring this tremendous enterprise to a successful end. For a hundred thousand out of more than three hundred thousand persons who immigrated to Israel since May 1948 no homes or work could be made available. They had to be concentrated in improvised camps under conditions which are a disgrace to all of us.
It must not happen that this magnificent work breaks down because the Jews of this country do not help sufficiently or quickly enough. Here, to my mind, is a precious gift with which all Jews have been presented: the opportunity to take an active part in this wonderful task.
A Biography of Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein (1879–1955) is among modern history’s greatest and most influential minds. He authored more than 450 scholarly works during his lifetime, and his advancements in science—including the revolutionary Theory of Relativity and E=mc2, which described for the first time the relationship between an object’s mass and its energy—have earned him renown as “the father of modern physics.”
Born in Ulm, in southwest Germany, Einstein moved to Munich with his family as an infant. As a child, Einstein spoke so infrequently that his parents feared he had a learning disability. But despite difficulties with speech, he was consistently a top student and showed an early aptitude for mathematics and physics, which he later studied at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich after renouncing his German citizenship to avoid military service in 1896.
After graduation, Einstein married his college girlfriend, Mileva Marić, and they had three children. He attended the University of Zurich for his doctorate and worked at the patent office in Bern, a post he left in 1908 for a teaching position at the University of Bern, followed by a number of professorships throughout Europe that ultimately led him back to Germany in 1914. By this time, Einstein had already become recognized throughout the world for his groundbreaking papers on special relativity, the photoelectric effect, and the relationship between energy and matter. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921.
In 1933, Einstein escaped Nazi Germany and immigrated to the United States with his second wife, Elsa Löwenthal, whom he had married in 1919. He accepted a position at Princeton University in New Jersey, where he stayed for the remainder of his life. At Princeton, Einstein dedicated himself to finding a unified field theory and played a key role in America’s development of atomic weapons. He also campaigned for civil rights as a member of the NAACP and was an ardent supporter of Israel’s Labor Zionist Movement.
Still, Einstein maintained a special affinity for his homeland. His connection to all things German and, in particular, to the scientific community in Berlin was probably the reason that throughout his years in America he so strongly valued his relationships with other German-speaking immigrants. He maintained a deep friendship with the founder of Philosophical Library, Dr. Dagobert D. Runes, who, like Einstein, was a humanist, a civil rights pioneer, and an admirer of Baruch Spinoza. Consequently, many of Albert Einstein’s works were published by Philosophical Library.
At the time of Einstein’s death in 1955, he was universally recognized as one of history’s most brilliant and important scientists.
Einstein with friends Marcel Grossmann, Eugen Grossmann, and Gustav Geissler in the garden of the Grossmann home in Thalwil, Switzerland, around 1899. Einstein’s discussions with Marcel about elliptic geometry provided one of the sparks that led to Einstein’s development of the General Theory of Relativity.
Einstein with his first wife, Mileva Marić, and their son Hans Albert, in 1904. Their second son, Eduard, would be born six years later.
A twenty-six-year-old Einstein during the time he was employed at the Bern patent office, in 1905.
Paper silhouettes created by Einstein in 1919, the year of his marriage to his second wife, Elsa. The silhouettes depict, from left to right, himself, Elsa, and his stepdaughters Ilse and Margot.
Einstein lecturing in Vienna, Austria, in January of 1921, the same year he won the Nobel Prize in Physics. 1921 also marked the year of Einstein’s first visit to New York City, followed by weeks of lectures at some of the East Coast’s most prestigious universities.
Einstein with Elsa in Migdal, Israel, on February 12, 1923.
Einstein smoking a pipe on the porch of his home in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1938. He was a very ardent pipe smoker and treasured the ritual of selecting different tobaccos and preparing them to be smoked.
Einstein with his friends poet Itzik Feffer and actor Solomon Mikhoels, in 1943.
Einstein in his Princeton study on the day that he received his honorary degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in 1949.
Einstein receiving the honorary degree from Israel S. Wechsler while at his Princeton home in 1949.
A portrait of Einstein at the Yeshiva University inauguration dinner for the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, at Princeton Inn on March 15, 1953.
Acknowledgments
1. From Monthly Review; New York, May, 1949.
2. From Pageant; New York, January, 1946.
3. From Science; Washington, D.C., Winter issue, 1935-36. (Translation prepared by Heinz and Ruth Norden.)
4. From a broadcast over ABC to the Rally of Students for Federal World Government; Chicago, May 24, 1946. Hitherto unpublished.
5. From One World or None, edited by Katherine Way and Dexter Masters; Whittlesey House, New York, 1946.
6. From the address delivered at Carnegie Hall, New York, upon receiving the One World Award, April, 1948. Hitherto unpublished.
7. From a speech delivered in Albert Hall, London, October, 1933. Hitherto unpublished.
8. From the message to the Peace Congress of Intellectuals in Wroclav. (This message was never delivered
, but was released to the press on August 29, 1948.)
9. From United Nations World; New York, October, 1947.
10. From Moscow New Times, November 26, 1947; and from Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; Chicago, February, 1948.
11. From a statement to the National Wartime Conference, 1945. Hitherto unpublished.
12. From The Nation; New York, October 3, 1934.
13. Written in 1936 for a gathering of university teachers which never took place. Hitherto unpublished.
14. From Atlantic Monthly; Boston, November, 1945 and November, 1947. As told to Raymond Swing.
15. From an address at the Fifth Nobel Anniversary Dinner at the Hotel Astor, New York, December 10, 1945. Hitherto unpublished.
16. From an address at the second annual dinner given by the Foreign Press Association to the General Assembly and Security Council of the United Nations, at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York, November 11, 1947. Hitherto unpublished.
17. From an address delivered at the Conference of the Progressive Education Association, November 23, 1934. Hitherto unpublished.
18. From Policy; Chicago, November 27, 1934.
19. From The American Scholar; New York, Summer, 1947.
20. From an address to the students of the California Institute of Technology, January 22, 1933. Hitherto unpublished.
21. From The Manchester Guardian; Manchester, England, Christmas, 1942.
22. Preface to Johannes Kepler’s Letters edited by Mrs. David Baumgardt and as yet unpublished.
23. Statement on the occasion of the Curie Memorial Celebration at the Roerich Museum, New York, November 23, 1935.
24. Statement read at the Memorial Services for Max Planck, April, 1948.
25. From La Pensee; Paris, February–March, 1947.
26. From The Scientific Monthly; Washington, D.C., Vol. LIV, February, 1942.
27. From Almanak van het Leidsche Studentencorps published by S. C. Doesburg Verlag, Leiden, Holland; 1934.
28. Statement on the occasion of Mahatma Gandhi’s 70th birthday, 1939. Hitherto unpublished.
29. Statement read at the Nobel Foundation Dinner, December 10, 1946. Hitherto unpublished.
30. From Collier’s; New York, November 26, 1938.
31. From an address over the Columbia Broadcasting System for the United Jewish Appeal, March 22, 1939.
32. Written in 1934. Hitherto unpublished.
33. Unpublished preface to a Black Book. Written in 1945.
34. From a broadcast for the United Jewish Appeal, April 11, 1943. Hitherto unpublished.
35. From an address delivered at the “Third Seder” celebration of the National Labor Committee for Palestine, at the Commodore Hotel, New York, April 17, 1938, and published in New Palestine; Washington, D.C., April 29, 1938.
36. From Bulletin of the Society of Polish Jews; New York, 1944.
37. From a statement read at the unveiling of the Memorial for the Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto; Warsaw, April 19, 1948. Hitherto unpublished.
38. From an address to the Jewish Academy of Sciences and Arts; March 22, 1936. Hitherto unpublished.
39. From a statement read at the Maimonides Jubilee Celebration, New York, April, 1935. Hitherto unpublished. (Translation prepared by Heinz and Ruth Norden.)
40. From Opinion; New York, March, 1949.
41. Statement to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel, on March 15, 1949. Hitherto unpublished.
42. From a letter to the Committee on Unity for Palestine, New York, 1945.
43. From a broadcast for the United Jewish Appeal, over the National Broadcasting Company, November 27, 1949.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
copyright © 1950, 1978 by Philosophical Library, Inc.
cover design by Milan Bozic
ISBN: 978-1-4532-0462-7
This 2011 edition distributed by Open Road Integrated Media
180 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
Essays in Humanism Page 13