Einstein on the Run

by Andrew Robinson

  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 e
yes 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: