In the meantime, Galilei in Captivity sparked another controversy in Israel. In 1948, the year of independence, Brod was awarded the highly prestigious Bialik Prize for Literature from the city of Tel Aviv for this novel, written in German and published in Winterthur, in the canton of Zurich. The prize citation read: “The book is saturated with genuine Jewish spirit and the eternal ideals of the people of Israel. From that perspective, the book possesses the highest educational and public value for our generation.”112 On both aesthetic and especially political grounds—the recency of the Holocaust, the tone-deafness of the timing, Brod’s discomfort with the Hebrew language for literature (though he used it orally)—a legal case was brought against the city arguing that this novel was not “Hebrew Literature.” (The Hebrew translation by Dov Sadan was also attacked.) Brod was scarred by the ferocity of the reaction, and he omitted any mention of the Bialik Prize in his memoirs.
In the wake of that debacle, getting a response from Einstein was a welcome balm. Brod both expressed a desire that Einstein read on to the end—as far as we know, he never did—and defended his historical research: “But he was really the way I have presented him. His letters, which we have in a beautiful edition in the university library here, testify to this.”113 He continued to try to elicit Einstein’s approval. Later that year he sent the physicist a musical composition he had written, referencing in his cover letter the evenings at Bertha Fanta’s.114 He also implored Einstein in the strongest terms to read his 1952 novel Der Meister (The Master), a fictionalization of the life of Jesus. He especially wished for a public endorsement: “All the more valuable for me would be a supportive word now about the Jewish issues also from your side concerning this, as I believe, important, indeed earth-shaking, situation.”115 It appears that Einstein’s engagement with the fiction of Brod, who would outlive him by more than a decade, was over. The writer died on 20 December 1968 in Tel Aviv. According to legend, the Prague telephone book from 1938 was found on his desk.116
* * *
Although Tycho Brahe’s Path to God is not really about Prague, being largely set in the suburban palace of Benatek, or about Einstein, who does not really lurk—despite repeated assurances to the contrary—lightly veiled behind the character of Johannes Kepler, a close examination of the book and its context reveals multiple points of contact that radiate from Einstein’s time as a professor at the German University of Prague.
The Einstein–Kepler association has proven durable not only because of the persistent repetition of this misidentification, but also because it is patently believable. Kepler was a fascinatingly innovative thinker of his own era, one who moved from place to place looking for support for his radical ideas. Einstein, for one, returned to Kepler time and again in his reflections on the philosophy and history of science, taking several opportunities to express his thoughts on the astronomer in writing. He admired Kepler as one of “those few who cannot do otherwise than openly acknowledge their convictions on every subject,” as he stated in the introduction to a volume of Kepler’s translated letters—though here, too, he made the same assertion as he had with Brod’s Galileo, maintaining that Kepler’s “life work was possible only when he succeeded in freeing himself to a large extent from the spiritual tradition in which he was born.”117 (Kepler, even more than Galileo, was profoundly religious.)118 In a 1951 letter to his school friend Maurice Solovine, Einstein even defended Kepler’s belief in “a reasonable astrology,” a view he considered “not at all that strange, because the suspicion of an animistic causal connection, as is characteristic almost everywhere among primitives, is not in itself unreasonable, and would be given up by the natural sciences only gradually under the pressure of systematically obtained results. Kepler’s researches naturally contributed to this process, which was played out in his own spirit as a hard inner struggle.”119 Einstein understood himself as a beneficiary of a scientific worldview that he attributed to Kepler’s internal conflict.
More distant observers were content to draw analogies between Einstein and Kepler based on little more than their shared commitment to mathematizing the universe, flattening the centuries and worldviews that separated these two Germanophone physicists who happened to share the experience of living for a time in Prague. This was enough for Einstein’s former collaborator, Cornelius Lanczos, to see in his friend “a true disciple of Kepler.”120 This version resonates with Philipp Frank’s identification of Brod’s abstracted astronomical assistant with the creator of relativity theory, even if the novel’s author had intended to describe the ethereal distractions of the flamboyant poet Franz Werfel.
Perhaps the strangest Einstein–Kepler comparison was made by a prisoner in Munich speaking to a journalist named Dietrich Eckart in 1924. Loquacious in his rage, and apropos of nothing at all, the prisoner began to pontificate about how “the physicist Einstein, whom the Jewish press lets themselves marvel at as a second Kepler, clarifies that he has nothing to do with Germanness.” Shifting from the putative linkage between the two scientists to the question of identification, the prisoner scoffed at Einstein’s being lauded by Jewish writers while he distanced himself from them. “The custom of the Central Union of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith—only the religious community of the Jews, not however to also parade their nationality—[Einstein] finds ‘insincere.’ A white raven? No. Only a person who thinks his people are already over the hill and thus doesn’t consider it necessary any more to pretend.”121 The prisoner in question was named Adolf Hitler. He and the anti-Semitic movement he fostered would in time come to shape, more than anything that preceded it, the question of how Einstein would, or would not, identify himself as Jewish. That, too, is a story that begins in Prague, at a time before either Einstein or Hitler had given much thought to Johannes Kepler.
CHAPTER 6
Out of Josefov
On these three constant elements of one’s experience—homeland, language, and tradition—one builds the feeling of the individual’s belonging to a community, one that is broader than the originally given community of the family and the elective community of friends. One feels oneself to belong to those who have the same constant elements of experience, and feels their totality on this level as one’s people.
—Martin Buber1
The myths surrounding Albert Einstein have acquired such solidity that aspects of his character can seem ahistorical. The most prominent of these is his genius: the brilliance (and quantity and diversity) of his contributions to physics are such that the popular image can make it seem like he was always that way, that as a toddler he had the capacity for tensor analysis, or that his scientific intuition was not enabled by years of comprehensive, rigorous training. Other characteristics that are just as inseparable from the Einsteins that grace posters and coffee mugs are revealed upon inspection to have been matters of conscious choice and self-fashioning. For example, the mismatched (or absent) socks or the frazzled hair. When younger, Einstein—who had sported a moustache since his teenage years—was more polished and, sartorially speaking, rather conventional. As he grew older, he chose a look that resembled what people would enjoy calling “bohemian,” lower-case. Although it evolved over time, this trademark seems timeless in retrospect, as though it were always lurking behind a façade, waiting to burst through.
What, then, of Einstein’s “Jewishness”? As with all the ascriptions of identity that we have seen in these pages, it is more complicated than it appears. For many who have thoughts about the matter—ranging from devoted followers of the laws of the Torah to rabid anti-Semites—being a Jew is a core matter of identity; it is not an outfit that one can don or discard at will, nor is it a sliding scale whereby one can opt for greater or lesser identification with Jewishness in different contexts or at different times. Einstein remains the modern world’s most famous Jew. But should we think of him as “being a Jew”—something that inhered in him by virtue of descent, an ineradicable part of his identity—or should we see his Jewishness as an
identification that was more variable, a label he defined in a panoply of ways and that he persistently refused to consider stable? This question is one that he himself confronted repeatedly, and that confrontation became sharply visible and charged during his unexpectedly brief tenure as a professor of physics in Prague. Prague and Jewishness would remain intertwined strands in almost all of his mutable positions about his and others’ Jewishness, though the connection was so submerged that it was perhaps not even apparent to him.
The link between Prague and Jews should not be surprising; indeed, the city’s association with Judaism is one of the most widely known aspects of its history outside the Czech Republic, due in no small part to the worldwide stature of Franz Kafka, the Bohemian capital’s most famous writer, German-speaker, and Jew. Kafka himself had a complex relationship to the religion of Judaism and the cultural communities of Jews, although one that was significantly closer to everyday understandings of what it means to be “Jewish” than Einstein’s.2 In what follows, I again will leave off scare quotes in referring to Jewishness, as I have mostly done for “German.” The central aim of this chapter requires that they be kept always in mind, however, as the label was alternately adopted by individuals or ascribed to them, and it rarely meant the same thing in any two instances. Following the links, both personal and public, between Einstein’s Prague and Prague’s Einstein will bring to the fore the way the interaction of man and city generated a conflation between what it meant to be a Jew and what it meant to be a German, a conflation that often subliminally structured many of Einstein’s (and others’) reactions to such crucial matters as Zionism and the Holocaust.
The topic of Prague’s Jewishness, its Germanness, and the way these shaped Einstein’s mature attitudes toward personal belief and nationalist identification comes so late in this book not because it is marginal but because it is central. My claim is not that Einstein definitively “became Jewish”—whatever one understands that to mean—in Prague, but rather that an examination of the repeated juxtaposition of Praguers, pacifism, and Palestine throughout Einstein’s life offers a more substantial way to parse his complex views on Jewishness than has been generally recognized. In 1911–1912, the various factors operated largely independently in Einstein’s life, but they did not shed their Bohemian roots until the scientist’s death and became silently incorporated into the myth afterward.
* * *
The most salient Bohemian story, featuring prominently in almost every biography of Einstein, has to do with an oath. It begins in Zurich with a piece of paper and ends at the Presidial Chancellery of the Viceroyalty in Prague. We can do worse, as with so many of the important legends about Einstein, than to paraphrase the version that appears in Philipp Frank’s 1947 biography of his predecessor at the German University.3 This one happens to be verifiable through contemporary documents. When Einstein received his offer for the ordinary professorship, he was made aware that he would have to swear loyalty to the Habsburg emperor Franz Joseph, a condition for employment as a civil servant anywhere in Austria-Hungary. He also had to inform the Viennese bureaucrats about his religion.
The dilemma lay at the juncture of these two matters. Einstein did not then see himself as having religious beliefs, and he did not want to declare himself—certainly not on an official form—as having an allegiance to a religion. Einstein’s reluctance to affiliate with organized religion dated back to before his teenage years. His parents identified as Jews and, though not devout, adhered to some of the outward customs of the tradition. As a boy, he became curious about going deeper into the rites, at least for a time. This is how the old Albert in 1949 briefly described the young Albert’s rapidly evolving attitudes in his “Autobiographical Notes”:
As the first way out there was religion, which is implanted into every child by way of the traditional education-machine. Thus I came—despite the fact that I was the son of entirely irreligious (Jewish) parents—to a deep religiosity, which, however, found an abrupt ending at the age of 12. Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic [orgy of] freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression.4
He chose to forego a bar mitzvah and—in the manner of teenagers—believed he had decisively turned away from the religion.5 When he came of age and could fill out his own bureaucratic forms as a university student in Zurich, and later as a patent clerk in Bern and a professor back in Zurich, he declared himself to be “without religion,” or, in the German term, konfessionslos.6 Yet many of his friends in Zurich identified as Jews, and it has been reasonably argued that despite his civil status, Einstein did not disavow the same casual identification for himself.7
When it came to the Viennese paper-pushers, Einstein therefore had a ready answer concerning religion: he would remain konfessionslos. The emperor, however, did not believe that one could honestly swear an oath unless it was vouchsafed by a belief in a deity—measured, by proxy, through adherence to a religious confession. Einstein wanted the job, so a simple substitution was made: konfessionslos, his original attestation, was replaced by “mosaisch,” the faith of Moses. And thus, so the tale runs, through the unsparing precision of Austrian bureaucracy Einstein became Jewish again. On 23 August 1911, the physicist donned a uniform to make it official, something he laughingly depicted to his good friend Heinrich Zangger back in Zurich: “Yesterday I swore my solemn oath of office at the Bohemian governor’s in a most picturesque uniform, whereby I helped myself to my Jewish ‘faith,’ which I had assumed once more only for this end. It was a droll scene.”8
If you are of a spiritual bent, the half-comedy of the whole thing might belie a deeper seriousness. Who cares if it took filling in a blank on a form to bring Einstein back to his Jewish identity? The Lord works in mysterious ways, and for some observers this moment would become of pivotal importance as Einstein engaged more publicly with his Jewish identification.9 Perhaps, although contemporary evidence indicates that Einstein did not take this official oath-taking especially seriously.
Consider his deep friendship with Paul Ehrenfest, whom Einstein met in Prague in early 1912 when the underemployed Austrian physicist made a grand tour of Central European universities from his temporary roost in St. Petersburg. (His wife, Tatiana Afanas’eva, also a physicist, was Russian; they had met at Göttingen and married in 1904.) Einstein found Ehrenfest an ideal thinking partner and exerted considerable effort to arrange for a position for his friend. Ehrenfest did not make it easy: he and Tatiana were committed atheists, and Ehrenfest would not fib on an official form and swear an oath to a god he did not believe existed. Einstein was perplexed. “It irritates me right off that you have this quirk of being konfessionslos; let it go for the sake of your children,” he wrote him in April 1912, as the possibility of an Austrian position was foreclosed because Ehrenfest would not make the same choice Einstein had. “After becoming a professor here, you could by the by again return to this curious hobby horse—you only need to do this for a short while.”10 When he recommended Ehrenfest to Max von Laue for a position, he warned that “he is rigid about remaining konfessionslos, and thus cannot be selected to a position in Austria, and probably also not in Germany.”11 The only place for the “fanatically konfessionslos (curious)” was Switzerland, which did not demand any such oath.12 (Ehrenfest ended up in Leiden, in the Netherlands, in a post Einstein declined, and which also did not require declarations of religious belief.)13
The casualness with which Einstein suggested donning and doffing Jewishness when convenient suggests that his newfound faith at the Prague Chancellery was not especially sincere. And so it would prove when he returned to Zurich in 1912; again he registered as konfessionslos. It is also worth noting the reports that his two sons were baptized Orthodox Christian in Serbia in 1913, and that after he moved to Berlin the following year he
considered sending the children to a Lutheran school.14 (They stayed in Zurich, so the question was moot.) More relevant in terms of conviction was Einstein’s variable but generally peevish behavior concerning official forms required by the Prussian bureaucracy. In the deposition for his divorce proceedings in 1918, for example, he listed himself as a “dissident,” that is, a nonbeliever, yet the actual divorce decree again registers him as mosaisch. (Then again, the same form declares the former Mileva Einsteinová, now Marić again, as also Jewish, which was never true.)15
Even when remarried to Elsa Einstein—a marriage in which both parties were of Jewish heritage—Einstein made difficulties. As in most European states at the time, in Germany a portion of one’s taxes was distributed to state-sponsored religious institutions according to the proportion of the population who registered as belonging to each. Registering as a member of a religion therefore had fiscal implications for churches and synagogues, and Einstein refused to comply. The first exchange over the issue was farcical: Albert and Elsa’s marriage was apparently registered as Protestant. Elsa’s daughter Ilse wrote to complain about the error—presumably at her mother and stepfather’s insistence: “Prof. Einstein and his wife have never belonged to a confessional community, although they are children of Jewish parents.… Since Prof. Einstein and his wife have never belonged to the Protestant church, they are naturally not in a position to present you with a certification of their leaving the congregation.”16
It was a different matter when the Jewish Community (Gemeinde) came calling in 1920, presumably a result of the marriage being now registered as Jewish. By this point, as we shall see later, Einstein was quite vocal about identifying as a Jew and especially with aspects of Zionism. As much as that may have signaled to others his identification with the Jewish religion (and thus the Community), he refused to be officially considered as anything but konfessionslos. “On careful consideration I cannot resolve to enter the Jewish religious community. As much as I feel myself a Jew,” he wrote, “just as much do I confront traditional religious forms as a stranger. Nonetheless, in order to show that Jewish matters lie close to my heart, I am very ready to give annually a certain contribution to Jewish charity.”17 The Community responded that “every Jew is by force of law a member, liable for taxation, of the Jewish Community of the region in which he lives.… The Community is therefore not authorized to ignore your assessment according to this rule.”18 Einstein balked:
Einstein in Bohemia Page 22