I explain to you
To your letter I remark that the word “Jew” is ambiguous, in that it refers 1.) to nationality and origins, 2.) to religious confession. I am a Jew in the first sense, not in the second.19
Despite repeated pleas from letter writers that his membership in the Community would assist with Zionist goals, or would improve the status of Jews, Einstein demurred: “The Community is an organization for the practice of ritual forms, which lies far from my views. I must take it as what it now is and not as what one might wish to see it perhaps transformed into.”20 Nonetheless, a biographer writes that he joined the Jewish Community of Berlin in 1924.21
If he was indeed so mercurial about the issue of being konfessionslos, and so cagey about being officially labeled a Jew—though he did not mind the label outside of official circles—what accounts for the staying power of the Prague story we began with? The answer hinges on the politics of two newspaper articles in Austria-Hungary and brings us back to the importance of Einstein’s stay in Prague for cementing this aspect of his public image.
The first article appeared in the Prager Tagblatt—one of the most widely circulating non-Viennese papers in the empire—on 26 May 1912, entitled “Einstein in Prague.” Inasmuch as this piece, signed with the initials R. K., has a hero, it is our physicist, though it also discusses the parallel case of Robert Raudnitz, a distinguished professor of pediatrics. It is more noticeable for its prominent villain: Count Karl von Stürgkh, minister of religion and education, whom we earlier saw fiddling with the order of the three-person list submitted by the German University’s hiring committee, thus offering the open post to Gustav Jaumann of Brno rather than Albert Einstein of Zurich. R. K. began by mentioning an earlier article that had announced that Einstein was going to be leaving his position in Prague. “Einstein? This name seemed familiar to me. For years all the physics journals have been filled with works about Einstein’s famous relativity principle, about his velocity principle, and about his new system of four-dimensional mathematics.”22 Why was he leaving? According to sources contacted by R. K., the major issue was that “he had to, as they relate in University circles, first undertake a change of religious identity before he was considered capable of teaching mathematical physics in Prague. Einstein had apparently been konfessionslos in Zurich and the Austrian educational administration” insisted that he declare himself Jewish.23 This demand, R. K. alleged, was not a foible of the emperor but the result of the machinations of von Stürgkh, a creature of the Viennese Christian Socialists, which in this case produced the ironic outcome of defending religion by creating another Jew. It was a shame that Einstein was leaving the city, ostensibly because of the Habsburg establishment’s hostility toward Jews, not because R. K. was a personal acquaintance of the scientist’s—“I have never seen or spoken to Einstein, he never paraded out in public and obviously did not belong among those scholars who appear with advertisements in the papers”24—but because “with Albert Einstein Prague is losing one of the most interesting phenomena of contemporary natural science.”25
Two months later, on 29 July 1912, a very similar article, anonymous and headlined “A. Einstein,” appeared at the top of the front page of the Montags-Revue in Vienna. In terms of biographical and scientific accuracy, the piece paled in comparison to its predecessor in the Prague daily, but its point was very similar: “Austria is losing him; foreigners do not come gladly to Austria or flee again at the first opportunity.”26 The article continued:
But now to Einstein. Who is he? A small bloke from Württemberg. What has he accomplished? The relativity principle and quantum theory—which in fact Planck formulated, but Einstein co-founded it—are his monumental achievements up to now, whereby it only should be stressed that modern physics does not any longer understand by “theory” hypotheses but on the contrary the accomplished firm basis upon which it can journey further by reliable steps.27
The illness affecting Austrian higher education was again diagnosed as von Stürgkh, whose hostility to the Jews—in contrast to his Prussian equivalent Friedrich Althoff’s efforts to expand official quotas in order to attract stronger faculty—deprived Austria-Hungary of a leading cultural position.
Both articles are tendentious and polemical. They are also significant. It is important to remember that this was not 1919, when the eclipse expedition to confirm general relativity catapulted Einstein to global superstardom. This was seven years earlier, when general relativity did not even exist and Einstein was a physicist who was well-regarded by his peers for matters that the general public did not interest itself in. Had these stories appeared after the eclipse, the deployment of Einstein as a rhetorical cudgel against a politician would have been humdrum, even banal. This early, however, the tactic should direct our focus to von Stürgkh and Habsburg politics with respect to the Jews. Einstein was the most recent Jewish professor to leave the German University, and so his story was weaponized. The incident had the effect, however, of elevating the konfessionslos anecdote into one of the defining features of Einstein’s time in Prague: that was where he was made into a Jew. As we have seen, this association was not necessarily Einstein’s own understanding of events, but the mythology was available for hagiographers and journalists to turn to when they needed to find information about the suddenly celebrated creator of relativity. Looking through their archives, they found this story, and a narrative was created.
* * *
As Einstein wrote to Emil Starkenstein, an extraordinary professor of pharmacology at the German University in Prague, in July 1921: “One can however very well be without religion without being disloyal to one’s people (at least in my opinion). I am also konfessionslos and consider myself a loyal Jew.”28 Such statements show the physicist straddling his resistance to one kind of identification as a Jew and his embrace of another. That second form of identification would manifest most spectacularly in Einstein’s relationship to the Zionist movement, a complicated micro- and macropolitical dance that was characterized by reactions ranging from initial hostility to fellow-traveling affiliation to public distancing.29 All three of those phases would be intimately related to people Einstein met initially in Prague. Understanding the historical position of Prague’s Jewish residents—especially the German-speaking and -identifying ones—is thus important in appreciating the nuances of the antinationalist Einstein’s association with Jewish nationalism.
Our earliest documentation of a Jewish community in Prague reaches back to at least the year 906. Almost two centuries later there was a massacre of Jews during the First Crusade. We also know there was a synagogue in the Lesser Town before the twelfth century, because it burned down in 1142, at which point it moved north of Old Town Square, to the region that would become the Prague ghetto.30 Such are the records of the presence of Jews in the early centuries of the capital of Bohemia: they show up in chronicles only when disaster befalls them.
As conflicts and eventually wars among Christians washed across the territory, significantly depopulating it, the Jewish community grew as a total percentage of the city, such that by the early eighteenth century Jews represented a stunning proportion of the population, making up nearly half of the residents of Old Town and about 28 percent across all districts.31 As Bohemia recovered from the wars of religion, Prague grew substantially, diluting the Jewish population, which continued to expand mostly in the countryside.32 The various communities still labored under heavy constraints and regulations, including an order of expulsion from Empress Maria Theresa on 18 December 1744 (later rescinded), some of which were alleviated by her son Joseph II in his Toleranzpatent of 1782. A significant consequence of Joseph’s decree was the requirement that Jews cease to use Hebrew or Yiddish except in religious ceremonies and instead convert their everyday transactions into German, which decade
s later would lead to the extinction of the Jewish dialect of Mauscheldeutsch and also cement the strongly misleading image in the eyes of Czech-identified Bohemians that all Jews were “German.”33
Emancipation came eventually: freedom of movement in 1849, and legal equality in 1867 after the Ausgleich compromise that created the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary out of the Habsburg Empire. The most illuminating context in which we can situate Einstein’s own position as a German-speaker of Jewish heritage in Prague is that of the university (and, after 1882, universities), which saw a dramatic expansion of students identified as Jews. In the eighteenth century, Jews seeking medical degrees had migrated out of Bohemia for their education to Halle and Frankfurt an der Oder before moving back to practice. Yet by 1863, they comprised 10 percent of the student body of the University of Prague, rising to 11.7 percent on the eve of the 1882 split (and 17.9 percent of Prague’s German Polytechnic). The split produced a significant asymmetry, a consequence of the historic pressure for German to be identified as the language of Jews and a perception of its greater potential to facilitate upward mobility. Although a significant proportion of Bohemia’s Jews were bilingual, for educational purposes they were concentrated in the German University: in 1885 the 404 enrolled there comprised 26 percent of the institution’s students; by contrast, the 50 students at the Czech University made up 2.5 percent of its population. By 1910, on the eve of Einstein’s arrival, the proportions had declined in both schools: Jews were 20 percent of the students at the German University and 2 percent at the Czech, with similar proportions at the polytechnics.34
Given the significance of the universities for the creation of elites within the city, one can see how Jews came to be identified as “German” by those who saw themselves as “Czechs,” while some self-identified Germans could at the same time refuse to recognize Jews as fully equivalent except insofar as they helped to shore up the German groups against Slavic inroads.35 The focus on language politics in Bohemia as the central issue after the weakening of liberal compromises in the first years of the twentieth century coincided with the rise of political anti-Semitism among pan-Germanists in Austria-Hungary and the German Empire. The Jews of Prague, although rather more of them identified themselves on the census as Czech-speakers rather than German-speakers by 1910, comprised over half of the Germanophones, which exacerbated nativist currents and prompted explosions of anti-Semitic actions. The most visible of these began in 1899—parallel in many ways to the notorious Dreyfus Affair then raging in France—with the arrest and trial of Leopold Hilsner, a 23-year-old Jewish vagrant, for the alleged murder of young seamstress Anežka Hrůzová in the town of Polná. The initial trial was riddled with bias and perjury, which led to its dismissal and a second trial, resulting in Hilsner being sentenced to death in 1900. The emperor commuted the sentence to life imprisonment, while intellectuals such as Tomáš Masaryk protested the railroading. Hilsner was pardoned by the emperor in 1918 in the last months of the Great War, which also happened to be the last months of the Habsburg Empire itself.36 This, then, was one manifestation of the difficult position of Jews between Czech nationalist activists and the Habsburg state.
In juxtaposition was the simultaneous romanticization of Prague’s Jews at the very moment that the old ghetto, the Judenstadt—renamed Josephstadt in German and Josefov in Czech in 1852, in honor of the eighteenth-century emperor’s Edict of Tolerance, which permitted Jews to live outside its confines—was being modernized out of existence. By 1890, only 20 percent of the population of Josefov remained Jewish, but the emigrants were more than replaced by the destitute, who squeezed into the ramshackle and crowded apartments. Population density in the Old Town was 644 persons per hectare, but in the neighborhoods of Josefov it was just under three times that (1,822 per hectare). Citing public health concerns, an urban renewal plan known as Assanierung in German and asanace in Czech was proposed in 1885. Six hundred individual buildings were torn down in its wake, removing essentially all structures except for the Jewish town hall, the main synagogues, and the cemetery, and replacing them with wide boulevards in the Parisian style.37 (The main boulevard, still a thoroughfare today, is called Pařížská.) By the time Einstein arrived in the city, Josefov was gone, memorialized in Gustav Meyrink’s gothic novel The Golem (1913–1915), set during the asanace. Einstein’s engagement with Prague’s Jews would happen outside of Josefov.
A contemporaneous event associated with Prague Jewry would have longer-term (though subterranean) implications for the physicist’s relationship with the religion. From 1909 to early 1911, just before Einstein’s arrival in the city, the Austrian philosopher Martin Buber gave three public lectures to Bar Kochba, the Jewish students’ association of the German University, and those lectures—later published and widely circulated—further intensified the enthusiasm of local Jewish intellectuals for Jewish nationalism and a cultural Zionism focused on building a community in Palestine.38 Max Brod, for one, noted the electrifying effect of the speeches in his diary, and a week after one of them, on 4 May 1910, he and Kafka went to see a Yiddish theater troupe that proved transformative for both of their identifications with aspects of their Jewish heritage.39 Buber’s ideas would not have triggered a new activism among the incipient Zionists in Prague if the ground had not already been prepared for it by Bar Kochba and its journal, Selbstwehr (Self-Defense). The members of Bar Kochba would have an outsized influence on Central European Zionism despite their small numbers—there were never more than 200 members in all the Zionist student organizations in the capital, both German and Czech, despite there being over twice that many Jewish students.40 The group’s significance stems partly from its relationship with Buber, but perhaps most importantly from the activism of one of its most visible leaders: Hugo Bergmann.
We encountered Bergmann a few chapters ago, as the husband of Bertha Fanta’s daughter Else and the student in Einstein’s physics class who introduced the scientist to the cultural circle that gathered in Fanta’s apartment. It was fitting that Bergmann served as the cultural vector connecting the new professor who had just arrived from Zurich to the largely Jewish social group, as Bergmann’s gift in both Prague and, after his emigration in 1920, in Palestine and later Israel was in bringing Jewish intellectuals together.
Bergmann was born in 1883 in Prague and attended school together with Kafka, who (according to Brod) used to copy his friend’s homework.41 Bergmann and Kafka entered the German University together thinking they would study chemistry, a field where there was more potential for advancement for Jews than could be found in other disciplines they were more interested in.42 The science was not to their tastes, and Kafka departed for law while Bergmann opted for philosophy, studying both science and Franz Brentano’s ideas with Anton Marty, Christian von Ehrenfels, and occasionally the master himself when he would visit. After doing very well in his doctoral work—which focused on atomic theory and, at the time of its completion in 1905, was quite current with the very developments that interested Einstein during that same year—he looked for a university where he could write his habilitation. He hit barriers because of his religion.43 Brentano urged Bergmann to convert to Christianity, not least for the sake of professional advancement, but Bergmann had been a convinced Zionist since 1898, joining Bar Kochba in 1901, and refused.44 Instead, he abandoned his habilitation plans, took a job in the university library, and married Else Fanta in 1908; the two took their first trip to Palestine in 1910.
Bergmann continued writing philosophy, and writing it in German, though it is clear from the footnotes of his work that he spoke Czech and generously engaged with scholarship written in that language. This is quite noticeable in his 1909 study of the early-nineteenth-century Bohemian philosopher and mathematician Bernard Bolzano, in which Bergmann also delved into Bolzano’s views on relative and absolute space and time and made references to non-Euclidean geometry.45 (There was a reason he chose to audit Einstein’s courses in 1911.) The book even garnered a respectful revi
ew from none other than Oskar Kraus on the front page of the German-language newspaper Bohemia in 1910.46 Despite his multilingualism—he also studied Hebrew in Prague and considered Zionists who did not learn the language a contradiction in terms—he strongly identified with the cause of maintaining German cultural institutions in his native city. As he wrote in a letter to the philosopher and former Brentano student Carl Stumpf in 1914:
My mother tongue is German, I attended only German schools, speak and think in German. These are in general the signs by which in this country one judges membership to the German people or the Czech people. By these criteria I am thus German as much as anybody else. I am this to an even greater degree than others because I studied at a German university and that I only studied with Germans (if I leave learning from books out of the accounting), which I could do in my discipline. The interest that my German teachers had in maintaining and promoting German culture is thoroughly my own. What pertains especially to the relation to Czech culture, I consider the German to be generally greater by contrast, and to be the one which—under equivalent circumstances—deserves to be recommended and promoted. For this promotion of German culture particularly in Prague I contributed according to my powers and want to do this all the more everywhere there, where I do not harm Jewish interests by doing so.47
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