Einstein in Bohemia

by Michael D. Gordin

  Especially interesting here is the final comment about the potential conflict between being German and being Jewish—but also the potential synergy between the two. This conflation of Germanness and Jewishness was characteristic of Einstein too, as we shall see.

  Bergmann remained active in Bar Kochba long after his student days—he had invited Buber to give his landmark speeches—and wrote extensively about the settlement of Jews in Ottoman Palestine. Although committed to Jewish emigration to the region, he was not at all sanguine about the impact it would have on the local Arab Muslim and Christian populations, putting him outside the norm of public statements on this topic. In 1911, the same year he met Einstein, he wrote an important article demanding that Zionists address their relationship with their neighbors: “Of the 700,000 residents of Palestine there are approximately 600,000 Arabs. Should we not honestly ask which problems arise for our settlement movement from the fact that Palestine has had for generations over half a million people in it who occupy land, consider it their homeland, and—at least now—are in charge there, that they determine the character of the land?”48 His solution, a characteristically German one, was to cast the Jews as bearers of civilization and cultivation (Bildung), a move that comes across with hindsight as condescending: “We come to Palestine as bearers of culture [Kulturträger]. The Arabs should learn from us.”49 The worry animated his political engagement and prepared the ground for him to assume a noteworthy, albeit soon marginalized, political position within the Yishuv.

  He held on to the library post, except during his military service in the Great War, until 1919, when he and Else made the decision to emigrate. (They later divorced.) In 1936, now known as Schmuel (Samuel) Bergman, with one less n, he became head of the library and a professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and continued to serve as a social node for Max Brod, Felix Weltsch, and other refugees of the Prague Jewish community until his death in 1975. Along the way, he would become a periodic touchstone of Albert Einstein’s engagement with Zionism.

  * * *

  As far as one can determine from correspondence and the recollections of his friends in Switzerland, Einstein had no serious encounters with Zionism until he arrived in Prague. The initial acquaintance did not leave an especially deep or positive impression. The Fanta circle exposed him to some of the leading Zionists in the city, but it seems the major reaction he had to that group—as we saw in the previous chapter in the case of Max Brod—was a vague distaste toward their nationalist politics. He was friendly with people like the archaeologist Wilhelm Klein, a baptized Jew who was shunned by most of the other Jews in Einstein’s circle, including the physicist’s close colleague and friend Georg Pick.50 Yet we know that within a little over half a decade, Einstein would publicly come out in support of several Zionist goals, and in 1921 he would travel to the United States at the invitation of Chaim Weizmann (later the first president of the State of Israel) on a trip to raise money for various Zionist causes—principal among them a university in Palestine. How did this change come about?

  The series of excellent studies of Einstein’s relationship with Zionism frame this as a Berlin story, deeply grounded in Einstein’s experiences as a pacifist during the Great War.51 In June 1921, Einstein published a noteworthy article called “How I Became a Zionist” in which he described his transition from ignorance about the situation of the Jews to his present activism: “Until seven years ago I lived in Switzerland and as long as I was there I was not conscious of my Jewishness, and there was nothing in my life that could have stimulated my Jewish feelings and enlivened them. That changed as soon as I moved my residence to Berlin.”52 Noteworthy in this narrative is the complete absence of Bohemia.

  The reminiscences of those who were crucial to enrolling him in Zionist causes echo this account. Kurt Blumenfeld, the Zionist activist who would play a central role in this effort, noted in his memoirs that when they met, he “only knew that [Einstein] was considered a renowned physicist. I also did not know that Max Brod and Hugo Bergmann in Prague, where he had worked as a professor of physics in the years before the war, had already tried in vain with him.” He continued: “Einstein told me later that he had been entirely immersed in cosmic problems during his time in Prague. Questions of nationality and of the relations of Jews to their surroundings seemed to him then as laughable minutiae.”53 Hugo Bergmann did not even remember exerting himself: “I do not recall having ever discussed Judaism with Einstein during those years of 1910–1912, although I took an active part in Zionism. I do not think Einstein was interested in Judaism at that time.… It was only ten years later that Einstein, under the influence of the Zionist leader Kurt Blumenfeld, came closer to Judaism, and in particular to Zionism whose faithful servant he was to become later.”54 Bergmann would not have predicted that he would run into this mustachioed violinist-physicist once again in 1923 on the latter’s visit to Palestine.

  There is no disputing that the Berlin wartime context was absolutely central to Einstein’s changing attitude toward Zionism. Among the traumatic consequences of the Great War was the displacement of many Jews, largely rural, from the Eastern European borderlands between the German and Austro-Hungarian empires on the one hand and the Russian on the other. A sizable group of these Ostjuden, religious, traditional, and impoverished, made it to Berlin, where they looked rather different from the elite Westjuden of the Prussian capital. Einstein was evidently shocked by the discrimination that he witnessed against those whom he regarded as victims of war.55 As he wrote in April 1920 to the Central Association of Germans of the Jewish Faith—in language rather reminiscent of his simultaneous dispute with the Jewish Community over its plan to list him on its taxation rolls—he was by no means a “German citizen of the Jewish faith”:

  What indeed is Jewish faith? Is there some kind of lack of faith by force of which one ceases to be a Jew? No. In that designation hide, however, two confessions of a “beautiful soul,” namely:

  1) I want to have nothing to do with my poor Ostjude brothers

  2) I do not want to be seen as a child of my people, but only as a member of a religious community.

  … But I am a Jew and I am happy to belong to the Jewish people, if I also do not consider them as some kind of chosen people.56

  Einstein’s own consciousness of his awakening interest in Jewish nationalism was thus derived from his pacifism and his horror at the tragedy of modern warfare.

  Yet even this juncture of pacifism and Zionism, centered in the Berlin where Einstein was living at the time, demonstrates Einstein’s extensive personal connections with Prague. His opposition to military conscription, for example, put him in contact in 1925 with leaders of War Resisters International such as Hans Kohn, a Prague Zionist and pacifist who was a close associate of Max Brod and others affiliated with Bar Kochba.57 In mid-October 1919, German Zionist Julius Berger informed the Zionist Organization in London that Albert Einstein—now the world-famous scientist in the wake of the successful British-led eclipse expedition earlier that year—was despite his vocal antinationalism increasingly amenable to certain projects and ought to be contacted by them directly. The office delegated the task to Bergmann, who had left newly born Czechoslovakia for London on his eventual path for Palestine and worked for the Zionist Organization. Bergmann extended an invitation to the physicist to become involved in the creation of a Hebrew University, and explicitly linked it to their mutual interactions in Bohemia:

  I hope that you still remember the times when we had you in Prague and when I could attend your seminar. I left Prague in the spring to collaborate as executive secretary of the newly-established Education Department of the Zionist Organization, organizing of public instruction in Palestine, and above all to participate in the preparations for the Hebrew University.

  That is the question, this university, which induces me to write to you once again after such a long time.58

  Einstein responded within two weeks quite positively: “I ta
ke a warm interest in the affairs of the new colony in Palestine and especially in the university to be founded there. I will gladly do everything that is in my power for that.”59 He did not mention Prague but did in this first letter note some unemployed Jewish physicists who might teach at such a Hebrew University. A few months later he prompted the konfessionsloser Ehrenfest, now in Leiden, to send recommendations for teachers at a university for Ostjuden in Palestine to “Dr. Bergmann from Prague” in London.60 The tone and phrasing in the letter give the impression that Ehrenfest had encountered Bergmann during his visit to see Einstein in Prague.

  Einstein’s attraction to Zionism was in part fueled by his opposition to war, which was itself based on his aversion to nationalism. Commentators at the time and since have found the physicist’s mixture of beliefs perplexing, given that Zionism was nothing other than a form of Jewish nationalism. How could one be for and against nationalism simultaneously? Einstein recognized the tension, as Blumenfeld recalled him saying one night as they were walking home together: “I am against nationalism, but for the Zionist cause. The reason has become today clear for me. If a person has two arms and constantly says: ‘I have a right arm,’ then he is a chauvinist. If a person however lacks a right arm, then he must do everything to substitute for that missing limb. Thus I am in my general attitude to humanity an opponent of nationalism. As a Jew, however, I exert myself from today forward on behalf of Jewish-national Zionism.”61 The clearest manifestation of this positive variant of nationalism came in the form of higher education, which Einstein understood as an unalloyed good that official anti-Semitism—in the form of the dreaded numerus clausus that imposed quotas for the numbers of Jews admissible to universities in many European states—frustrated. As his sister Maja wrote in unpublished biographical notes from the early 1920s: “His later advocacy and activities on behalf of Zionism came from this impulse, less in accordance with and on the basis of Jewish dogmas as from the inner obligation with respect to those ethnic fellows [Rassengenossen], for whose scholarly activity in the sciences an independent working place should be arranged.”62 Einstein wrote to his colleague Max Born that he “would consider it reasonable if Jews themselves gathered the money in order to offer Jewish researchers outside the universities support and opportunities for teaching.”63

  The Zionist Organization understood the draw they had in Einstein. His endorsement was a tremendous magnet for donations, yet at the same time his idiosyncratic views on war, nationalism, sovereignty, and the internal politics of the fledgling Hebrew University in Jerusalem (the campus opened in 1925) made him a problematic figure for the movement’s leaders.64 In this area, as in most matters, Einstein refused to stay on message when the message was dictated by other people. As the Yishuv (the Jewish settlement in Palestine) expanded and began developing more of the armature of a state-in-gestation, with increasingly violent confrontations between Arabs and Jews and hostilities against the British officials administering the Mandate, Einstein allotted his wavering support not to the mainstream trends in Zionism but to the Brit Shalom (Covenant of Peace) movement. Brit Shalom was never a mass affair, with about 60 members in the Mandate, 13 overseas, and 80 sympathizers, but one of the last group was Einstein. It was founded in 1925 by Arthur Ruppin, Georg Landauer, Hans Kohn, and Hugo Bergmann, the latter two Prague Jews. (Martin Buber was also involved.) The group was interested in building a peaceful, binational entity in Palestine and laid a particular stress upon Arabic–Hebrew bilingualism, a feature that drew from several of its founders’ experiences living as Germanophone minorities in Bohemia and Poland.65 For its pacifist and culturalist orientation, and also its personal connections that reached back to his time in Prague, Einstein found the group appealing and issued statements in support of it in various contexts.

  The connection between politics in Palestine and the experience of being a German-speaking and German-identified Jew was relevant not only to the founders of Brit Shalom, but also to Einstein and his personal acquaintances. Repeatedly in Einstein’s correspondence one comes across statements that merge identification as a Jew—whether or not a Zionist one—with identification as a German. “Indeed it lifts the heart and strengthens one’s faith in the future of humanity,” wrote Viktor Ehrenberg, a professor of German law at Leipzig and physicist Max Born’s father-in-law, after the eclipse expedition, “when one learns that the researchers of all countries bow before a man of Jewish blood who thinks and writes in the German language, in full recognition of his greatness.”66 For some, support for Zionism was impossible precisely because their own national identification tilted toward Germanness, as in the case of Georg Schlesinger, who wrote to Einstein in 1921:

  I have as a German—my Jewish religion is my personal affair—for now a completely exclusive interest in the reconstruction of my cast-down German fatherland, to which I seek to contribute the sacrifice of all my meager powers. For new foreign enterprises—and I consider the Zionist-Palestinian effort as one in the most pronounced manner—I have neither time nor means. As a German national whose heart bleeds over the unconscionable mutilation of his fatherland, I wish from all my heart to everyone who avows a Jewish national state success in the erection of their long desired national-Jewish homestead in Palestine.67

  The point I want to underscore is that for many in Einstein’s milieu, and, as we shall see, for the scientist himself, the framework for thinking about identification as a Jew—in “ethnic” terms as opposed to religious ones—was often explicitly modeled on prior attitudes and affinities related to a certain conception of “Germanness” and also the German language.68

  In the years to come, Einstein’s relationship with the various Zionist leaders was largely mediated by that language. Bergmann is a good example. In 1923, on his only visit to Palestine—while returning from a lengthy visit to the Far East—Einstein gave an emotional speech on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem at the site of the emergent university. His travel journal recalls meeting with the university librarian, who was none other than Bergmann, “the sincere Prague saint, who sets up the library with too little space and money.”69 The two continued to correspond after this meeting, often about philosophical topics related to their mutual interests, in an extended conversation that had begun in Prague. In 1929 Bergmann published a book, in German, giving a Brentanist interpretation of the debates over causality in contemporary physics, a dispute in which Einstein stood firmly in favor of a rigid understanding of causality in the quantum realm against an emergent indeterminist interpretation crystallizing around the ideas of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. The book was dedicated to Anton Marty, who by now was long deceased, and bore a foreword from Einstein, who approved of its tenor.70

  More frequently, however, the topic of their exchanges shifted to contemporary politics in the Yishuv. The same year the book on causality appeared, Palestine erupted in violent protests by Arab residents against increasing colonization by Jews, uprisings that were brutally suppressed by the British. Einstein was appalled. “The events in Palestine seem to me again to have proven how necessary it is to establish a form of true symbiosis between Jews and Arabs in Palestine,” he wrote to Bergmann in distress. “I understand by that the existence of permanently-functioning mixed administrative, economic, and social organizations. The divided state of being next to each other must lead from time to time to dangerous tensions. Besides this all Jewish children must learn Arabic.”71

  Bergmann wrote back an impassioned response in agreement about both the collapse of civil relations and the need to take conciliatory measures to restore confidence. Einstein was so pleased with this letter that he requested permission to have it translated into English and published, which Bergmann agreed to in hopes that a major English-language Jewish-affiliated venue would run it and help build external pressure on Zionist leaders in Palestine.72 Before 1929, Einstein had seen Zionism as a way of fighting pernicious nationalism with a benevolent form, even as the Zionist leadership was baffled by his support
of Brit Shalom. The rebellion brought the conflict between Einstein and Weizmann’s group to a head. The physicist even appealed, without success, to the British high commissioner for Palestine to request that Arabs involved in the uprising not receive the death penalty.73 Relations both between Jews and Arabs and between Zionists and Einstein continued to deteriorate. It was in a letter to Bergmann in 1930 that Einstein most forcefully articulated his grim prognosis for the future: “Only direct cooperation with the Arabs can achieve a worthy and secure existence. If the Jews do not realize this, the entire Jewish position in the complex of Arab lands will eventually become fully untenable. It makes me less sad that the Jews are not clever enough to understand this, as that they are not righteous enough to want it.”74

  By 1936, Einstein had publicly distanced himself from Zionism, but not from the personal relationship with Bergmann that had drawn him into interactions with it. In 1947, Bergmann commissioned an article from Einstein on relativity theory for the Hebrew Encyclopedia; the scientist, increasingly loath to undertake such tasks, nevertheless sent in his contribution on time and without fuss.75 In 1950 Bergmann invited him to come to the newly created State of Israel, but Einstein pled ill health and demurred. When the Israeli leadership offered him the presidency in 1952 upon Chaim Weizmann’s death, he turned it down for the same reason, much to the relief of Prime Minister David Ben Gurion. Relations with the Israelis did not improve, but the connection to Bergmann remained warm. The philosopher visited the physicist in Princeton in 1953 and was crestfallen at Einstein’s death in 1955.76