Der Jude Einstein |
Der Jude Einstein; Einstein, the Jew In
the fall of 1923, professor Phillip Lenard, Nobel prize physicist and president
of the German physics society, addressed his fellow physicists at a convention
in Munich. One year had passed since Albert Einstein had been awarded the Nobel
prize in physics from the Swedish academy. Reflecting on that award, Lenard said
this: "Relativity is a Jewish fraud, which one could have suspected from
the first with more racial knowledge than was then disseminated, since its
originator Einstein was a Jew. My disappointment was all the greater since
a quite predominant number of the representatives of physics more or less
conformed to the calculation pretenses (Rechengetue) of the Jews." Note
once more that Lenard was a world famous physicist who had won the Nobel prize
himself. It is also significant that this attitude was expressed ten years before
Hitler became the dictator of Germany, i.e. at a time when Germany was a
democratic republic. We
see therefore that the antagonism expressed against Einstein already then
devolved upon all Jews in Germany, so that the promotion of the Nazi party was
not an imposition upon the German people but a popular cause. Einstein
was of course more fortunate than his Jewish contemporaries. Born in Ulm in
1879, Albert Einstein came from a middle class Jewish family which practiced no
religion but could not and would not deny their Jewishness. Unlike many German
Jews, the Einstein family did not convert to Chrsitianity pro
forma but lived with the restrictions and obstacles which all Jews had
always been forced to confront in Germany. Albert
Einstein was physically abnormal, although this was not visible in his lifetime.
After his death in 1955 his brain was removed from his body and pickled. Since
then researchers found that he had an unusually large inferior parietal lobe,
which is the center of mathematical thought and spatial imagery. He therefore
had shorter than normal connections between the frontal and temporal lobes.
Einstein also had considerable musical ability, as did his mother, who played
the violin as he did. Einstein
had three children by his first wife, a Serbian physicist. The eldest of his
children, a girl,
may have been adopted out or may have died in childhood. His second
child, a son, become a distinguished professor of hydrolics at the University of
California. He was not Jewish because his mother was not Jewish. Einstein had
another son who died in a Swiss psychiatric hospital at a young age. Einstein
practiced no religion but was not an atheist. He was a follower of Spinoza.
Spinoza thought that the evidence for the existence of God could be found in the
laws of nature but not in the laws of men. Hence, Spinoza, like so many other
writers and philosophers, denied the divinity of Torah and Jewish law. Einstein
also distanced himself from the Jewish religion but nevertheless used that
famous dictum that "God does not play dice with the universe."
Einstein was not a relativist. That means that Einstein did not support the
notion that ethics
and morals are merely the opinion of any beholder. In fact, Einstein
believed the opposite. He always sought unity and was therefore never reconciled
to quantum mechanics, which Heisenberg had developed and which rested on
unpredictable elements in the basic laws of the universe. Always
conscious of his Jewishness, Einstein did a great deal to bring to this country
numerous Jews
endangered in Nazi
Germany in the 1930's when he was already a resident here. In fact, it has been
said that Einstein influenced the migration of so many Jewish intellectuals to
the United States during the years 1933-1940 that American intellectual life
became Jewish thereafter. This is largely the case, since Jews are at least ten
times over-represented in the academic world if we consider that we are only
1.8% of the American population. Nothing better ever happened to American higher
education. In fact, the influence of that intellectual migration on the American
academy is so great that entire areas of study, such as art history, did not
even exist in this country until the Jewish refugees from Naziland founded these
studies here. Most important of course was the development of the atomic bomb,
which was almost entirely the work of refugee Jewish physicists brought here
with the help of Einstein. Albert
Einstein was a great Zionist. He spoke everywhere in favor of the establishment
of a Jewish homeland in Eretz Yisrael and used his great influence on behalf of
the Jews of Israel to such an extent that he was offered the presidency when
Israel became independent in 1948. Einstein refused the offer on the grounds
that he did not view himself as a
politician. In December, 1999, Time magazine named Albert Einstein "Man of the Century." This speaks so well of our fellow countrymen who were not deterred by the well known fact that Einstein was a Jew and an immigrant. In any other country that would surely not have been possible. It happened here because, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, "America is the worst form of society in the world, except for all the others." Shalom u'vracha.
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