Walter Isaacson - Einstein - His Life and Universe

During the weeklong gathering in Bad Nauheim, Einstein stayed with Max Born in Frankfurt, twenty miles away, and the two men commuted to the resort town by train each day. The big showdown over relativity, at which both Einstein and Lenard were expected to participate, was on the afternoon of September 23. Einstein had forgotten to bring anything to write with, so he borrowed the pencil of the person next to him in order to take notes while Lenard talked.

Planck was in the chair, and by both his commanding presence and soothing words he was able to prevent any personal attacks. Lenard’s objections to relativity were similar to those of many nontheorists. The theory was built on equations rather than observations, he said, and it “offends against the simple common sense of a scientist.” Einstein replied that what “seems obvious” changes over time. That was true even of Galileo’s mechanics.

It was the first time that Einstein and Lenard had met, but they did not shake hands or speak to each other. And though the official minutes of the meeting do not record it, Einstein apparently lost his equanimity at one point. “Einstein was provoked into making a caustic reply,” Born recalled. And a few weeks later, Einstein wrote Born to assure him that he would “not allow myself to get excited again as in Nauheim.” 23

Finally, Planck was able to end the session, before any blood was drawn, with a limp joke. “Since the theory of relativity unfortunately has not so far been able to extend the absolute time available for this meeting,” he said, “ it must now be adjourned.”The papers the next day were left without headlines, and the antirelativity movement subsided for the time being. 24

As for Lenard, he distanced himself from the weird group of original antirelativists. “Unfortunately Weyland turned out to be a crook,” he later said. But he did not let go of his own antipathy toward Einstein. After the Bad Nauheim meeting he became increasingly vitriolic and anti-Semitic in his attacks on Einstein and “Jewish science.” He became a proponent of creating a “Deutsche Physik” that purged German physics of Jewish influences, which to him was exemplified by Einstein’s relativity theory with its abstract, theoretical, and nonexperimental approach and its odor (at least to him) of a relativism that rejected absolutes, order, and certainties.

A few months later, at the beginning of January 1921, an obscure Munich party functionary picked up the theme. “Science, once our greatest pride, is today being taught by Hebrews,” Adolf Hitler wrote in a newspaper polemic. 25There were even ripples that made it across the Atlantic. That April, the Dearborn Independent, a weekly owned by automaker Henry Ford, a strong anti-Semite, blared a banner headline across the top of its front page. “Is Einstein a Plagiarist?” it accusingly asked. 26

Einstein in America, 1921

Albert Einstein’s exploding global fame and budding Zionism came together in the spring of 1921 for an event that was unique in the history of science, and indeed remarkable for any realm: a grand two-month processional through the eastern and midwestern United States that evoked the sort of mass frenzy and press adulation that would thrill a touring rock star. The world had never before seen, and perhaps never will again, such a scientific celebrity superstar, one who also happened to be a gentle icon of humanist values and a living patron saint for Jews.

Einstein had initially thought that his first visit to America might be a way to make some money in a stable currency in order to provide for his family in Switzerland. “I have demanded $15,000 from Princeton and Wisconsin,” he told Ehrenfest.“It will probably scare them off. But if they do bite, I will be buying economic independence for myself—and that’s not a thing to sniff at.”

The American universities did not bite. “My demands were too high,” he reported back to Ehrenfest. 27So by February 1921, he had made other plans for the spring: he would present a paper at the third Solvay Conference in Brussels and give some lectures in Leiden at the behest of Ehrenfest.

It was then that Kurt Blumenfeld, leader of the Zionist movement in Germany, came by Einstein’s apartment once again. Exactly two years earlier, Blumenfeld had visited Einstein and enlisted his support for the cause of creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Now he was coming with an invitation—or perhaps an instruction—in the form of a telegram from the president of the World Zionist Organization, Chaim Weizmann.

Weizmann was a brilliant biochemist who had emigrated from Russia to England, where he helped his adopted nation in the First World War by coming up with a bacterial method for more efficiently manufacturing the explosive cordite. During that war he worked under former prime minister Arthur Balfour, who was then first lord of the Admiralty. He subsequently helped to persuade Balfour, after he became foreign secretary, to issue the famous 1917 declaration in which Britain pledged to support “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

Weizmann’s telegram invited Einstein to accompany him on a trip to America to raise funds to help settle Palestine and, in particular, to create Hebrew University in Jerusalem. When Blumenfeld read it to him, Einstein initially balked. He was not an orator, he said, and the role of simply using his celebrity to draw crowds to the cause was “an unworthy one.”

Blumenfeld did not argue. Instead, he simply read Weizmann’s telegram aloud again. “He is the president of our organization,” Blumenfeld said, “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.”

“What you say is right and convincing,” Einstein replied, to the “boundless astonishment” of Blumenfeld. “I realize that I myself am now part of the situation and that I must accept the invitation.” 28

Einstein’s reply was indeed a cause for astonishment. He was already committed to the Solvay Conference and other lectures in Europe, he professed to dislike the public spotlight, and his fragile stomach had made him reluctant to travel. He was not a faithful Jew, and his allergy to nationalism kept him from being a pure and unalloyed Zionist.

Yet now he was doing something that went against his nature: accepting an implied command from a figure of authority, one that was based on his perceived bonds and commitments to other people. Why?

Einstein’s decision reflected a major transformation in his life. Until the completion and confirmation of his general theory of relativity, he had dedicated himself almost totally to science, to the exclusion even of his personal, familial, and societal relationships. But his time in Berlin had made him increasingly aware of his identity as a Jew. His reaction to the pervasive anti-Semitism was to feel even more connected—indeed, inextricably connected—to the culture and community of his people.

Thus in 1921, he made a leap not of faith but of commitment. “I am really doing whatever I can for the brothers of my race who are treated so badly everywhere,” he wrote Maurice Solovine. 29Next to his science, this would become his most important defining connection. As he would note near the end of his life, after declining the presidency of Israel, “My relationship to the Jewish people has become my strongest human tie.” 30

One person who was not only astonished but dismayed by Einstein’s decision was his friend and colleague in Berlin, the chemist Fritz Haber, who had converted from Judaism and assiduously assimilated in order to appear a proper Prussian. Like other assimilationists, he was worried (understandably) that a visit by Einstein to the great wartime enemy at the behest of a Zionist organization would reinforce the belief that Jews had dual loyalties and were not good Germans.