Walter Isaacson - Einstein - His Life and Universe

The very assimilated Brandeis, who had been born in Kentucky and had turned himself into a proper Bostonian, was an example of the Jews from Germany whose families had arrived in the nineteenth century and tended to look down on the more recent immigrants from eastern Europe and Russia. For both political and personal reasons, Brandeis had clashed with Weizmann, a Russian Jew who had a more assertive and political approach toward Zionism. 53The enthusiastic crowds that greeted Einstein and Weizmann on their trip were mainly made up of the eastern European Jews, while Brandeis and his ilk remained more aloof.

Most of Einstein’s time during the two days he spent in Boston was devoted to appearances, rallies, and dinners (including a kosher banquet for five hundred) with Weizmann to drum up contributions for their Zionist cause. The Boston Herald reported on the reaction at one fund-raising event at a synagogue in Roxbury:

The response was electrifying. Young girl ushers worked their way with difficulty through the crowded aisles, carrying long boxes. Bills of various denominations were rained into these receptacles. A prominent Jewess cried out ecstatically that she had eight sons who had been in the army and wanted to make some donation in proportion to their sacrifices. She held up her watch, a valuable imported timepiece, and slipped the rings from her hands. Others followed her example, and soon baskets and boxes filled with diamonds and other precious ornaments.

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While in Boston, Einstein was subjected to a pop quiz known as the Edison test. The inventor Thomas Edison was a practical man, getting crankier with age (he was then 74), who disparaged American colleges as too theoretical and felt the same about Einstein. He had devised a test he gave job applicants that, depending on the position being sought, included about 150 factual questions. How is leather tanned? What country consumes the most tea? What was Gutenberg’s type made of?*

The Times called it “the ever-present Edison questionnaire controversy,” and of course Einstein ran into it. A reporter asked him a question from the test. “What is the speed of sound?” If anyone understood the propagation of sound waves, it was Einstein. But he admitted that he did not “carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books.” Then he made a larger point designed to disparage Edison’s view of education. “The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think,” he said. 55

One remarkable feature of most stops on Einstein’s grand tour was a noisy parade, which was rather unusual for a theoretical physicist. In Hartford, Connecticut, for example, the procession included more than a hundred automobiles headed by a band, a coterie of war veterans, and standard-bearers with the American and Zionist flags. More than fifteen thousand spectators lined the route. “North Main Street was jammed by crowds that struggled to get close to shake hands,” the newspaper reported. “The crowds cheered wildly as Dr. Weizmann and Prof. Einstein stood up in the car to receive flowers.” 56

It was an astonishing scene, but it was exceeded in Cleveland. Several thousands thronged Union train depot to meet the visiting delegation, and the parade included two hundred honking and flag-draped cars. Einstein and Weizmann rode in an open car, preceded by a National Guard marching band and a cadre of Jewish war veterans in uniform. Admirers along the way grabbed on to Einstein’s car and jumped on the running board, while police tried to pull them away. 57

While in Cleveland, Einstein spoke at the Case School of Applied Science (now Case Western Reserve), where the famous Michelson-Morley experiments had been conducted. There he met privately, for more than an hour, with Professor Dayton Miller, whose new version of that experiment had provoked Einstein’s skeptical response at the Princeton cocktail party. Einstein drew sketches of Miller’s ether-drift models and urged him to continue refining his experiments. Miller remained dubious about relativity and partial to the ether, but other experiments eventually affirmed Einstein’s faith that the Lord was indeed more subtle than malicious. 58

The excitement, public outpouring, and dizzying superstar status conferred upon Einstein were unprecedented. But in financial terms, the tour was only a modest success for the Zionist movement. The poorer Jews and recent immigrants had poured out to see him and donated with enthusiasm. But few of the eminent and old-line Jews with great personal fortunes became part of the frenzy. They were, on the whole, more assimilated and less ardently Zionist. Weizmann had hoped to raise at least $4 million. By the end of the year, only $750,000 had actually been collected. 59

Even after his trip to America, Einstein did not become a full-fledged member of the Zionist movement. He supported the general idea of Jewish settlements in Palestine, and especially Hebrew University in Jerusalem, but he never had a desire to relocate there himself nor to press for the creation of a Jewish nation-state. Instead, his connection was more visceral. He came to feel even more associated with the Jewish people, and he resented even more those who would forsake their roots in order to assimilate.

In this regard, he was part of a momentous trend that was reshaping Jewish identity, by choice and by imposition, in Europe. “Until a generation ago, Jews in Germany did not consider themselves as members of the Jewish people,” he told a reporter on the day he was leaving America. “They merely considered themselves as members of a religious community.” But anti-Semitism changed that, and there was a silver lining to that cloud, he thought. “The undignified mania of trying to adapt and conform and assimilate, which happens among many of my social standing, has always been very repulsive to me,” he said. 60

The Bad German

Einstein’s trip to America indelibly cast him as he wanted to be: a citizen of the world, an internationalist, not a German. That image was reinforced by his trips to Germany’s other two Great War enemies. On a visit to England, he spoke at the Royal Society and laid flowers on the grave of Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey. In France, he charmed the public by lecturing in French and taking a mournful tour of the graves on the famous battlefields.

It was also a time of reconciliation with his family. That summer of 1921, he vacationed on the Baltic with his two boys, instilled in young Eduard a love of math, and then took Hans Albert to Florence. They had such a pleasant time that it helped further restore his relations with Mari . “I’m grateful that you’ve raised them to have a friendly regard for me,” he wrote her. “In fact you’ve done an exemplary job all around.” Most astonishingly, on his way home from Italy he visited Zurich and not only called on Mari but even considered staying in “the little upstairs room,” as he called it, at her house there. They all got together with the Hurwitz family and had a musical evening as in the old days. 61

But the mood was soon sullied by the continued collapse of the German mark, which made it harder for Einstein to support a family whose consumption was in Swiss currency. Before the war the mark had been worth 24 cents, but it had fallen to 2 cents by the beginning of 1920. At that time a mark could buy a loaf of bread. But then the bottom fell out of the currency. By the beginning of 1923, the price of a loaf went to 700 marks and by the end of that year cost 1 billion marks. Yes, 1 billion. In November 1923, a new currency, the Rentenmark, was introduced, backed by the government property; 1 trillion old marks equaled 1 new Rentenmark.