Albert Einstein אלברט אינשטיין
He created relativity; he redefined space, time and gravitation
At eleven or twelve he had a brief and intense burst of religious feeling, which ended with the reading of popular books on science. His relations with Jewishness are documented on paper, and it is a rare case where everything can be traced. As a student in Zurich, at the Bern patent office and as a Zurich professor he entered konfessionslos—no confession—on the forms. In 1911 the Austrian rules for the Prague chair obliged him to write mosaisch; in 1912, back in Zurich, he was konfessionslos again. And in 1924 he joined the Jewish Community of Berlin—having in 1919–20 refused a similar enrolment with the line "I am a Jew in the first sense, not in the second."
Without being a believer he was a militant Jewish nationalist: from 1921 the public face of the campaign for the Hebrew University, to which he willed his archive, his papers and the rights to his name and image. In November 1952 Ben-Gurion offered him the presidency of Israel, and he declined: "deeply moved… and at once saddened and ashamed." Not the premiership—the presidency.
And the Gutkind letter of 1954, which both sides quote: there the Bible is called "a collection of primitive legends", the notion of a chosen people meaningless, and the Jewish people "my kin". It must not be printed that he believed in a personal God. Nor that he failed mathematics at school.
Sources
Documents of the period
- The letter to E. Gutkind, 1954; the refusal of the presidency, November 1952 — “a collection of primitive legends” — and “my kin”
Scholarship
- NobelPrize.org, the 1921 Physics prize — the wording: for the photoelectric effect, not for relativity
Basis: documents and evidence.