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| Politics & Society |
Einstein's Promised Land
By Saswat Pattanayak
2012-11-30

With the "God Letter" recently auctioned for over $3 million, the
world has started taking a renewed interest in Albert Einstein's core
philosophies. In the most conservative estimate, he has been described
as the father of modern physics; and by most liberal counts, the most
intelligent human being in history. But despite tremendous
biographical sketches, Einstein has remained largely unknown as an
activist, or terribly misunderstood as a statesman. Many dimensions of
his life have been deliberately suppressed, some grossly exaggerated,
and quite a few entirely concocted. This is quite natural considering
the ruling class elites have a stake in appropriation of his legacies
– the United States which granted him residency needed to use him for
its Cold War propaganda, while Israel and the Jewish Diaspora needed
to tout him – the most famous Jew in history - as their torchbearer.
The spiritual thinkers have cited him as irreverently religious, while
the progressives have owned him up for his idealistic socialism.


But this auctioned letter, handwritten by Einstein shortly before his
death, almost disturbed many such long-held conventional conclusions,
shattered many a comfortable myth and certainly exposed to the world
how little we knew about this man. If Einstein could compose such an
unsweetened critique of God and religion as the letter suggests, what
else about him do we not know? Who have been suppressing the
lesser-known dimensions about someone we define the word genius by?
Why has there been a need to distort the truths about the good
scientist to begin with?


The answers lie in the argumentative clarity and the sheer brilliance
that epitomized Einstein all his life – the naked truths our
convoluted and opportunistic world has never been prepared to brace
itself for. After all, it has always been more convenient to
hero-worship a critical thinker than delve into his/her necessary
prescriptions.


Although Einstein remained among the most well-known in history, he
stated toward the end of his life, how little value that held for him,
"Though everybody knows me, there are very few people who really know
me." Whether there is a historical necessity to really know Einstein
is an important question, increasing in relevance, as more and more of
the world is getting engaged in religious warfare, vocally supporting
Israeli terrorism, and has been actively embracing tenets of
capitalism. Irrespective of our intents, Albert Einstein, the
celebrated global citizen who most informedly analyzed international
relations, more than anyone else, still possesses the rigorously
tenable solutions to each of these crises.


To seek the answers, let's begin with the three million dollar letter,
and then proceed to locate his roots and evolution. In the "God
Letter" (1954), Einstein wrote, "The word God is, for me, nothing more
than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a
collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are
nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation, no matter, how
subtle, can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are
highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to
do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion, like all other
religions, is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And
the Jewish people, to whom I gladly belong, and with whose mentality I
have a deep affinity, have no different quality for me than all other
people… I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."


Such outright rejection of God, Judaism and Israel in this letter have
raised many eyebrows, especially in a world that has been
systematically tutored so far to treat Einstein as per the 'decent'
norms of our day. Despite the worldwide attention to the content of
this letter, the truth is, it is far from sensational, and the
opinions therein are not exceptionally subversive, by Einstein's
standards. It is important to shatter the myths about Einstein's
feel-good pacifist humanism in favour of his true radicalized
communist activism, so that Einstein's worthwhile contributions are
made commonplace and they inspire revolutionaries world over as
originally intended, instead of merely enticing secret bidders on
auction websites.



Einstein's Zionism: For a Cultural Centre, not a Political State


Einstein never disowned his association with Zionism, although it is
important to note his definition of Zionism largely varied from the
ones commonly held during his own time, and now. He could easily have
succumbed to a reactionary (nationalist) variant of Zionism,
considering he was constantly victimized as a Jew, regardless of his
celebrity. But he consciously did not choose that path. In 1920, a
group of German scientists, led by Nobel Prize winner Philipp Lenard,
denounced the theory of relativity as a "Jewish perversion". Lenard
would go on to serve as Hitler's chief scientist, and the man to fund
this campaign to discredit Einstein's contributions would be later
unraveled as the American industrialist Henry Ford, a Nazi
collaborator. Remaining unprovoked however, Einstein declared the same
year: "I do not believe in anything that might be described as 'Jewish
faith'. But I am a Jew and am glad to belong to the Jewish people,
though I do not regard it in any way as chosen..."


Cognizant of the anti-semitism impacting Einstein's career and
legacies, Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann in 1921 asked Kurt Blumenfeld,
a top Zionist recruiter to "stir up Einstein". Blumenfeld sent back
Weizmann a warning - "Einstein, as you know, is no Zionist, and I ask
you not to try to make him a Zionist or to try to attach him to our
organization...Einstein, who leans to socialism, feels very involved
with the cause of Jewish labour and Jewish workers... I heard... that
you expect Einstein to give speeches. Please be quite careful with
that. Einstein... often says things out of naïveté which are unwelcome
by us."


Einstein required no stirring up, as he had already chosen the side of
the oppressed and without any hesitation accepted Weizmann's
invitation to travel to England and America, but duly noted, "In
several places, a high-tensioned Jewish nationalism shows itself that
threatens to degenerate into intolerance and bigotry; but hopefully
this is only an infantile disorder." Besides, Blumenfeld was clearly
wrong, for Einstein was no naive. He knew from his experiences that
"anti-Semitism is frequently a question of political calculation".
During his stay in Switzerland, he was not aware of his Jewishness and
he wrote, "There was nothing in my life that would have stirred my
Jewish sensibility and
stimulated it. This changed as soon as I took up residence in Berlin.
There I saw the plight of many young Jews, especially of East European
Jews. They are made the scapegoats for the malaise in present-day
German economic life... Meetings, conferences, newspapers press for
their quick removal or internment." When the German government
contemplated measures against East European Jews, Einstein protested
and exposed the "inhumanity and irrationality of these measures" in
the Berliner Tageblatt.


Einstein distinguished early on between the West European Jews and the
prevailing anti-Semitism targeting East European Jews. His support for
Soviet Union was strengthened based on how Stalin's policies welcomed
East European Jews into Soviet Union. And at the same time, between
the First World War and the Second, Einstein witnessed how racist
Germany was treating the East European Jewish refugees, and the
barbarity of it all would awaken his sense of belonging with the
oppressed race of the time. Although he could afford to, Einstein
refused to remain indifferent, and he refused to separate his
profession from his politics. Together with a few colleagues – both
Jews and non-Jews, he held university courses especially to benefit
the East European Jews in the summer of 1921 and he declared that
"such experiences have awakened my Jewish-national feelings. I am not
a Jew in the sense that I call for the preservation of the Jewish or
any other nationality as an end in itself... I consider raising Jewish
self-esteem essential, also in the interest of a natural coexistence
with non-Jews. This was my major motive for joining the Zionist
movement... But my Zionism does not preclude cosmopolitan views." His
envisioning of a "free Jewish community in Palestine" was not so much
a demand for a militarist sovereign country as it was about East
European Jews not to be treated as wretched refugees in the racist
European powers. Jewish Diaspora would never have aimed for a separate
land if the Jews were treated humanely in the various European
countries they lived in, Einstein cited early on.


But wary he would always remain of the Zionists at the same time. One
of them was Isaac Don Levine who tried early on to persuade Einstein
against the Bolsheviks by making false claims about how Jews were
being colonized by Stalin's Russia. On April 9, 1926, Einstein
rubbished such claims by Levine and wrote to him that he was
supporting Russia and that the "efforts being made to colonize Jews in
Russia must not be opposed because they aim at assisting thousands of
Jews whom Palestine cannot immediately absorb." Einstein had duly
acknowledged how Stalin was the only international leader to have been
supportive of the Jewish cause, so much so that Soviet Union was the
first country to develop an autonomous territory for the Jewish
people, a concept that Einstein had dreamt to see realised in
Palestine, upon British promise. But reactionary Zionism was
intolerant towards the communists and was refusing to credit the
Soviet Union for their initiatives. As history would prove it later,
and Einstein would attest, the British ended up deceiving the Jews,
while Soviet Union continued to save millions of them.


In the March 1926 letter to Blumenfeld, Einstein wrote, "I appreciate
the educational achievements of Zionism. However, as an enterprise, I
don't know it well enough to support it with good conscience." Even as
Einstein's conscience would continue to haunt him, he was still
optimistic about the forthcoming "Jewish centre" of morality and
intellectualism. He never got the "impression that the Arab problem
might threaten the development of the Palestine project." He said, "I
believe rather that, among the working classes especially, Jew and
Arab on the whole get on excellently together." (1927)


Next year, in 1928, contrary to political wisdom, the British proposed
a parliament for Palestine in a rushed manner that mandated equal
representations from Jewish and Arab (and some British appointees) – a
move that would result in the first major "riots" claiming hundreds of
lives on each side. By the Jewish migrations in 1930, the British
census report would declare almost 17 percent of the population in the
Arab land to be Jews. Mass agitations among the Arabs would be
"tackled" by the British in 1936 when for the first time, the
colonizers would station more troops in Palestine than in the entire
Indian subcontinent. In 1937, the proposed mandate would be declared a
failure because common grounds between the Arabs and Jews would not be
allegedly found and the British conveniently would then "partition"
Palestine, much to the chagrin of the Arabs (and, Einstein).


Before the proposed "Partition" could materialize, Zionist Weizmann
demanded that all Arabs be deported to Jordan, an idea that was
opposed by Einstein and resulted in further differences between the
two of them. Describing Jewish nationalism as guided by militarism and
conservatism, Einstein even compared it with Prussia in a letter to
Weizmann: "Without honest cooperation with the Arabs there is no peace
and no security. This is for the long range politics and not for the
present times. In the last analysis, even if we were not practically
defenseless, it would not be worthy of us to want to maintain a
nationalism a la Prussienne."


It was not any political power that Einstein wanted to see instituted
in the Arab land. Refusing to be deluded by the Zionist propaganda, he
was increasingly becoming concerned about the safety of the Arab
people in Palestine. In a letter to Bernard Lecache in May 1930,
Einstein wrote, "With regard to the question of Palestine, my most
eager wish would be that, by policies preserving the legitimate
interests of the Arabs, the Jews might succeed in proving that the
Jewish people has managed to learn something from its own past, long
ordeal."


Although immigration of Jewish people to the Arab land was becoming
legally inevitable, Einstein proposed there should be a limit to that.
In a letter to Edward Freed, he wrote in 1932, "I am not a nationalist
and I do not wish any discrimination of the Arabs in Palestine. The
Jewish immigration to Palestine in the framework of 'suitable limits'
can't do harm to anyone." The 'limits' were opposed by many Zionists
of the time, principally by the anticommunist and Jewish nationalist
Ze'ev Jabotinsky. Einstein attacked them as Fascists and in a letter
to the Zionist Beinish Epstein, he accused them of "borrowing from the
Fascists... methods that I abhor deeply, and use them to serve the
interests of those who, relying on their ownership of the means of
production, disfranchise and exploit the nonowners." (1935)


These sentiments are more relevant today as the Gaza wars continue to
oppress the Arabs in the name of defending the state of Israel. Back
then, Einstein had warned the Jewish people not to fall into the trap
of nationalism, and the following excerpt of his commentary sums it
up: "The essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish
state with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power… I am
afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain – especially from the
development of a narrow nationalism within our own ranks, against
which we have already had to fight strongly, even without a Jewish
state. A return to a nation in the political sense of the word would
be equivalent to turning away from the spiritualization of our
community..."


However, Einstein's plan was not laying the foundation for the future;
British colonialism's declarations were. As the Second World War
unfolded, between 1939 and 1944, the British allowed for a limited
number (75,000) of Jews to be settled in Palestine. In the meantime,
Nazi Germany's onslaughts made possible somewhat of a unity among the
Arabs and Jews - Palestinian Communist Party (which supported the
Soviet Union) as well as Jewish Communists and left-leaning Zionists
Hashomer Hatzair worked towards forging alliances between antifascists
from each side. At the same time, to counter the influence of the
communists, the rightwing Zionists also grew in leaps and bounds (some
of them assassinated Lord Moyne, British Minister of State in 1944).
Next year, they demanded immediate admission of 100,000 Jewish
refugees to Eretz Israel, Einstein sharply attacked these Jewish
militants and said "I regard them as a disaster. I'm not willing to
see anybody associated with those misled and criminal people", in an
interview with I.Z. David.


Anti-Israel: "The war is won, but the peace is not." (Einstein, 1945)


While he rejoiced the defeat of Hitler and Nazism, Einstein continued
to oppose the idea of a Jewish state. In January 1946, testifying
before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine (AACIP),
Einstein argued against the idea of Israel. He wrote to Rabbi Wise,
"I'm firmly convinced that a rigid demand for a 'Jewish State' will
have only undesirable results for us." American radical journalist I.
F. Stone, himself a fellow 'cultural Zionist' declared his support for
Einstein saying that "to have the greatest Jewish figure of the period
oppose a Jewish state as unfair to the Arabs is a very noble thing."


Einstein attacked the British as the root cause of the instabilities
in the lives of Arabs and Jews. "Difficulties between the Jews and
Arabs are artificially created, and are created by the English," he
thundered. Einstein noted that Palestine could still rule with one
government, but without British intervention, because in his
impression, "Palestine is a kind of small model of India. There is an
attempt, with the help of a few officials, to dominate the people of
Palestine and it seems to me that the English rule it." Attacking the
British colonial rule as one that exploits the native while
collaborating with landowners, Einstein laid bare a vicious critique
of Western interests in the proposed partitions."


In 1952, when Weizmann died and to fill that vacuum a great name was
sought to become President of Israel, Ben Gurion unashamedly
approached Einstein. Not only did Einstein refuse to accept that
position, he also stated it would be "a difficult situation that would
create a conflict with my conscience." Although Gurion's offer is a
well-known historical episode, Einstein's response is rarely mentioned
because that would then brand the most honored Jewish person as the
biggest anti-Semite in the political terms employed today.


Likewise, a day after Einstein's death, the New York Times, on April
19, 1955 deliberately misconstrued history in its characteristic style
by printing, "Israel, whose establishment as a state, Einstein had
championed..." As Einstein's chronicler Fred Jerome noted, it was "a
description of Einstein the media had never used while he was alive."
However, the conspiracies to cleanse Einstein of his "dirty past" had
started long ago with FBI employing anti-Stalinist agents to discredit
him, while suppressing such facts from the public knowledge. Thanks to
Jerome's investigations ("The Einstein File"), it is now revealed that
Louis Gibarti, who was expelled from the Communist Party by Stalin,
soon became an informant for the FBI (interviewed by Democratic Party
Senator Pat McCarran). McCarran, submitted the reports of allegations
against Einstein's international communist contacts, and his
Republican counterpart Senator McCarthy ended up denouncing Einstein
as an "enemy of America".


Einstein's deeply rooted friendship with Paul Robeson and his
unconditional support for W.E.B. DuBois were also deliberately kept
under wraps for decades - despite them possibly being the biggest
influences in Einstein's radical saga. Just as the facts - that he was
the fiercest critic of British colonialism, a profoundly radical voice
against American imperialism, a strong advocate for Stalin's Russia, a
steadfast supporter of the black communists, and a studied commentator
against the reactionary Zionism upon which Israel has been founded -
have been carefully concealed. For if the real Einstein were to
inspire the world today, that would not just disturb the comfortable
imperialists, more importantly, it would awaken and radicalize all the
oppressed people of the world to stand up against injustice, as
Einstein, not the marketable genius - but the collective conscience
for a progressive world, once did.





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"To those who believe in resistance, who live between hope and
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who understand enough to be afraid and yet retain their fury."

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