I N T R O D U C T I O N T O V O L U M E 7 x x x i x
izations tell us as much about Einstein as they do about Arons. The choice of
attributes indicate Einstein’s close identification with the virtues of the lone hero
and his lack of familiarity with the politics of the new era, in which the individual
was often subsumed in mass organizations. If, in summer 1921, Einstein modestly
declined the characterization of “revolutionary” in physics (Doc. 58), how much
truer is it that whatever political instincts he had at the end of war had been honed
during an ancien régime of elitist politics and suspicion of popular movements.
Surrounded by his BNV comrades, Einstein welcomed a visiting Belgian paci-
fist to Berlin in mid-December 1919 (Doc. 27). Given the extreme sensitivity in
Germany to Allied charges of wartime atrocities by its military against Belgian
civilians, such a reception was personally a quite courageous act. But the speech
itself had no explicit political content, accusing European intellectuals in moralistic
tones of turning values on their heads and calling for solidarity, without which
amity among individuals and states could not be achieved.
Two weeks later, Einstein published his defense of East European Jews in the
mass-circulation Berliner Tageblatt (Einstein 1919h [Doc. 29]). In effect, he
stepped out of the shadows of his political isolation and grappled with a social
problem that he had made his own. Elsewhere in this volume, his recovery of Jew-
ish concerns is discussed in some detail, and it is pointed out that Einstein’s wres-
tling with the “Jewish Question” was at least a two-stage process that extended
from late 1919 until his American tour in spring 1921. Here it is necessary to stress
that the first phase of this recovery—the search for his personal identity as a Jew—
was the critical factor that politicized him. The passivity of the earliest political
writings gives way to an engagement that will mark his writings on social and polit-
ical topics in the future.
The emotional power of Einstein’s search for his Jewish identity can be recon-
structed to some degree by conceiving of the period before 1918 as a moratorium
during which he pursued scientific goals while shunting aside, if not ignoring, more
personal concerns. An outsider all his life, in Berlin he came to identify with those
individuals, such as the East European Jews, who were treated as pariahs. No friend
of authority and an instinctive supporter of the socially underprivileged, he was
drawn to those who were marginalized by the authorities. Seven further documents
in this volume that deal with the “Jewish Question”—Docs. 34 and 35; Einstein
1920h (Doc. 37); Einstein 1921h (Doc. 57); Doc. 59; Einstein 1921i (Doc. 60); and
Einstein 1921j (Doc. 62)—indicate how Einstein moved from defining the question
in terms of personal identity to solving it with an intellectual embrace of cultural
Zionism. Rejecting the assimilationist call to be a German first and a Jew second
on the grounds that one allegiance would have to be subordinate to the other—
something he found demeaning—he was free to pursue his vision of a culturally
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