2 2 6 T H E J E W I S H QU E S T IO N
named
“Schultz.”[24]
Einstein wrote an indignant open letter to the authorities (Doc. 32), ap-
parently intended for the Berliner Tageblatt but never published. Linkage of the terms
“Jew,” “traitor,” and “Easterner” in the dictionary of the nationalists was especially offen-
sive. While recognizing that university students were particularly susceptible to the logic of
such venom, Einstein laid the blame for the attitude at the feet of his colleagues, the univer-
sity professors. Yet, a month later, when confronted with a student protest in his own lec-
tures, he was at pains to point out that anti-Semitism had not been a factor (see Einstein
1920a [Doc.
33]).[25]
In spite of the fact that he continued in late 1919 and early 1920 to accept the CV’s po-
sition on the centrality of anti-Semitism as an issue, Einstein at this time offered a glimpse
of other concerns that would distance him from the assimilationist position and move him
toward the views of the Zionists. In warning of the dangers to the East European Jews, Ein-
stein expressed a solidarity with them which he found lacking in many of his fellow Jews
in Germany. He explicitly mocked their tactic of redirecting onto East European Jews the
Gentile anti-Semitism intended for them (Docs. 34 and Einstein 1920h [Doc. 37]). Given
the almost instinctive protectiveness toward the underdog that he had expressed on more
than one occasion in his life, here too he acted consistently with a worldview that sympa-
thized with less-privileged members of the community.
Another factor, touched on in a different context above, was Einstein’s animosity toward
the submissiveness to authority, which he felt was deeply ingrained in young German Jews.
In assimilating to the demands of Gentile society and internalizing its expectations, Jewish
youth was abasing itself, he
wrote.[26]
The forcefulness with which Einstein advanced this
interpretation is telling, for at the time that he wrote the letter in question—1909—he was
about to accept a university position himself, albeit in Switzerland. Einstein associated this
form of subservience with a worldview that was identified by many with that of the CV and
its assimilationist ideology. Disenchantment with this view is already evident in a symbolic
gesture that he made in October 1919 in signing an appeal for the Palestine Foundation
[24]Georg F. Nicolai (1874–1964) was Extraordinary Professor of Medicine and Physiology at the
University of Berlin. See Zuelzer 1981, p. 255, which cites the article in Wahrheit denouncing Nicolai
(born Lewinstein) as “Abramowicz” of Posen. Worse was yet to come. In mid-April 1920, e.g., Deut-
sche Zeitung suggested that Nicolai and Einstein join their Senegalese brethren in Frankfurt am Main,
where occupying French colonial troops might prove more sympathetic to their views than German
university students (see Zuelzer’s notes, Wolf Zuelzer Papers, WyUAHC).
[25]That Einstein continued to bristle at anti-Semitic virulence is evident in his response to the anti-
relativists later in the year (see Doc. 45).
[26]“Tail wagging” (“schweifwedeln”) is the term that Einstein employed to characterize this
submissiveness. Einstein to Jakob Laub, 19 May 1909 (Vol. 5, Doc. 161). Abasement was not only
self-inflicted. At the end of the 1920s, Einstein pointed out that his discovery of himself as a Jew owed
more to Gentiles than to Jews. “I saw how schools, the satirical press, and countless other cultural
institutions of the non-Jewish majority undermined the confidence of even the best of my fellow Jews,
and felt that it should not thus be allowed to continue” (“Ich sah, wie Schule, Witzblätter und unzäh-
lige kulturelle Faktoren der nichtjüdischen Mehrheit das Selbstgefühl auch der Besten meiner
Stammesgenossen untergrub und fühlte, dass es so nicht weiter gehen dürfe.” Einstein to Willy
Hellpach, 8 October 1929).