xliv INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME
8
more comprehensible.[10] By
the
end of
the
war
and
the dissolution
of
the
Empire,
Einstein
pithily
summarizes his
answer
to
the
question
of
the intellectual’s
role in
political
affairs with the
following epigram: Keep
your
trap
shut
(Doc. 653).
Yet this volume also contains
harbingers
of
Einstein’s future interest and
involvement in
politics.
As
one
of
his first official acts in
Berlin,
in
spring
1914,
Einstein declines
an
invitation from the
Imperial
Russian
Academy
of
Sciences,
declaring
his
solidarity
with the Jewish victims
of
pogroms (Doc.
7).
Four
years
later,
in
May 1918,
Einstein’s attention is drawn
to
the cultural
deprivation
of
East-
ern
Jews when he is invited
to
attend
a
lecture
by
a
visiting
Polish rabbi
on provid-
ing Hebrew-language
instruction within the Polish school
system
to Jewish
pupils
(Doc. 547).
After
the
war,
he is asked to
participate
in
a congress
to
be called
by
the
Zionist
Association
of
Germany
in
order to
deliberate,
among
other
issues, on
the
recognition
of
Palestine
as a
national
area
of
settlement
of
the Jewish
people
(Docs.
666 and
671).
It is
unclear whether
he attended
either
event.
Einstein’s
discovery
of
"the Jewish
soul"[11]
in the
postwar period
of
the
Weimar
Republic
became
his
gateway
to
a
far
more
systematic
involvement with
politics
than
we can
find in these
pages.
Besides
a growing affinity
for
the
cause
of
Zion-
ism,
there
are
two other
factors,
absent in this
volume,
that
determine his
greater
access
and
receptivity
to
the
political arena
after the
war.
One
was
thrust
on
him
in
1919,
after
the solar
eclipse expeditions
confirmed his
general theory
of
relativity
and the
mass
media elevated
him
to the status
of
an
all-knowing sage.
Pronounce-
ments
on
social,
political,
and economic issues
came
to be
expected
of
him.
The
other
is Einstein’s
new
definition
for himself of
the role
of
the intellectual
who has
access
to
the media in the
mass society
of
the twenties.
Though
the old
elites have not been
swept away
in Weimar
Germany,
Einstein
soon recognized
that
the ineffectiveness
to
which the
intellectual
had been
relegated
under the
Empire
could be
overcome by appeals
to
an
international
press
that
created his
popular
fame and
continued
to further it. His views
on
moral and
political
issues,
confined
to his
correspondence
and tentative in the
early
Berlin
years,
would
now
be broad-
cast
throughout
the world and
carry great weight.
It is
under
these conditions
that
Einstein’s
isolation
truly comes
to
an
end.
V
Whereas the
large body
of
correspondence on
general relativity
in this volume
reflects the
number
and
the
importance
of Einstein’s
contemporary
published
papers
in this
area,
this
is
much less the
case
for the other scientific
correspondence
presented
here.
For
instance,
the letters
from
1914 to 1918
provide surprisingly
little
background
to the
genesis
and the
reception
of
Einstein’s
ground-breaking