Albert Einstein was a very influential man in history. He was the discoverer of “the world’s most famous equation.” That equation was the same one that ended a world war. But not very many people really think about what he thought about what his equation was used for. I did, so I wrote this report on his ideas and opinions concerning what then were “current events.” Now I will share with you some of these wonderful ideas of his.

I will begin my talk with a short bio of Einstein’s life. Einstein was born into a Jewish family on March 14, 1879 at 11:30 am in Ulm, Germany. A year later, Einstein’s father’s younger brother, Jakob, convinced Hermann Einstein (his father) to start a gas and water installation in Munich, so they moved there. It started off well, but Jakob wanted to go higher. He decided to make a factory for producing electrical products. Jakob also thought that they should buy a house in a suburb of Munich for him and Einstein’s family, and Hermann Einstein agreed to both ideas. Einstein’s mother, Pauline, was instrumental and brought music into the house. She taught Einstein the violin and his sister Maria, or Maja as she was called, the piano. From 1885 to 1888 he was a student at a Catholic elementary school. His Hebrew lessons were taught to him at home, privately. At the age of 9, he was sent to another school, and there he received four more years of Hebrew lessons. In 1894, his parents moved to Milan, leaving him in Germany. Finally, half a year later he stopped his schooling early, at the age of 15, and joined the rest of his family in Pavia, Italy. These were the early years of his life.

Einstein, like most of us here, was a Jew. All Jews, including us, have things to say about anti-Semitism and Zionism. He did too. When I looked for information on his ideas about Zionism, I was “attacked” by an onslaught of speeches and letters made by him. I was interested by what I saw he was making speeches about. He was a “strong devotee” of the Zionist idea. Now, it might not have been such a good idea after all, with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

He was thinking about ways to solve the conflict, and he thought of a council of everyday, non-government people governed by the heads of the countries. This he called the Privy Council. Both the Israelis and the Arabs would send eight people (four from each side) —

• A doctor – elected by the Medical Association.
• A lawyer – elected by the lawyers.
• A working men’s representative – elected by the trade unions.
• An ecclesiastic – elected by the ecclesiastics.

These people would meet once weekly. They would try to work together to make decisions that would be good for the welfare of the country as a whole, not their individual group of people. What they would talk about and decide would be completely secret; they would not even be allowed to talk about it in private. Only when at least three people on each side agreed would the decision be published and available to the community. A member could decide to leave the group, but still would need to keep secret everything that he knew and had talked about. A government might also decide to remove a representative and have somebody elected to take his place if it did not like what side of an argument he/she voted on. Although the Privy Council would not have any power over what their governments did, they might still be able to have the leaders make the decisions in favor of their idea or think about their idea as a working one.

I think the Privy Council was a good idea. This idea of his would probably work now, even though he thought of it approximately 50 years ago. That shows us that the conflict in Israel/Palestine has not changed much since the declaration by Britain that Israel was finally an actual country.

Between the years 1921-1932, Einstein gave five speeches to a variety of Jewish audiences on reconstruction in Palestine. Of these, I thought the first, fourth, and last speeches were the most interesting.

In his first speech, we find out the real reason why he took his trips to America. The reason was to raise money for a Jewish University in Jerusalem. He raised large sums of money and, in addition, Jewish doctors decided to give money for a Medical Center to be established there. These acts made him better known in the US prior to his moving here, so it might have had an impact on his popularity and the wide recognition given to his theories.

His fourth speech is his only one that is directed primarily towards the Jewish youth. He tells them that we, as Jews, must not forget to pay attention to the wants of, and relations with, the Arabs. We know now that one thing that is keeping the conflict alive is that we are not working with the Arabs in addition to not being cautious (enough) and informed of their wants. If we pay more attention to our relations with them, we might be able to smother the conflict in Palestine and make peace in that part of the world. That is the hope of many Jews living in America today.

His final speech about reconstruction was his longest and most informative. Even though it was his most recent speech, he had not yet settled in the nearby city of Princeton. In this speech, he mainly talked about how many things had changed for the Jews after WW2, and he said that the idea of change should guide how one looks at the Zionist movement. Life had changed from living in ghettos in Germany to living in a free land called America. Things could also change more, we could have a change in world opinions and the British could create Israel, and/or we might even have no lasting conflict with the Arabs. Looking at changes is a good way to look at things, because we might change for the better, or even for the worse. It is pretty much saying, let our fate be our guide and let it lead us through the many passageways of life.

Einstein talked a lot about Anti-Semitism as well as about Zionism. Some of his ideas I highly agree with, some I only partially agree with, but so far I haven’t completely disagreed with any of his ideas. I read an article he wrote that was published in a magazine a long time ago. He started off by relating a long story about a Shepard and a horse. The Shepard told the horse that the stags, which were faster than the horse, were drinking up all the water in the lake. The Shepard told the horse that if the horse trusted him, he could get it water. The Shepard then got what he had wanted, which was the horse being his slave. I read this, and thought about algebra. I kept plugging in people or groups of people for the horse, stags, and the Shepard. Finally, I got that Hitler was the Shepard, leading the horse (the Nazi party, or the fascist party), and the stags were the Jews, being the world’s scapegoat.

“Why is it usually the Jews who play the stag?” Einstein answers it simply, “Because there are Jews among almost all nations and because everywhere they are too thinly scattered to defend themselves against violent attack.” An example of this is the fact that the Russian government successfully held pogroms to try to get the Jews to pack their bags and move to another town. If we had more people, then we would have been able to retaliate, and we would not have lost so many lives, businesses, homes, and family heirlooms.

Einstein also decided not to attend a French sponsored meeting against Anti-Semitism for two reasons:

1. He said that he was a German citizen as well as a Jew. He also said that as much as he wanted to, he still couldn’t take part in a meeting held by another country condemning the acts of the country that he was currently a citizen of.
2. He also said that all Jews regard other Jews as their brethren. If an injustice is done to one Jew, most other Jews will think of that injustice as also being done to him/herself. Other people who fight injustice should attend such meetings because as outsiders they would be impartial and therefore their decisions and ideas would not be influenced by the hardships of their brethren.

I think not attending this meeting was a very smart thing to do because what he said at the meeting would be influenced by outside factors, namely, what was being done to Jews and the fact that he was still a German citizen.

Now, looking back at what I wrote about him and what I thought myself, I think that we have very similar viewpoints on this topic. That might be because all Jews think of other Jews as brethren, and brethren often agree on issues. Not always though, because Jews are on different sides of the Zionist issue. Maybe some of the reason why Einstein and I think alike is because both of us are German Jews.

Einstein also had ideas on Germany and the Holocaust. He wrote a letter to the heroes and fighters at the Warsaw Ghetto. He talked about how they sacrificed their lives to fend off the Nazi Army. He also said that the German people as a whole were responsible for the Holocaust in that they elected Hitler to power after all of his evil intentions were made fully clear, “past the point of misconception,” and therefore the German people as a whole brought the Holocaust upon the Jews, and therefore they, as a whole, were guilty of mass-murder.

Perhaps the most controversial idea of Einstein’s was whether or not the United States should create atomic weapons of mass destruction to use on Japan. His famous “General Theory of Relativity” was E=mc², which means that the Energy that could be created by the splitting of the atoms in an object is equal to the object’s mass times the speed of light squared. That helped the US determine the amount of energy that would be released if a uranium or plutonium atom was split in half. The amount of energy created would be enough to blow up a whole city. When we dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the widespread destruction was blamed on Einstein because he determined the Theory of Relativity that let the US create these weapons of mass destruction.

Einstein thought that the secret of the Atomic Bomb shouldn’t have been given to either the UN or the Soviet Union. The US and Great Britain should have talked with the Soviet Union and should have created a world government. Since these three countries had the most military power, they would have the power to hold this government together. The “Big Three” (the US, Britain and Russia) would adopt a constitution written by “a single American, a single Briton, and a single Russian.” All nations that would agree to this constitution would be part of the world government, and all of these participating nations would learn the secret of the atomic bomb. The reason why we would give this secret to the other nations of the world is to create peace through this Government, and therefore have this government not be a tyrannical world government like the one that he predicted would come in the future if this were not established. He thought that the people who believed that this was the ultimate solution but thought that it should be brought about slowly had not thought about the whole picture. If this process was slow, then the countries that did not know the secret would not know our reasons for not giving it to them and would become suspicious. That suspicion would bring war and war is what we would be trying to prevent by establishing this world government.

The second thing that he wrote about “Atomic War or Peace” starts off with him stating, “Nothing has been accomplished to make the world safe from war, while much has been done to increase the destructiveness of war.” He did not know anything about the progress of the Manhattan Project, as the atom bomb creation project was called, because he didn’t have the security clearance from the US government because he was so left wing. Nobody working was allowed to talk to him, either. Einstein had a knack for predicting things, and he predicted that bacteriological warfare would soon be used, and it would be as dangerous as atomic warfare. We have seen that in Iraq and know that his hypothesis was true.

Einstein thought that the US should stockpile the atomic bomb. Most of you here won’t agree with that, but his reasons were more than adequate to convince me. He said that the only reason to stockpile it was to “deter” another country from making an atomic attack on us. If we had a lot of atomic bombs, they would probably have less than us and therefore would be afraid of using it because we would have many more and would be able to do more damage to them than they could to us.

Some of you might have changed your minds listening to Einstein’s ideas, some of you might not have, but this is another prominent aspect of Einstein. He didn’t really care what you thought, as long as you listened to him and gave his opinions some consideration as to whether or not they had some ethical or moral value.

I think that these ideas of Einstein’s were not for his time, but if they were tried now, there might be a desired outcome. This world government idea of his could work because we have many allies and those allies could join with us and create this government. That is what we need at this time, a group of nations, all allies, and all with strong military forces joining together to make peace in the world. This could create an international bond, and these nations could work together to make the world a better place, where all prospered and were well off.

In this report I have focused on Einstein’s ideas about Judaism and politics.

I hope you will agree with me that they are very interesting. Albert Einstein was a man for the future. He started the Atomic era, and made great discoveries in the field of science. But I now hope that if someone asks you what you think Albert Einstein was, I hope you say, “A scientist AND a politician.”

Bibliography

Clark, Ronald W. Einstein, the Life and Times. Avon Books, 1971.

Einstein, Albert. Ideas and Opinions. Crown Publishers, 1954.

Museum of Natural History, “Albert Einstein Exhibit”, New York City, New York, 2003.

Pais, Abraham. ‘Subtle is the Lord…’. Oxford University Press, 1982.

Rosenkranz, Ze’ev. The Einstein Scrapbook. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.