Essays in Humanism (17 page)

43. The Jews of Israel

THERE IS NO PROBLEM
of such overwhelming importance to us Jews as consolidating that which has been accomplished in Israel with amazing energy and an unequalled willingness for sacrifice. May the joy and admiration that fill us when we think of all that this small group of energetic and thoughtful people has achieved give us the strength to accept the great responsibility which the present situation has placed upon us.

When appraising the achievement, however, let us not lose sight of the cause to be served by this achievement: rescue of our endangered brethren, dispersed in many lands, by uniting them in Israel; creation of a community which conforms as closely as possible to the ethical ideals of our people as they have been formed in the course of a long history.

One of these ideals is peace, based on understanding and self-restraint, and not on violence. If we are imbued with this ideal, our joy becomes somewhat mingled with sadness, because our relations with the Arabs are far from this ideal at the present time. It may well be that we would have reached this ideal, had we been permitted to work out, undisturbed by others, our relations with our neighbors, for we
want
peace and we realize that our future development depends on peace.

It was much less our own fault or that of our neighbors than of the Mandatory Power, that we did not achieve an undivided Palestine in which Jews and Arabs would live as equals, free, in peace. If one nation dominates other nations, as was the case in the British Mandate over Palestine, she can hardly avoid following the notorious device of Divide et Impera. In plain language this means: create discord among the governed people so they will not unite in order to shake off the yoke imposed upon them. Well, the yoke has been removed, but the seed of dissension has borne fruit and may still do harm for some time to come—let us hope not for too long.

The Jews of Palestine did not fight for political independence for its own sake, but they fought to achieve free immigration for the Jews of many countries where their very existence was in danger; free immigration also for all those who were longing for a life among their own. It is no exaggeration to say that they fought to make possible a sacrifice perhaps unique in history.

I do not speak of the loss in lives and property fighting an opponent who was numerically far superior, nor do I mean the exhausting toil which is the pioneer’s lot in a neglected arid country. I am thinking of the additional sacrifice that a population living under such conditions has to make in order to receive, in the course of eighteen months, an influx of immigrants which comprise more than one third of the total Jewish population of the country. In order to realize what this means you have only to visualize a comparable feat of the American Jews. Let us assume there were no laws limiting the immigration into the United States; imagine that the Jews of this country volunteered to receive more than one million Jews from other countries in the course of one year and a half, to take care of them, and to integrate them into the economy of this country. This would be a tremendous achievement, but still very far from the achievement of our brethren in Israel. For the United States is a big, fertile country, sparsely populated with a high living standard and a highly developed productive capacity, not to compare with small Jewish Palestine whose inhabitants, even without the additional burden of mass immigration, lead a hard and frugal life, still threatened by enemy attacks. Think of the privations and personal sacrifices which this voluntary act of brotherly love means for the Jews of Israel.

The economic means of the Jewish Community in Israel do not suffice to bring this tremendous enterprise to a successful end. For a hundred thousand out of more than three hundred thousand persons who immigrated to Israel since May 1948 no homes or work could be made available. They had to be concentrated in improvised camps under conditions which are a disgrace to all of us.

It must not happen that this magnificent work breaks down because the Jews of this country do not help sufficiently or quickly enough. Here, to my mind, is a precious gift with which all Jews have been presented: the opportunity to take an active part in this wonderful task.

A Biography of Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) is among modern history’s greatest and most influential minds. He authored more than 450 scholarly works during his lifetime, and his advancements in science—including the revolutionary Theory of Relativity and E=mc
²
, which described for the first time the relationship between an object’s mass and its energy—have earned him renown as “the father of modern physics.”

Born in Ulm, in southwest Germany, Einstein moved to Munich with his family as an infant. As a child, Einstein spoke so infrequently that his parents feared he had a learning disability. But despite difficulties with speech, he was consistently a top student and showed an early aptitude for mathematics and physics, which he later studied at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich after renouncing his German citizenship to avoid military service in 1896.

After graduation, Einstein married his college girlfriend, Mileva Marić, and they had three children. He attended the University of Zurich for his doctorate and worked at the patent office in Bern, a post he left in 1908 for a teaching position at the University of Bern, followed by a number of professorships throughout Europe that ultimately led him back to Germany in 1914. By this time, Einstein had already become recognized throughout the world for his groundbreaking papers on special relativity, the photoelectric effect, and the relationship between energy and matter. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921.

In 1933, Einstein escaped Nazi Germany and immigrated to the United States with his second wife, Elsa Löwenthal, whom he had married in 1919. He accepted a position at Princeton University in New Jersey, where he stayed for the remainder of his life. At Princeton, Einstein dedicated himself to finding a unified field theory and played a key role in America’s development of atomic weapons. He also campaigned for civil rights as a member of the NAACP and was an ardent supporter of Israel’s Labor Zionist Movement.

Still, Einstein maintained a special affinity for his homeland. His connection to all things German and, in particular, to the scientific community in Berlin was probably the reason that throughout his years in America he so strongly valued his relationships with other German-speaking immigrants. He maintained a deep friendship with the founder of Philosophical Library, Dr. Dagobert D. Runes, who, like Einstein, was a humanist, a civil rights pioneer, and an admirer of Baruch Spinoza. Consequently, many of Albert Einstein’s works were published by Philosophical Library.

At the time of Einstein’s death in 1955, he was universally recognized as one of history’s most brilliant and important scientists.

Einstein with friends Marcel Grossmann, Eugen Grossmann, and Gustav Geissler in the garden of the Grossmann home in Thalwil, Switzerland, around 1899. Einstein’s discussions with Marcel about elliptic geometry provided one of the sparks that led to Einstein’s development of the General Theory of Relativity.

Einstein with his first wife, Mileva Marić, and their son Hans Albert, in 1904. Their second son, Eduard, would be born six years later.

A twenty-six-year-old Einstein during the time he was employed at the Bern patent office, in 1905.

Paper silhouettes created by Einstein in 1919, the year of his marriage to his second wife, Elsa. The silhouettes depict, from left to right, himself, Elsa, and his stepdaughters Ilse and Margot.

Einstein lecturing in Vienna, Austria, in January of 1921, the same year he won the Nobel Prize in Physics. 1921 also marked the year of Einstein’s first visit to New York City, followed by weeks of lectures at some of the East Coast’s most prestigious universities.