Einstein and Israel
Isaiah Berlin
[An essay originally published 8 November 1979]
Albert Einstein's chief title to immortal fame is his transcendent
scientific genius, about which, like the vast majority of mankind, I
am totally incompetent to speak. Einstein was universally revered as
the most revolutionary innovator in the field of physics since Newton.
The exceptional respect and attention that were everywhere paid to his
person and to his opinions on other topics sprang from this fact. He
knew this himself: and although he was a genuinely modest man,
embarrassed by the adulation which he excited, and disliked publicity,
he expressed pleasure at the thought that, if homage was to be paid to
individuals at all, it should go to those who could claim achievement
in fields of intellect and culture rather than of power and conquest.
Indeed, that a mathematical physicist should have become a great world
figure is a remarkable fact and a credit to mankind.
If the impact of Einstein's ideas outside the realms of theoretical
physics and, perhaps, of the philosophy of physics is compared to that
made by the ideas of other great scientific pioneers, an odd
conclusion seems to emerge. Galileo's method, to go no further back,
and his naturalism, played a crucial role in the development of
seventeenth-century thought, and extended far beyond technical
philosophy. The impact of Newton's ideas was immense: whether they
were correctly understood or not, the entire program of the
Enlightenment, especially in France, was consciously founded on
Newton's principles and methods, and derived its confidence and its
vast influence from his spectacular achievements. And this, in due
course, transformed - indeed, largely created - some of the central
concepts and directions of modern culture in the West, moral,
political, technological, historical, social - no sphere of thought or
life escaped the consequences of this cultural mutation.
This is true to a lesser extent of Darwin - the concept of evolution
affected many fields of thought outside biology: it upset the
theologians, it influenced the historical sciences, ethics, politics,
sociology, anthropology. Social Darwinism, founded on a misapplication
of Darwin's and Huxley's views, with its eugenic and sometimes racist
implications, did social and political harm. I hesitate (before his
audience) to refer to Freud as a natural scientist; but there is no
doubt that his teaching, too, affected fields far outside psychology -
history, biography, aesthetics, sociology, education.
But Einstein? His scientific achievement touched on the philosophy of
science; his own views - his early acceptance of Mach's phenomenalism,
and his subsequent abandonment of that view - show that he possessed
the gifts of a philosopher, and so, indeed, did his views of the
central doctrines of Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Russell. In this respect,
Einstein and Planck were virtually unique among the outstanding
physicists of our century. But his influence on the general ideas of
his time? On educated opinion? Certainly he presented a heroic image
of a man of pure heart, noble mind, unusual moral and political
courage, engaged in unswerving pursuit of the truth, who believed in
individual liberty and social equality, a man sympathetic to
socialism, who hated nationalism, militarism, oppression, violence,
the materialistic view of life. But apart from embodying a combination
of human goodness with a passion for social justice and unique
intellectual power, in a society in which many seemed to live by the
opposite values - apart, that is, from his exemplary life, from being,
and being seen to be, one of the most civilized, honorable, and humane
men of his time - what impact did Einstein have?
It is true that the word "relativity" has been, to this
day, widely misinterpreted as relativism, the denial of, or doubt
about, the objectivity of truth or of moral and other values. But this
is a very old and familiar heresy. Relativism in the sense in which
Greek sophists, Roman skeptics, French and British subjectivists,
German Romantics and nationalists professed it, and in which
theologians and historians and ordinary men have, in modern tunes,
been tormented by it - this was the opposite of what Einstein
believed. He was a man of simple and absolute moral convictions, which
were expressed hi all he was and did. His conception of external
nature was that of a scientifically analyzable, rational order or
system; the goal of the sciences was objective knowledge of an
independently existent reality, even though the concepts hi which it
was to be analyzed and described were free, arbitrary human creations.
What general impact did his doctrines have? Modern theoretical
physics cannot, has not, even in its most general outlines, thus far
been successfully rendered in popular language as Newton's central
doctrines were, for example, by Voltaire. High-minded public men in
England like Haldane and Herbert Samuel tried to derive general
metaphysical or theological truths, usually somewhat trite ones, from
the general theory of relativity, but this only showed that their
gifts lay in other spheres.
But if the impact of Einstein's scientific thought on the general
ideas of his time is in some doubt, there can be none about the
relevance of his nonscientific views to one of the most positive
political phenomena of our time. Einstein lent the prestige
mondial of his great name, and in fact gave his heart, to the
movement which created the state of Israel. Men and nations owe a debt
to those who help to transform their realistic self-image for the
better. No Zionist with the least degree of self-esteem can refuse to
pay him homage if the opportunity of doing so is offered to him.
Einstein's support of the Zionist movement and his interest in the
Hebrew University were lifelong. He quarreled with Weizmann more than
once; he was highly critical of the Hebrew University and, in
particular, of its first president; he deplored the shortcomings of
Zionist policy toward the Arabs; but he never abandoned his belief in
the central principles of Zionism. If young people (or others) today,
whether Jews or gentiles, who, like the young Einstein, abhor
nationalism and sectarianism and seek social justice and believe in
universal human values - if such people wish to know why he, a child
of assimilated Bavarian Jews, supported the return of the Jews to
Palestine, Zionism, and the Jewish state not uncritically nor without
the anguish which any decent and sensitive man cannot but feel about
acts done in the name of his people which seem to him wrong or unwise,
but, nevertheless steadily, to the end of his life - if they wish to
understand this, then they should read his writings on the subject.
With his customary lucidity and gift for penetrating to the central
core of any issue, whether in science or in life, Einstein said what
had to be said with simplicity and truth. Let me remind you of some of
the things he said and did, and in particular of the path which led
toward them.
He was born in Ulm, the child of irreligious parents. He was educated
in Munich where he seems to have encountered no discrimination; if he
reacted strongly against his school and suffered something approaching
a nervous breakdown, this does not seem to have been due to
anti-Jewish feeling. What he reacted against was, perhaps, the
quasi-military discipline and nationalist fervor of German education
in the 1890s. He studied intermittently in Milan and Zurich, taught in
Zurich, obtained a post in the patent office in Bern, then held
university chairs in Prague and Zurich, and in 1913 was persuaded by
Nernst and Haber, as well as Planck, whose reputations were then at
their peak, to accept a research post hi Berlin.
I need not remind you of the atmosphere of Prussia on the eve of the
First World War. In a letter written in 1929 to a German minister of
state, Einstein said, "When I came to Germany fifteen years ago
[that is, in 1914], I discovered for the first time that I was a Jew.
I owed this discovery more to gentiles than Jews." Nevertheless,
the influence of some early German Zionists, in particular Kurt
Blumenfeld, the apostle to the German Jews, played a significant part
in this - and Einstein remained on terms of warm friendship with him
for the rest of his life. But, as in the case of Herzl, the decisive
factor in his awakening as a Jew was not so much encounter with an
unfamiliar doctrine (he had met adherents of it in Prague but
apparently took no interest in it then) as the chauvinism and
xenophobia of leading circles, in this case in Berlin, which led him
to a realization of the precarious predicament of the Jewish community
even in the civilized West. "Man can flourish" he declared, "only
when he loses himself in a community. Hence the moral danger of the
Jew who has lost touch with his own people and is regarded as a
foreigner by the people of his adoption." "The tragedy of
the Jews is ... that they lack the support of a community to keep them
together. The result is a want of solid foundations in the individual
which in its extreme form amounts to moral instability."
The only remedy, he argued, is to develop a close connection with a
living society which would enable individual Jews to bear the hatred
and humiliation to which they are often exposed by the rest of
mankind. Herzl is to be admired, Einstein tells us, for saying "at
the top of his voice" that only the establishment of a national
home in Palestine can cure this evil. It cannot be removed by
assimilation. The Jews of the old German ghettos were poor, deprived
of civic and political rights, insulated from European progress. Yet
these obscure, humble people had one great advantage over
us - each of them belonged in every fiber of his being to a
community in which he was wholly absorbed, in which he felt himself
a fully privileged member, which asked nothing of him that was
contrary to his natural habits of thought. Our forefathers of those
days were pretty poor specimens intellectually and physically, but
socially they enjoyed an enviable spiritual equilibrium.
Then came emancipation: rapid adaptation to the new open world: eager
efforts to don clothes made to fit others, involving loss of identity,
the prospect of disappearance as a group. But this was not to be:
However much the Jews adapted themselves, in language,
manners, to a large extent even in the forms of religion, to the
European peoples among whom they lived, the feeling of strangeness
between them and their hosts never vanished. This is the ultimate
cause of anti-Semitism, which cannot be got rid of by well-meaning
propaganda. Nationalities want to pursue their own goals, not to
blend.
To ignore, or argue against, emotional prejudice or open hostility,
Einstein declared, is wholly futile; the baptized Jewish Geheimrat
was to him merely pathetic. National frontiers, armies, he regarded as
evil, but not national existence as such: the life of peaceful
nations, with reciprocal respect for one another and toleration of
each other's differences, was civilized and just. There follows a
statement of Zionism not unlike the reaction to a similar predicament
of another internationalist and socialist, Moses Hess, in the 1860s.
Let me quote Einstein's words in 1933: "It is not enough for us
to play a part as individuals in the cultural development of the human
race, we must also attempt tasks which only nations as a whole can
perform. Only so can the Jews regain social health."
Consequently: "Palestine is not primarily a place of refuge for
the Jews of Eastern Europe, but the embodiment of the reawakening of
the corporate spirit of the entire Jewish nation."
This seems to me a classical formulation of the Zionist creed, with
an affinity to the unpolitical cultural nationalism of Ahad Ha'am:
what Einstein was advocating was, in essence, the creation of a social
and spiritual center. But when British policy and Arab resistance, in
his judgment, made the state inevitable, he accepted it and the use of
force to avoid annihilation as being, perhaps, something of a
necessary evil, but nevertheless as a burden and a duty to be borne
with dignity and tact, without arrogance. Like all decent Zionists he
was increasingly worried about the relationship with the Arabs of
Palestine. He wished for a state in which Jews and Arabs could fully
cooperate. But he realized, sadly, that events made this unlikely for
the time being. He remained a consistent supporter of the Jewish State
of Israel: here Jewish ideals must be pursued, especially three among
them: "knowledge for its own sake; an almost fanatical love of
justice; desire for personal independence."
I need hardly say how sharply this differed from the general attitude
of the educated German Jews of his milieu, not to speak of men of
similar origin and social and intellectual formation elsewhere in
Western Europe. When one remembers Einstein's earlier life, remote
from Jewish affairs, his lifelong idealistic internationalism, his
hatred of all that divided men, it seems to me to argue a remarkable
degree of insight, realism, and moral courage of which his fellow Jews
today have good reason to feel proud. After all, other eminent German
Jewish scientists, honorable men of unimpeachable personal integrity,
Fritz Haber, Max Born, James Franck, reacted very differently. So did
writers and artists like Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig, Mahler, Karl Kraus,
or Werfel, who were all too familiar with anti-Semitism in Vienna.
I do not wish to imply that Einstein necessarily condemned
assimilation to the culture of the majority as always ignoble or
doomed to failure. It was plainly possible for children of Jewish
parents to find themselves so remote from their community and its
traditions that even if they considered it, they were unable
psychologically to reestablish genuine links with it. He was clear
that in a civilized society every man must be free to pursue his own
path in the manner that seemed to him best, provided that this did not
do positive harm to others. He did not accuse these scientists and
writers and artists of dishonorable or craven motives; their human
dignity was not, for him, in question, only their degree of
self-understanding.
It was his incapacity for self-deception or evasion, his readiness to
face the truth, and - if the facts demanded it - to go against the
current of received ideas, that marked Einstein's bold rejection of
the central elements in the Newtonian system, and it was this
independence that characterized his behavior in other spheres. He
rejected conventional wisdom: "Common sense," he once said, "is
the deposit of prejudice laid down in the mind before the age of
eighteen." If something did not seem to him to fit, morally or
politically, no less than mathematically, he would not ignore, escape,
forget it; adjust, arrange, add a patch or two in the hope that it
would last his time; he would not wait for the Messiah - the world
revolution - the universal reign of reason and justice-to dissolve the
difficulty. If the shoe does not fit, it is no use saying that time
and wear will make it less uncomfortable or that the shape of the foot
should be altered, or that the pain is an illusion - that reality is
harmonious, and that therefore conflict, injustice, barbarism belong
to the order of appearances, which superior spirits should rise above.
If his philosophical mentors, Hume and Mach, were right, there was
only one world, the world of human experience; it alone was real:
beyond it there might be mystery; indeed, he regarded the fact, of
which he was totally convinced, that the universe was comprehensible
as the greatest of mysteries; yet no theory was valid which ignored
any part of direct human experience, in which he included imaginative
insight, arrived at by paths often far from conscious.
It was this sense of reality that saved him, despite his deep
convictions, from being doctrinaire. When what he knew, understood
directly, was in conflict with doctrinal orthodoxy, he did not ignore
the immediate evidence of his moral, social, or political sense. He
was a convinced pacifist; during World War I he made himself unpopular
in Germany by denouncing it. But in 1933 he accepted the necessity of
resisting Hitler and the Nazis, if need be by force, which horrified
his pacifist allies. He was an egalitarian, a democrat, with an
inclination toward socialism. Yet his sense of the need to protect
individuals from the state was so strong that he believed that Bills
of Rights would be trampled on unless an elite of educated and
experienced persons in authority at times effectively resisted the
wishes of majorities. He praised the American Constitution, and in
particular the balance of power between the president, Congress, and
public opinion (his early political mentor, the Austrian socialist
Fritz Adler, would scarcely have approved). He hated walls between
human beings, exclusiveness. But when Jewish students were being
hounded by nationalist students in German or Polish universities, he
declared that Weizmann was right; liberal and socialist resolutions
were useless; the Jews must act, and create their own university in
Jerusalem.
He hated nationalism all his life. But he recognized the acute need
of the Jews for some form of national existence; above all, he did not
regard a sense of national identity and nationalism - which he
detested - as being one and the same thing. It is clear that he took
political allegiance seriously. He renounced his German nationality
twice. He would not, as a young man, have chosen to adopt Swiss, or,
after Hitler, American citizenship, had he not felt that he could give
his full allegiance to these democratic countries when, for obvious
reasons, he found it unbearable to retain his German passport. It was
this combination of social sensitiveness and concrete insight into
what it is that men live by that saved him from doctrinaire
fanaticism; it was this that made him morally convincing.
He was an innocent man, and sometimes, I should think, taken in by
fools and knaves. But innocence has its own modes of perception: it
sometimes sees through its own eyes, not those of the spectacles
provided by conventional wisdom or some uncriticized dogma. The very
same independence which caused him to reject the accepted notions of
physical space-time and boldly offer the hypothesis of gravitational
waves and light quanta against the resistance of physicists and
philosophers also liberated him morally and politically.
Consequently this man who sought privacy, who remained wholly
uncorrupted by adulation and unparalleled fame in five continents, who
believed in salvation by work and more work to unravel the secrets of
nature - secrets miraculously amenable to analysis and solution by
human reason - this gentle, shy, and modest man displeased many
establishments: German nationalists, Germanophobe Frenchmen, absolute
pacifists, Jewish assimilationists, Orthodox rabbis, Soviet Marxists,
as well as defenders of absolute moral values in which, in fact, he
firmly believed.
He was neither a subjectivist nor a skeptic. He believed that the
concepts and theories of science are free creations of the human
imagination, not, as Bacon or Mill or Mach thought, themselves
abstracted from the data of experience; but what the scientist seeks
to analyze or describe by means of these theories and concepts is
itself an objective structure of which men, viewed scientifically, are
themselves a part. Moral and aesthetic values, rules, standards,
principles cannot be derived from the sciences, which deal with what
is, not with what should be; but neither are they, for Einstein,
generated or conditioned by differences of class or culture or race.
No less than the laws of nature, from which they cannot be derived,
they are universal, true for all men at all times, discovered by moral
or aesthetic insight common to all men, and embodied in the basic
principles (not the mythology) of the great world religions.
Like Spinoza, he thought that those who deny this are merely blinded
by the passions; indeed, he felt Spinoza to be a kindred spirit. Like
Spinoza, he conceived God as reason embodied in Nature, as being, in a
literal sense, a divine harmony, Deus sive Natura; and, again
like Spinoza, he showed no bitterness toward his detractors, nor did
he compromise with them - he remained serene and reasonable, humane,
tolerant, undogmatic. He did not wish to dominate, and did not demand
blind fidelity from his followers. He supported any movement - say,
the League of Nations or left-wing groups in America - if he thought
that on the whole it did good, or at least more good than harm.
So with Jewish Palestine. He hated the chauvinists; he was critical,
at times to an unrealistic degree, of the attitude of the Zionist
leadership toward the Arabs, but this did not make him lean over
backward occasionally as it did others; he denounced the Eisenhower
administration for seeking to please the Arab states at the expense of
Israel, a policy which he attributed to American imperialism. He was
critical of some of the Hebrew University's policies: so, for
instance, he thought that, among the academic refugees from fascist
Europe, young scholars, not the old and famous, should be offered
appointments. But his loyalties remained unimpaired. He was not
prepared to abandon the Zionist movement because of the deficiencies
of some of its leaders. His Zionism was grounded in the belief that
basic human needs create a right to their satisfaction: men have an
inalienable right to freedom from hunger, nakedness, insecurity,
injustice, and from homelessness too.
He was somewhat homeless himself. In a letter to his friend Max Born
he wrote that he had no roots; that he was a stranger everywhere. He
was, on his own admission, a lonely man who instinctively avoided
intimacy. He was a solitary thinker, not easy to know as a human
being. His deep humanity and sympathy with the victims of political
oppression, social discrimination, economic exploitation, were central
to his outlook and need no special explanation; they were in part,
perhaps, a compensation for his difficulty in forming close personal
relationships.
Like many physicists connected in some way with the production of the
atom bomb, he was, in his later years, oppressed by a sense of the
responsibility of scientists for introducing a terrible new means of
destruction into the world; and he condemned the use of it made by his
adopted country which seemed to him bent on a dangerously imperialist
course. His hatred of the cruelty and barbarity of reactionaries and
fascists at tunes led him to believe that there were no enemies on the
left - an illusion of many decent and generous people, some of whom
have paid for it with their lives.
Perhaps his very gifts as a scientist led him to schematize, to
oversimplify practical problems, including complex political and
cultural ones, which allow of no clear-cut solutions, to be too
sweeping and to ignore the wrinkles and unevennesses of daily life,
insusceptible as they are to exact quantitative analysis. For it seems
to me that there may exist a certain difference between the gifts of
scientists and humanists. It has often been pointed out that major
discoveries and inventions - as opposed to demonstrations of their
validity - require great imaginative power and an intuitive sense -
not rationally analyzable - of where the right solution must lie, and
that this is not dissimilar from the vision of artists or the
sympathetic insight into the past of gifted historians or scholars.
This may well be true. Yet those who deal with human beings and their
affairs need some awareness of the essential nature of all human
experience and activity, a sense of the limits of what it is possible
for men and women to be or to do; without some such awareness of the
limits imposed by nature there is no criterion for dismissing an
infinity of logically possible but wildly improbable, or absurd
historical or psychological, hypotheses.
About what makes men rational Aristotle and Kant and Voltaire and
Hume may well be right: on this sense of what can, and what clearly
cannot, be the case in human affairs, on the normal association of
ideas, on such basic concepts as those of past, future, things,
persons, causal sequence, logical relations - a closely woven network
of categories and concepts - human rationality, perhaps even sanity,
in practice, depends. Departure from these, as attempted, for example,
by surrealist painters or poets or aleatory composers, may be
interesting, but it is deliberately counterrational.
But in mathematics or theoretical physics this sense of reality does
not necessarily seem to be required. Indeed, something close to the
opposite may, at times, be needed. In the case of seminal discoveries
- say, of imaginary numbers, or non-Euclidean geometry, or the quantum
theory - it is precisely dissociation of commonly associated ideas,
that is, departure from some categories indispensable to normal human
experience, that seems to be required, namely a gift for conceiving
what cannot in principle be imagined, nor expressed in ordinary
language which is concerned with day-to-day communication, with the
facts and needs of human life. It is this detachment from, even
flouting of, everyday reality that leads to the popular image of the
abstract thinker - Thales who falls into a well, the absent-minded
professor who boils his watch in place of an egg.
This kind of escape into abstractions - an ideal world of pure forms
expressed in a specially invented symbolism free from the
irregularities and untidiness, or even the basic assumptions, of
ordinary experience - may possibly, at times, be connected with a
psychic disturbance, some kind of displacement in early life.
Einstein's breakdown as a schoolboy in Munich is paralleled by similar
childhood experiences of Newton and Darwin, who also remained somewhat
inaccessible emotionally. These thinkers, too, spoke of a type of
experience which Einstein described as a deeply religious feeling
before a vision of the divinity revealed in the all-embracing unity
and rational harmony of the rigorously causal structure of nature.
This was a vision of reality which nothing could shake: consequently,
Einstein remained an unyielding determinist, and never accepted the
uncertainty principle as an ultimate category of natural knowledge, or
as an attribute of objective nature - only as part of our provisional
and incomplete analysis of it.
Such addiction to pure abstraction and generalization may, at times,
be connected with an incapacity for close personal relationships with
others, a full social life; this appears to me to be a plausible
hypothesis. It may well have been so with Albert Einstein. What he
withheld from private life he gave to the world. Not only the fame of
his achievement, but his figure, his face, are known to millions of
men and women. His appearance became a visible symbol, a stereotype,
of what people supposed a scientist of genius should look like, much
as an idealized Beethoven became a commercialized image of the
inspired artist. How many people know what other scientists of genius
- Planck, Bohr, Rutherford - looked like? Or, for that matter, Newton
or Galileo, or even Darwin? Einstein's features, with their simple,
kindly, bemused, melancholy expression, moved men's hearts everywhere.
He was very famous, virtually a folk hero, and his appearance was as
familiar and as widely loved as Charlie Chaplin's, long before he was
portrayed on American stamps or Israeli bank notes.
I am, as you must know, no expert on any of Einstein's most important
attributes or achievements. But I should like to return for one more
moment to the state of Israel. The Zionist movement, like the state of
Israel, has often been attacked, today more than ever, both by
countries outside its borders and from within; sometimes with, more
often without, reason or justice. That Einstein, who tolerated no
deviation from human decency, above all on the part of his own people
- that he believed in this movement and this state and stood by it
through thick and thin, to the end of his life, however critical he
was at times of particular men or policies - this fact is perhaps
among the highest moral testimonials on which any state or any
movement in this century can pride itself. Unswerving public support
by an utterly good (and reasonably well-informed) man, against a
virtually complete lack of sympathy for it on the part of the members
of his social and intellectual milieu (whose general moral and
political views he largely shared) may not by itself be enough to
justify a doctrine or a policy, but neither can it be dismissed; it
counts for something; in this case for a great deal.
|