einstein

even the middle class.
There was one group that could be easily cast as the alien and dark force most responsible for the humiliation facing a proud culture.“People
need a scapegoat and make the Jews responsible,” Einstein noted. “They are a target of instinctive resentment because they are of a different
tribe.” 7
Weyland, Lenard, and the Antirelativists
The explosion of great art and ideas in Germany at the time, as Amos Elon wrote in his book The Pity of It All, was largely due to Jewish patrons
and pioneers in a variety of fields. This was particularly true in science. As Sigmund Freud pointed out, part of the success of Jewish scientists was
their “creative skepticism,” which arose from their essential nature as outsiders. 8 What the Jewish assimilationists underestimated was the
virulence with which many Germans, whom they considered to be their fellow countrymen, in fact saw them as essentially outsiders or, as Einstein
put it, “a different tribe.”
Einstein’s first public collision with this anti-Semitism came in the summer of 1920. A shady German nationalist named Paul Weyland, an
engineer by training, had turned himself into a polemicist with political aspirations. He was an active member of a right-wing nationalistic political
party that pledged, in its 1920 official program, to “diminish the dominant Jewish influence showing up increasingly in government and in public.” 9
Weyland realized that Einstein, as a highly publicized Jew, had engendered resentment and jealousy. Likewise, his relativity theory was easy to
turn into a target, because many people, including some scientists, were unnerved by the way it seemed to undermine absolutes and be built on
abstract hypotheses rather than grounded in solid experiment. So Weyland published articles denouncing relativity as “a big hoax” and formed a
ragtag (but mysteriously well-funded) organization grandly dubbed the Study Group of German Scientists for the Preservation of a Pure Science.
Joining with Weyland was an experimental physicist of modest reputation named Ernst Gehrcke, who for years had been assailing relativity with
more vehemence than comprehension. Their group lobbed a few personal attacks at Einstein and the “Jewish nature” of relativity theory, then called
a series of meetings around Germany, including a large rally at Berlin’s Philharmonic Hall on August 24.
Weyland spoke first and, with the orotund rhetoric of a demagogue, accused Einstein of engaging in a “businesslike booming of his theory and
his name.” Einstein’s penchant for publicity, wanted or not, was being used against him, as his assimilationist friends had warned. Relativity was a
hoax, Weyland said, and plagiarized to boot. Gehrcke said much the same with a more technical gloss, reading from a written text. The meeting,
reported the New York Times, “had a decidedly antiSemitic complexion.” 10
In the middle of Gehrcke’s talk, there arose from the audience a quiet murmur:Einstein, Einstein. He had come to see the circus and, averse
neither to publicity nor controversy, laugh at the spectacle. As his friend Philipp Frank noted, “He always liked to regard events in the world around
him as if he were a spectator in a theater.” Sitting in the audience with his friend the chemist Walther Nernst, he cackled loudly at times and at the
end pronounced the entire event “most amusing.” 11
But he was not truly amused, and he even briefly considered moving away from Berlin. 12 His anger aroused, he made the tactical mistake of
responding with a highly charged diatribe that was published three days later on the front page of the Berliner Tageblatt, a liberal daily owned by
Jewish friends. “I am well aware that the two speakers are unworthy of reply by my pen,” he said, but then proceeded not to be restrained by that
awareness. Gehrcke and Weyland had not been explicitly anti-Semitic, nor did they overtly criticize Jews in their speeches. But Einstein alleged
that they would not have attacked his theory “if I were a German nationalist, with or without a swastika, instead of a Jew.” 13
Einstein spent most of his piece refuting Weyland and Gehrcke. But he also attacked a more reputable physicist who was not at the meeting but
had given support to the antirelativity cause: Philipp Lenard.
Winner of the 1905 Nobel Prize, Lenard had been a pioneer experimenter who described the photoelectric effect. Einstein had once admired
him. “I have just read a wonderful paper by Lenard,” Einstein had gushed to Mari back in 1901. “Under this beautiful piece I am filled with such
happiness and joy that I absolutely must share some of it with you.” After Einstein had published his first spate of seminal papers in 1905, citing
Lenard by name in the one on light quanta, the two scientists had exchanged flattering letters. 14
But as an ardent German nationalist, Lenard had become increasingly bitter about the British and the Jews, contemptuous of the publicity
Einstein’s theory was garnering, and vocal in his attacks on the “absurd” aspects of relativity. He had allowed his name to be used on brochures
that were distributed at Weyland’s meeting, and as a Nobel laureate he had worked behind the scenes to make sure that Einstein was not awarded
the prize.
Because Lenard had refrained from showing up at the Philharmonic Hall rally, and because his published critiques of relativity had been
academic in tone, Einstein did not need to attack him in his newspaper piece. But he did. “I admire Lenard as a master of experimental physics,
but he has not yet produced anything outstanding in theoretical physics, and his objections to the general theory of relativity are of such superficiality
that, up until now, I did not think it necessary to answer them,” he wrote. “I intend to make up for this.” 15
Einstein’s friends publicly supported him. A group that included von Laue and Nernst published a letter claiming, not altogether accurately,
“Whoever is fortunate enough to be close to Einstein knows that he will never be surpassed in his . . . dislike of all publicity.” 16
Privately, however, his friends were appalled. He had been provoked into a display of public anger against those who should have remained
unworthy of a reply by his pen, thus stirring up even more distasteful publicity. Max Born’s wife, Hedwig, who had freely scolded Einstein about his
treatment of his family, now lectured, “[You should] not have allowed yourself to be goaded into that rather unfortunate reply.” He should show more
respect, she said, for “the secluded temple of science.” 17
Paul Ehrenfest was even harsher. “My wife and I absolutely cannot believe that you yourself wrote some of the phrases in the article,” he said. “If
you really did write them down with your own hand, it proves that these damn pigs have finally succeeded in touching your soul. I urge you as
strongly as I can not to throw one more word on this subject to that voracious beast, the public.” 18
Einstein was somewhat contrite. “Don’t be too severe with me,” he replied to the Borns. “Everyone must, from time to time, make a sacrifice on
the altar of stupidity, to please the deity and mankind. And I did so thoroughly with my article.” 19 But he made no apologies for flunking their
standards of publicity avoidance. “I had to do this if I wanted to stay in Berlin, where every child recognizes me from photographs,” he told
Ehrenfest. “If one believes in democracy, then one must grant the public this much right as well.” 20
Not surprisingly, Lenard was outraged by Einstein’s article. He insisted on an apology, as he had not even been part of the antirelativity rally.
Arnold Sommerfeld, chairman of the German Physical Society, tried to mediate, and he urged Einstein “to write some conciliatory words to
Lenard.” 21 It was not to be. Einstein refused to back down, and Lenard ended up edging ever closer to being an outright antiSemite and later a
Nazi.