Albert Einstein

Why this Chapter exists

Beyond the physics.

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) is best known for his physics: the 1905 papers, E = mc², and the theory of relativity. His place in Jewish history rests on the rest of his life.

He was a refugee from Nazi Germany. He used his fame to help other refugees escape and to speak against the Nazi regime. He spent decades arguing, in public, about what it meant to be Jewish and what a Jewish homeland should be. In 1952 he was asked to become president of the new State of Israel.

Object Spotlight

The job offer he said no to.

On November 17, 1952, a letter went out from the Israeli embassy in Washington to a house on Mercer Street in Princeton, New Jersey. It asked whether Albert Einstein would agree to become the President of the State of Israel.

The offer was serious. Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann, a chemist and Zionist leader whom Einstein had known for thirty years, had just died. (Zionism is the movement to build the Jewish people a country of their own in their ancestral homeland, the Land of Israel.) Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion himself had approved approaching Einstein. The message said that accepting would mean moving to Israel and taking its citizenship, with full freedom to continue his scientific work there. The presidency of Israel is a largely ceremonial role, a head of state who stands above day-to-day politics. For a country only four years after independence, the offer reflected the symbolic place Einstein held in Jewish public life and in the wider world.

Einstein said no. He wrote back the next day, on November 18. “I am deeply moved by the offer from our State of Israel,” he wrote, “and at once saddened and ashamed that I cannot accept it.” Then he explained why, plainly: “All my life I have dealt with objective matters, hence I lack both the natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people and to exercise official functions.”

By 1952 Einstein had been a public supporter of the Zionist project for more than three decades and a public opponent of the Nazi regime since 1933. The office went instead to Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, who held it until 1963. Einstein stayed in Princeton and kept working until he died in April 1955.

Ulm, Munich, and Switzerland · 1879–1900

A German Jewish boyhood.

Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879, in Ulm, a city in southern Germany. His family were secular Jews, Jewish by heritage and identity, but not religiously observant, and thoroughly at home in German language and culture. That was a common pattern for the Jewish middle class of Germany at the time: educated, assimilated, and at home in Germany. His father Hermann and uncle Jakob ran an electrical engineering business, first in Munich, where the family moved when Albert was a baby.

Einstein clashed with the rigid, drill-and-obey style of the German Gymnasium (the academic high school), even as his gift for math and physics ran far ahead of his classmates. When the family business failed in 1894 and his parents moved to Italy, the fifteen-year-old was left behind in Munich to finish school. Instead he walked out without a diploma, followed his family to Italy, and in 1896 formally gave up his German citizenship, which left him, for the next five years, a citizen of no country at all.

He finished high school instead in Aarau, Switzerland, where the school encouraged independent thinking, and it suited him. In 1896 he entered the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zurich (the ETH) to study physics and math, graduating in 1900. He became a Swiss citizen in 1901. Changes of citizenship became a recurring fact of his life. By the end he had been, at various points, German, stateless, Swiss (a citizenship he kept for the rest of his life), briefly Austrian, German again until 1933, and, from 1940, American.

Bern · the miracle year

The miracle year.

The physics can be told quickly, and it explains the fame that made his public life possible. After graduating, Einstein could not get a university job. He took work as a technical examiner in the Swiss patent office in Bern, evaluating other people’s inventions. The job was steady and left his evenings free for physics.

In a single stretch of 1905, his annus mirabilis (Latin for “miracle year”), the unknown patent examiner published four papers that changed physics:

• One showed that light comes in discrete packets of energy, later called photons, a founding idea of quantum physics. The Nobel committee cited his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect, not relativity, when it awarded him the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922.
• One explained the jittering motion of tiny particles in a liquid, in a way experiments could test. When Jean Perrin tested it in 1908, the results settled that atoms are physically real rather than a convenient hypothesis.
• One laid out the special theory of relativity, rebuilding the way physics understood space and time.
• A short follow-up contained the result the world now writes as E = mc²: mass and energy are equivalent.

Ten years later, in 1915, he completed the general theory of relativity, a new account of gravity itself. When astronomers confirmed one of its strange predictions in 1919 (that starlight bends as it passes the sun), Einstein became world-famous almost overnight.

Becoming Jewish in public

Becoming Jewish in public.

Einstein grew up with little religious practice and stayed that way. For him, being Jewish was not mainly about religion, and over time he spoke about it more and more in public. The turn came after the First World War, in the early 1920s, in Berlin.

Germany after the war was poor, bitter, and looking for someone to blame, and a wave of antisemitism rose with it. One target was the Ostjuden (“Eastern Jews”): Jews who had fled poverty and violence in Eastern Europe and arrived as refugees in Germany, poorer and more visibly traditional than the assimilated German Jews. Plenty of established German Jews kept their distance from them, anxious not to be associated. Einstein defended the Ostjuden openly and began speaking publicly about antisemitism.

In 1921 he sailed to America for the first time, on a fundraising tour beside Chaim Weizmann, the leader of the Zionist movement, to raise money for a planned Hebrew University in Jerusalem. From then on he was publicly tied to the Jewish national project. Over the next decade his essays described a Jewish identity grounded in culture and belonging, not religious law.

Zionism, the complicated kind

Zionism, the complicated kind.

Einstein supported the building of a Jewish home in Palestine for more than three decades, but his version of Zionism was particular. (The Herzl Chapter covers the founding of the Zionist movement.)

• He helped build the Hebrew University. Einstein was a founding governor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1925 and gave its first scientific lecture during a visit in 1923. His involvement had its ruptures. He resigned from the board in 1928 in a dispute over how the university was run and returned in the 1930s. He left the university his papers, which is why his archive is in Jerusalem today.
• He saw it for himself in 1923. On a twelve-day visit to Palestine he toured Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and the farming settlements, meeting the community building the country on the ground.
• He hoped for Jewish-Arab cooperation. Through the 1920s and 1930s he leaned toward thinkers like the philosopher Martin Buber and Judah Magnes, the American-born rabbi who led the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Both hoped Jews and Arabs might share the land, and Einstein was wary of any nationalism that turned chauvinist. He framed Zionism as a cultural and moral revival more than a flag-and-borders project.
• He backed Israel, with reservations. After 1945 he supported the founding of the State of Israel, while disagreeing openly with some of its early political leadership. In April 1948 he wrote to an American group raising money for the militant Jewish underground group Lehi (the “Stern Gang”), refusing to help. He warned against “the Terrorist organizations build [sic] up from our own ranks.” In December 1948 he co-signed a letter to the New York Times, with the philosopher Hannah Arendt and others, criticizing a visiting Israeli politician, Menachem Begin, whose party they considered too extreme. Both letters criticized particular groups within the Zionist movement. Einstein continued to support the State of Israel.

1933 · refugee from Nazi Germany

A bounty on his head.

When Adolf Hitler took power on January 30, 1933, Einstein happened to be abroad, working in California. He never set foot in Germany again.

Within weeks the Nazis seized his summer house outside Berlin, drove him from the Prussian Academy of Sciences (he resigned before it could expel him), and the press reported a bounty of $5,000 on his head. His books were among those thrown on the fires in the Nazi book burnings of May 1933. A Nazi publication ran his photograph in a lineup of enemies of the regime with the caption “not yet hanged.”

From 1933 on, Einstein was a prominent public critic of Nazism, and he used his name to help people escape. Working through refugee organizations, he signed many affidavits vouching for Jewish refugees trying to reach the United States. Under strict American immigration quotas, visa applicants needed financial affidavits, sworn promises of support from sponsors in the United States.

His own landing was easier than most refugees’. In October 1933 he took a position at the brand-new Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and stayed for the rest of his life, more than two decades.

Princeton · 1933–1955

Starting over in America.

Einstein became a U.S. citizen in 1940 and lived at 112 Mercer Street in Princeton. His second wife, Elsa, died in 1936. His household then included his stepdaughter Margot, his longtime secretary Helen Dukas, and later his sister Maja. The science of these years was a long, unsuccessful hunt for a “unified field theory,” a single framework meant to tie together all the forces of nature. He never found it. (One of his Princeton papers, the 1935 “EPR” paper, written to challenge a puzzling feature of quantum theory, later became central to the study of what is now called quantum entanglement.)

In Princeton he kept signing refugee affidavits. He also took up the fight against racism in his new home. Einstein joined the NAACP, spoke out against segregation and lynching, and in 1946 accepted an honorary degree from Lincoln University, a historically Black college in Pennsylvania, where he gave a blunt commencement speech calling segregation “a disease of white people.” He befriended the singer and activist Paul Robeson and the scholar W. E. B. Du Bois at a time when both were under government suspicion.

The 1939 letter to Roosevelt

The letter and the bomb.

In the summer of 1939, with war about to break out, a group of physicists grew alarmed. Recent discoveries about splitting the uranium atom meant a bomb of enormous power might be possible, and Nazi Germany had the scientists to try building one first. They needed to warn the U.S. government, and they needed someone the President would actually read.

The letter was written mostly by the physicist Leo Szilard. But Szilard wanted Einstein’s signature, because Einstein’s name would open any door. Einstein signed it on August 2, 1939. The letter told President Franklin Roosevelt that a nuclear chain reaction looked possible, that it could produce extraordinarily powerful bombs, that Germany might be pursuing this, and that the United States should pay attention. It helped push the government toward what became the Manhattan Project, the program that built the atomic bomb.

Einstein never worked on the bomb itself (the U.S. Army refused him security clearance because of his pacifist politics) and he learned of the project’s progress only secondhand. In November 1954, nine years after the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he told the chemist Linus Pauling that signing the letter had been “one great mistake” in his life. He added, in Pauling’s notes, that there was “some justification”: the danger that the Germans would build such bombs. Einstein spent his last decade campaigning against nuclear weapons.

The last ten years · 1945–1955

Using his fame.

In his final decade, Einstein used his fame for public causes:

• Against the bomb. He became a leading public voice for putting nuclear weapons under international control, chairing a committee of atomic scientists devoted to the cause. Days before his death in 1955 he signed the Russell–Einstein Manifesto, written with the philosopher Bertrand Russell, warning that nuclear weapons now threatened the survival of the human race. It led to the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, a scientists’ movement that shared the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize.
• For civil rights. He kept up his open support for the American civil rights movement (petitions, defense funds, public statements).
• Against the witch hunts. During the McCarthy era of the early 1950s, when Americans were being hauled before Congress and pressured to name supposed communists, Einstein publicly urged witnesses to refuse to cooperate. The FBI kept a file on him that ran to some 1,400 pages.
• For refugees, still. He went on supporting efforts to help Holocaust survivors resettle.

Debates in the record

What historians still debate.

Several parts of Einstein’s record are debated:

• His family life. Einstein’s published letters show a personal life with real failings. They record strain and coldness in his first marriage, to Mileva Marić, and a daughter born before that marriage whose fate is unknown. They also show conduct toward people close to him that by today’s standards reads harshly.
• Did Mileva Marić help with the 1905 work? Marić was a physicist and Einstein’s fellow student, and some writers argue she contributed to the famous papers. Most historians conclude she was an important intellectual companion during those years but that the ideas in the papers were Einstein’s. The question is still argued at the edges.
• The 1939 letter. How much blame or credit Einstein deserves for the atomic bomb is debated. He said he regretted it, and many historians think the bomb would have been built without him.
• His Zionism. Because his views were specific and shifting (for a Jewish homeland, wary of nationalism, hopeful about sharing the land) people across the political spectrum quote the parts they like. (One common distortion, that he turned down the presidency to protest the state’s fighters, splices his real 1948 letters onto the 1952 decision. The Misconceptions page examines it.)

Sites that survive

Where the record stands.

• Jerusalem, the Albert Einstein Archives, Hebrew University. The home of Einstein’s papers, correspondence, and personal effects, left to the university in his will. albert-einstein.huji.ac.il →
• Princeton, New Jersey, the Institute for Advanced Study. Einstein’s academic home from 1933 until his death. ias.edu →
• Princeton, 112 Mercer Street. Einstein’s house from 1935 until his death, now privately held and not open to the public, but a landmark of the town.
• Ulm, Germany. A memorial marks his birthplace. The house he was born in was destroyed in a 1944 wartime bombing.

Classroom Connections

Where this Chapter fits.

Teaching Connections

• World History and US History. Einstein’s 1933 flight from Nazi Germany, the 1939 letter to Roosevelt, and his postwar work on nuclear disarmament and civil rights sit within the era’s record, material for the upper grades. At grade 6, the Chapter enters through biography, science, innovation, and civic responsibility. The later history of Nazism, exile, and the atomic-bomb letter is carried in the upper-grade work.
• Classroom Applications. Students can:
  • (grades 6–8) explore Einstein’s life, scientific discoveries, and public voice as a model of curiosity and civic responsibility
  • analyze his letters and public statements as primary sources
  • (upper grades) examine his 1933 flight, the Roosevelt letter, and his postwar advocacy in historical context
  • weigh the responsibilities of scientists and public figures
  • construct evidence-based historical arguments.
• International Classroom Relevance. Because Einstein was a global scientific and public figure, this Chapter supports world history, the history of science, and the study of refugees, human rights, and public intellectuals internationally.

Standards Alignment

• NYS Social Studies Framework: NY Global History 10.5 (Unresolved Global Conflict, 1914–1945), NY US History 11.8 (World War II, 1935–1945), and NY Grade 8 United States History 8.6 (World War II). At grade 6, the Chapter is anchored through Common Core literacy.
• Common Core RH.6–8, RH.9–10 & RH.11–12. Students assess an author’s purpose and point of view (RH.6–8.6, RH.9–10.6, RH.11–12.6) and corroborate evidence across sources (RH.6–8.9, RH.9–10.9, RH.11–12.9), working from Einstein’s own letters and public statements, the Russell–Einstein Manifesto, and modern scholarship.
• C3 Framework, D2.His.1 and D2.His.14 (grades 6–8 and 9–12). Students investigate historical context, continuity and change, and causation.