1905, his miracle year, having time to himself, using his own mind as his lab, he writes and publishes four papers. All of which are revolutionary.
Schwab: From Unpacked, this is Jewish History Nerds. The podcast where we nerd out on awesome stories in Jewish history. I’m Jonovin Schwab.
Yael: I’m Yael Steiner and I am not gonna lie, I have been waiting for this episode all season long.
Schwab: It’s gonna be amazing.
Yael: I feel like this person that we’re about to discuss is so well known, but also somewhat shrouded in mystery. I feel like I know a lot about him, but I have a feeling I’m about to learn that I really know nothing about him. Is that the sense you got doing the research?
Schwab: Yeah, I think so. This is an epic story. We teased it at the beginning of this season. It’s so epic that we’re gonna do something we’ve never done before and actually take two episodes. This is gonna be a two-part series to try to cover not even close to the whole story, but everything that I want to at least get to.
Yael: So you mean I just get to listen and learn for two episodes and you had to prepare extra?
Schwab: I have never done this level of preparation. The person we’re talking about — and if someone is listening and doesn’t know who this is, I really wanna know more about this person — we’re gonna be talking about Albert Einstein, who is one of the most famous people of all time, one of the most famous Jews of all time. He’s, yeah, he’s the scientist you might have heard of.
Yael: He’s a scientist.
Schwab: I googled “most famous, most influential Jews of all time.” There are a bunch of versions of those lists, but a pretty common ranking goes something like: number one, Moses; number two — you want to guess number two?
Yael: I was just gonna say.
Schwab: We wouldn’t necessarily think this, but — Jew, and incredibly influential — Jesus. So Moses number one, Jesus number two, Einstein number three.
Yael: Jesus. I’m kinda surprised Moses outranks Jesus.
Schwab: I guess if you’re making a list of most famous or influential Jews, you’re gonna put — yeah, right? Like you’re not gonna put the founder of a different religion at the top. But so, Einstein.
Yael: You should choose somebody who died as a Jew.
Schwab: Albert Einstein dies a Jew. So right, he is a Jew and he is dead and he is a scientist, as you noted. There is so much material on Einstein. There are literally thousands of books written about him.
Yael: Okay, so he’s not still with us.
Schwab: I do wanna say the one thing that is really enjoyable to read and learn about that we’re really not gonna cover is explanations of his science. It would be really fun, but we’re not gonna explain what the theory of relativity is.
Yael: I think that you might understand some of his science. I definitely will not. We would need like an eight-part series to get me there.
Schwab: There are really, really great explainers that do simplify it and make it understandable. But yeah, it would take so long. Where I want to start is — we’re going to dispel some notions. We’re going to learn what we don’t know about Einstein. I think one of the biggest problems we have is he is so widely known and such a cultural figure that it’s hard to picture him in a way that isn’t, you know, the older, absent-minded professor with the crazy hair who is a worldwide celebrity sticking out his tongue.
Yael: Sticking out his tongue.
Schwab: Like that famous picture. But to really tell the story of his life, we need to understand who he was when he wasn’t that — especially before that.
Yael: He wasn’t working as a scientist initially, right? Didn’t he work as a patent clerk?
Schwab: Yes, yeah. He was a patent clerk. So that’s where I want to start. Before he became this huge scientific celebrity, he was a patent clerk. And I think that’s the story that some people know — like he wasn’t successful right away.
Yael: Right, like he wasn’t being put in the Westinghouse science competition as a 10-year-old and being put on this trajectory his entire life.
Schwab: Exactly. I don’t want to get off track, but a fun fact — I was a fourth place national winner in the Siemens Westinghouse competition.
Yael: Of course you were.
Schwab: All right. But we’ll do a separate episode on the history of my life and how I transitioned from science prodigy to Jewish history podcast co-host.
Yael: Okay, cool. I’m there. So Einstein, though, was not that — he was not a science prodigy.
Schwab: Einstein is born in 1879 in Ulm, Germany. That is a line I know very well because my son, Nadav, was Einstein in the wacky wax museum last year. That was the thing he said: “I am Albert Einstein. I was born in 1879 in Ulm, Germany.”
Yael: I knew that.
Schwab: And I want to start the story in 1905, or right before 1905, because 1905 is a hugely important year in the Einstein story.
So he’s 26 years old. He had been a good student, but by no means a prodigy. And to dispel another notion — this idea that he failed mathematics — no, that didn’t happen. People say, “Oh, even Einstein failed math.” He never failed math. I don’t know what people are talking about.
Yael: That’s like one of those things like, “Michael Jordan didn’t make his junior high basketball team.” But that is actually true, I think.
Schwab: Right. Einstein does fail to get an academic position for many years — that is true. But he never failed math. He was a very good science student. He had gotten into a very prestigious college-level science program. But that’s sort of where his career had stalled out. Part of this is Einstein’s personality — it was a difficult one.
Yael: Abrasive.
Schwab: He was very convinced of his own brilliance, and he was very difficult with his teachers. He’s very contrarian. He hates authority. If there’s one through line for his entire personality, it’s an extremely strong aversion to very authoritative structures — especially militaristic ones. He feels it has no place in learning. He thinks things that are too structured, too rote, are interruptive of the learning process. But he’s in Germany in the early 1900s, where the entire culture is being defined by a sense of militarism.
Yael: Got it.
Schwab: Schools are working on a military model, and he cannot take that.
Yael: Okay, so he doesn’t work within the system. He’s not a yes man.
Schwab: Absolutely not. He graduates from this program and should be applying for assistant professor positions. And he does — he applies to literally every assistant professor position in physics on the European continent.
Yael: And how does he end up becoming a patent clerk?
Schwab: He does not get a single one of them. No one is interested in working with him. Part of this is his reputation — none of his teachers want to recommend him. He’s difficult to work with. He’s convinced of his own brilliance. He’s also not a strong experimentalist.
Yael: His reputation preceded him. Got it. Had he made any really novel discoveries as a PhD student? Was his work up until that point interesting or notable?
Schwab: He’s not even a PhD yet. What he had submitted as a dissertation was rejected. He submitted a second version of it. His advisor encouraged him to retract it and save himself the fee. So he has not really published anything. He has not made a name for himself. He has failed to graduate as a PhD student. He has the equivalent of a college degree. Can’t get a job anywhere. And his personal life is a mess.
He grew up Jewish, as we know, but in a very secular, very assimilated household. They are Jews, but there’s very little practice or observance going on. When he is in college, another one of the students in his class is a Serbian woman. Stephen Gimbel, one of the really interesting biographers of Einstein, has a great line about it. He says the fact that she is Serbian in this school in Zurich is only the second most interesting demographic fact about her.
Yael: Wasn’t Tesla also Serbian?
Schwab: Yes, Tesla also Serbian. But yes — and she’s a woman. So this Serbian woman, Mileva Marić, is his classmate. And she is, again, if you’re in that class, you’re pretty bright. She and Einstein immediately take a liking to each other.
Yael: A woman — okay, very cool.
Schwab: They’re both outsiders. She is Serbian and a woman; he, a Jew. And they really like each other — they fall kind of hard for each other. Both of their families are very against this relationship. Einstein’s parents, not because she’s not Jewish — the person they wanted him to marry also was not Jewish — but because she was not an easy person. In one of the letters from his parents, she’s described as, short and ugly and has a limp and is unpleasant. Yeah. Einstein’s parents really don’t like Mileva. And Einstein, being a contrarian — this only drives him harder into her arms.
Yael: Lovely. That is such a nice way to describe someone.
Schwab: Neither of them is gainfully employed. Mileva fails to graduate — maybe because she spent a little too much time with Einstein. While he could blow off class and just cram for the tests and pass with flying colors, Mileva couldn’t do this. He was not the best influence on her academically.
He graduates but fails to get a job. They’re living together but not married, which is a problem. And then — even more problematic in terms of getting a job — Mileva gets pregnant. This is not something Einstein acknowledged during his life. It was pieced together from letters opened from the archive. Mileva got pregnant.
He’s applying for this patent clerk position, which was actually not a bad job — it paid more than an assistant professor position, and you needed to be fairly scientifically competent. It’s a Swiss civil service position with good benefits. But Einstein hates German militarism, hates the idea of being drafted into the army. When he’s in his teens, he renounces his German citizenship and moves to Switzerland, spending a lot of his time in Zurich, where he goes to school and where he’s trying to get the job at the patent office.
Yael: Well, if you don’t like militarism, a good place to move is a country that declines to get involved in military conflict.
Schwab: Yeah. It’s not an accident. But working in the patent office is a civil service position, so you need to meet certain requirements — and definitely one of them is not “father of an illegitimate child.” He needs to marry Mileva, and he can’t acknowledge that they had a child out of wedlock.
He also has to fill out government forms — a huge problem for Einstein. He has a real problem with authority and forms. Specifically, one of the problems he faces is they ask what religion he is, and he hates that question. At one point, he fills out a form and under religion writes “none.” At another point, he writes “dissenter,” which is like — that is his true orthodoxy. And when really forced to write something, he writes “mosaic.”
So he’s trying to get this patent office job. They have this illegitimate child — you can really go down a rabbit hole on what happened to this girl, Lieserl, who is given up for adoption and then Einstein and Mileva seemingly never speak of her again. Either she dies very young or she survives a bout with scarlet fever and lives under a different identity.
Yael: He’s floundering.
Schwab: Really floundering. A lot of ideas in his head, but his career and his life are going nowhere. Then he gets the job in the patent clerk office, and it’s the perfect job for him — he’s very good at it, he has a lot of free time to just think about things. And Einstein loved to think about things.
Not being a physicist in the academy was not a problem for him, because he was not a great experimentalist. The way that he arrived at conclusions was by thinking about things, finding visual representations and metaphors for them, and just turning these ideas over in his head long enough that he was able to come to logical conclusions about the nature of reality.
He would think: how does light work? It seemed that light was functioning as some sort of wave, as a form of energy — but there were some observations that didn’t match with that. And Einstein thought to himself, okay, what if I’m on a bicycle, and I was able to ride this bicycle at the speed of light alongside a beam of light — what would I be observing? And literally just thought about these questions long enough, and came to conclusions like: light actually is both a particle and a wave.
So he spends a lot of time in the patent office thinking about these things. And in 1905, his miracle year, Annus Mirabilis — working in the patent office, having time to himself, using his own mind as his lab — he writes and publishes four papers in the span of one year. All of which are revolutionary.
One of them gets accepted as his doctoral dissertation. One of them is the special theory of relativity. One of them is a proof that atoms exist, which was an open question at the time. And one of them is on the photoelectric effect and the idea of quantum mechanics — light having mass. All four of them in one year.
Yael: And people accepted these ideas?
Schwab: It’s a source of a lot of debate. His doctoral dissertation is accepted. It pretty much settles the debate on atoms — everyone’s like, alright, this is how things work on the molecular level. The special theory of relativity — not widely accepted at all. Some people love it, some react very strongly against it. Light having mass — people start getting on board with that idea. But this allows him to break into the academic world. He’s not overnight “this guy was right about everything.” That does happen later. But it does allow him to start getting academic positions, and after this, his career takes off. He basically goes from position to position every one, two, or three years because he’s being offered an even more prestigious position — Zurich to Berlin to Prague, back to Berlin — because everybody wants him. They’re like, we can offer you a full professorship, we want you to chair our new theoretical physics department. People are getting on board the Einstein train.
Yael: So when does he become famous? Right now there are superstar physicists in the academy, and I don’t know who they are. When does he move beyond that world?
Schwab: Yeah, it’s one particular moment. And there’s so many parts of this story that are really amazing visual metaphors — and this one is a fantastic one. It’s 14 years later. It’s 1919.
Between 1905 and 1919, he’s writing a lot, publishing a lot. The question of his Jewish identity is also developing, which we’ll come back to in a bit — and have a lot more to discuss in part two. But he’s getting more involved in the academy, talking more with the preeminent scientists of the day, and develops his special theory of relativity further into the general theory of relativity — which, without getting too into the science, is now a fundamental re-envisioning of how the universe works. He is saying everything we’ve said since Newton for hundreds of years — it actually works differently than that. Space and time are part of the same constant. Light and mass can be converted into energy. Light can be bent. Time can be distorted.
And as he’s developing this theory, everyone realizes there is one thing — sorry to get slightly into the science, but it is an important one. The thing we can observe most easily that has the most mass and therefore the most gravity is the sun. Its gravity must be so powerful that it bends light. But we have no way of knowing if it bends light, because we cannot look at the sun and see other light going near it or around it — it’s the sun.
Yael: An eclipse.
Schwab: An eclipse. Right. If we take certain measurements during a solar eclipse, we can either prove Einstein wrong — this doesn’t happen — or observe it and say: we took the measurements during the eclipse, and actually Einstein is right, the sun does seem to be bending light.
There’s an eclipse in 1914, I think in Crimea, but there was a lot going on in 1914 in Europe. So they couldn’t do it then. In 1919, a British astronomer named Arthur Eddington goes to observe a solar eclipse, takes these measurements, and sends a telegram to Einstein saying: you’re right.
Einstein is sitting in his office with a graduate student. He receives this telegram, looks at it, hands it to his graduate student and says, “This may be of interest to you” — totally nonchalant. And she says to him, “What would you have done if he said it was wrong?” And he says something like, “I would have had pity on the Lord” — meaning God — because the theory is right.
Yael: So self-esteem wasn’t a problem.
Schwab: Self-esteem was not a problem. But he’s proven right. And this is now not just in scientific journals — this becomes a global story. Headline in the New York Times, above the fold. I think it was something like “Heavens in Disarray.” A person has totally changed the way we look at the entire universe, and he becomes — no pun intended — a star.
He is now a huge celebrity, both because this is a massive scientific breakthrough, and also at least partially because at that moment, it’s the end of World War One. Here is a German scientist who’s anti-nationalist, anti-militarist. He’s Jewish. This is the model of the new European, the new German, that everyone wants to elevate. So everybody now wants a piece of him. He is invited to lecture all over the place.
He jokes about this when it comes to the Nobel Prize: when his theories are proven wrong, the Germans say he’s French; the French say he’s German; the Germans say he’s a Jew. Nobody wants anything to do with him. But when he’s right, the Germans are like, he’s very German. And the French are like, but he spent time in Switzerland.
Yael: And the Jews are like — he’s a Jew.
Schwab: He’s our shining star.
Yael: Yeah, we love to claim this guy.
Schwab: Also going on in 1919 — he had eventually married Mileva, and they do have two legitimate children. But their relationship was never easy. She had become very jealous of his success. When they were young in college, they imagined doing science together, and now he’s the scientist and she’s not. Their relationship is falling apart. He starts spending a lot of time with his cousin, Elsa Einstein.
Yael: Does he marry her? She’s his cousin.
Schwab: They become romantically involved. Yeah, she’s his cousin. They have a lot more in common — she’s Jewish, she’s family, they share the same background. And she’s a very different personality. She’s not jealous of him. She’s not a scientist. She’s more of a caretaker and a gatekeeper for him. She knows she is subservient to him and his needs, and she takes care of a lot of them — because he really can’t take care of himself.
Yael: The executive functioning wasn’t all there.
Schwab: There’s so much that people get into in biographies — what would we diagnose him with now? Something. The eccentricities do add up. This is probably a legend, but: he’s working at Princeton, and a call comes into the Dean’s office saying, “Hi, I need Dr. Einstein’s address. I need to find his home.” The person on the phone says, “I’m really sorry, we can’t give out that kind of information about faculty.” The caller asks in all sorts of different ways, and finally says, “Okay, this is embarrassing to admit, but I need Dr. Einstein’s address because I am Dr. Einstein and I don’t remember it.”
Yael: Ha!
Schwab: Like, yeah. It probably didn’t happen exactly like that, but you only tell that type of story about a certain type of person. He would forget his lunch every day. He would forget his keys. He would forget his wallet. He would forget to eat, forget to change his clothes. He had the crazy hair because he didn’t brush it.
Yael: Well, he had more important things to think about.
Schwab: A lot on his mind. And what was not on his mind were personal care, grooming to a lesser extent, and certain social conventions.
Yael: Okay, so we know the type.
Schwab: He wins the Nobel Prize — that’s also a really interesting story. He is nominated basically every year from 1905 on, and the committee rejects him every single year for a decade and a half. First: antisemitism. He is a Jew, and nobody was particularly inclined to give Nobel Prizes to Jews. But also, his theories are radical and revolutionary, and a lot of the scientific establishment doesn’t like that. His main contributions are in the field of theoretical physics. And the Nobel Prize had never, at that point, been given to someone in theoretical physics — because theoretical physics barely existed until then. Some of them felt: science is done in a laboratory with experiments and proof, not by thinking of something and coming up with a different idea. That’s not science.
So they find plenty of other people to give the Prize to. In 1921, it’s basically like — you have to give it to Einstein at this point — but there are enough factions on the committee that they end up giving it to nobody rather than to Einstein. And then they’re like, okay, we need to figure this out. They convene a special committee. The actual committee’s job: to discuss the Einstein question. Because now they want to give the Nobel Prize in Physics to Niels Bohr. But Bohr’s work built off of Einstein. You can’t give it to Bohr without having ever recognized Einstein.
Yael: When you said he confirmed that atoms exist — all of those models of the atom, Bohr, Rutherford — that’s all afterwards?
Schwab: Yeah. It was a wide debate, you know, do atoms exist or not? And there were different models. But he is one of the important pieces in settling that — saying this is how we know it works, because we’ve observed these things. And in his paper, he’s like, picture in your mind a teacup and you dissolve sugar in it. That’s how he thinks about everything.
So finally — it’s 1922 — they’ll give the Nobel Prize to Bohr and retroactively award the 1921 Nobel Prize to Einstein. But very specifically for his work on quantum mechanics and the photoelectric effect — not for the theory of relativity.
Yael: Interesting. So they managed to back into it somehow.
Schwab: And that’s a theme — what we’re willing to concede. Like, oh, okay, we like this part, but not the whole thing. And then Mileva gets the winnings. That’s what really happens. 1921 was not a good year for Mileva — she’s like, it’s coming. Finally they can’t give it to nobody. And then they give it to nobody.
He finally wins the Nobel Prize in 1922 and doesn’t go to the acceptance ceremony. He’s supposed to give a lecture somewhere else. Everyone says, “You’re not going to accept the Nobel Prize?” He’s like, “I’ll get it — I’ll go there afterwards. Not a big deal.”
Yael: Right. Okay. Makes sense. This all tracks. So he wins the Nobel Prize — and then what?
Schwab: Before we get there, I want to say a little more about who he is as a Jew — open that discussion, and then we’ll have a lot more in part two.
Like I said earlier, he grows up in a very secular, very assimilated household. His parents are German Jews. Their families originally come from more rural areas. I think his paternal grandparents are from Swabia in Germany — which I believe is where my name comes from.
Yael: Interesting.
Schwab: And Jews, as they gained the right to do so, started moving from rural areas to cities. “Swabian” became sort of a term — like, people from the countryside who moved to the city. Schwabs. Country bumpkins. Hicks.
Yael: They’re hicks.
Schwab: Yeah. And Einstein describes himself that way sometimes. In some of his letters he calls himself “the valiant Swabian.” He knows he’s never fully accepted. And when he’s younger, especially, he’s like — it’s because my family was from the countryside, not because he was Jewish.
His parents are very bought into the German Jewish assimilation idea. We’ve come from a Jewish background, but we’re not practicing Jews — we’re Germans, we’re going to assimilate and be part of German society.
Yael: And nothing bad is ever going to happen to us.
Schwab: His parents were so assimilated that in the 1880s and 90s, when he has to attend a religious school, they’re like — all right, he’ll go to a Catholic school. They later also send him to a Jewish school, but for Einstein, when he’s very young, around eight or nine, attending Catholic school with very assimilated parents, his rebellious streak manifests in becoming very religiously Jewish for about a year or two. It seems like he maybe kept kosher for a period, maybe kept Shabbat — as a great way of rebelling both against his parents and against the Catholic school.
Yael: Did he have a bar mitzvah?
Schwab: He did not. No bar mitzvah, no other Jewish rites or practices. Basically the only Jewish thing his family does is host young students for Friday night Shabbat dinner — a long Jewish tradition. But the Einsteins do this on Thursday nights with college and graduate students.
They have over this Jewish medical student, a guy named Max Talmud. Every Thursday night, this guy comes over for dinner. Einstein is like 11. And this medical student brings him books — first maybe age-appropriate ones, but quickly it becomes a book on Euclidean geometry, axioms and proofs. He starts bringing scientific books and papers each week. And every week, young Einstein has read the whole previous week’s book and is excited — all right, Max is here Thursday night, I’m gonna chew this guy’s ear off — wanting to have a full conversation with this 20-year-old medical student about the scientific ideas of the time. So it’s like the one Jewish thing his family does, which also just turns into a science thing.
And like I said before, every time he’s asked to put down his religious affiliation, he writes “none,” he writes “dissenter,” he writes “mosaic.” But as you hinted, what sort of makes the choice for him is that the Germans do not accept him as a German. He grows up in a family thinking: this is the bargain — if we assimilate enough, we will be accepted. And that bargain is not kept.
Yael: They’re not gonna let that happen.
Schwab: And I think he has a hard time accepting it at first, but comes to really understand it. And being who he is, it makes him turn around and have the opposite idea. He starts thinking and talking about Jewish identity in the late teens and ’20s — which is really surprising for a person who, up until this point, has been so clear that he wants nothing to do with his Jewish identity.
Yael: So how does that manifest itself?
Schwab: He publishes an article in April 1920 about Jewish nationalism and antisemitism and assimilation — sort of defining who he is and what Jews are. He writes:
“I am neither a German citizen, nor is there anything in me that can be described as Jewish faith. But I am a Jew and I am glad that I belong to the Jewish people, even though I in no way consider them to be the chosen ones. Let us leave antisemitism to the Goy and let us keep the love of our brethren.”
So he’s saying: I’m not religious, but I’m a Jew. I’m never going to stop being a Jew. I don’t think Jews are better than anyone else. I don’t think they’re the chosen people. But it is tribal. He uses a term — the translation is something like “ethnic brothers.” He sees a commonality to Jews and he is one of them and he is never going to stop being one of them.
And once he comes to that conclusion, his next conclusion is: stop trying to assimilate. Stop trying to not be Jews, because it’s never gonna happen. And stop focusing so much on antisemitism and instead embrace a positive Jewish identity. Which is just a really surprising turn for him.
Yael: So does the Jewish community try to claim him at that moment?
Schwab: We’re going to have a whole episode about that. As he becomes a huge celebrity, of course — he’s one of ours, this huge important scientist, he’s a Jew. And he doesn’t say no to that. He’s not running away. Part of it is because all these other people are rejecting him. There are antisemitic scientists. There becomes a movement attacking his science as “Jewish science.” And he’s like, it’s just good science. I don’t know why you’re calling it Jewish science. But it’s sort of like his parents and Mileva all over again — the more you project negativity, the more it drives him in the other direction. So all the antisemites make him a proud Jew.
And then as a proud Jew, he says: let’s stop focusing so much on antisemitism. He writes later, responding to the question “What is a Jew?”:
“A simple answer is: a Jew is a person professing the Jewish faith. But that is superficial. To give another example — what is a snail? A snail is an animal inhabiting a snail shell. The Jewish faith is but one characteristic product of the Jewish community. A snail can shed its shell without ceasing to be a snail. The Jew who abandons his faith is in a similar position. He is still a Jew.”
Yael: So it’s an immutable characteristic.
Schwab: Exactly. No matter where Jews go, it’s still a Jew. A Jew can never become not a Jew.
Yael: And that’s true both for antisemites and for people who have this filial loyalty to their Jewishness. There are people who look at that as a positive immutable characteristic — you can never shed it, the ember is always there. And from the antisemitic side: you can assimilate as much as you want, but at the end of the day, a Jew is a Jew.
Schwab: Right. Yeah.
Yael: So he might want to not focus on antisemitism, but there are plenty of people who are going to choose to focus on it anyway.
Schwab: Right. And another occurrence that becomes really important to him — he has a job in Germany in the ’20s, post–World War One, and a lot of Eastern European Jews start moving into Germany. The Germans are not thrilled about this. Einstein reacts very strongly. He is very upset at his fellow German Jews who ostracize the Ostjuden — the Eastern Jews, the Russians and the Polish.
Yael: They’re the country mice and we’re the city mice.
Schwab: And he’s like, that was me. I know what it feels like. So he very much embraces them and is very against drawing those distinctions. He sees it and says: that’s another form of assimilation. You think by rejecting the Ostjuden, the Germans are gonna accept you? You will never be German enough for the Germans. Stop turning your back on your own brothers and sisters.
A lot of them are very interested in attending his lectures. So he says: anyone who can’t afford the fees — Eastern European Jews are welcome to attend my lectures for free. The German students in his class really don’t like this and start making a whole stink. And Einstein says: okay, fine, I’ll keep teaching my regular classes, and then I will offer the same lectures for free. He does his own free lecture series for Jews who can’t afford university fees. And he finds that he loves them. He just has the best time lecturing to these Jews who are there for free. There’s an intellectual hunger. He cares for them. He wants them to have a place.
Yael: Because the academy wasn’t welcoming to him either.
Schwab: Right. He had always been an outsider. And now that he’s not — or somewhat not — he resents the ways that people are still being kept on the outside. And this becomes really, really important to him. At the end of his life, he describes it this way: “My relationship to the Jewish people has become my strongest human bond.”
It’s hard to put a finger on exactly why — an emotional thing, seeing himself in them, they were just really good students. But this comes to take on a great amount of importance for a person who grew up never thinking this way.
Yael: So this is the 1920s, Germany. Something bad is about to happen to German Jews — significantly worse than what has happened up until this point. So how does he evade that fate?
Schwab: Let’s save that for episode two. There’s so much coming. It’s the 1920s. What is Einstein’s place in all of that? That’s what we’ll discuss in the next episode.
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This episode was hosted by me, Jonathan Schwab.
And by me, Yael Steiner. Our education lead is Dr. Henry Abramson. Our editors are Rob Pera and Ari Schlacht.
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