The Travel Diaries of Albert Einstein: The Far East, Palestine, and Spain, 1922–1923

THE TRAVEL DIARIES OF ALBERT EINSTEIN

Map with itinerary of Einstein’s ocean voyages

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Editorial apparatus and diary translation

copyright © 2018 by Princeton University Press

Travel diary, additional texts, and endpaper images

copyright © 2018 by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work

should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press

41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press

6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR

press.princeton.edu

Cover and book design by Chris Ferrante

All Rights Reserved

ISBN 978-0-691-17441-9

Library of Congress Control Number:  2018931638

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Kis Antiqua Now

Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

Printed in the United States of America

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

To my parents

Ruth Hannah Rosenkranz (1928–2015)

&

Arnold Rosenkranz (1923–1999)

with whom I embarked on

my very first voyages

Contents

Illustrations

Frontispiece.  Map with itinerary of Einstein’s ocean voyages

Preface

I GREW UP A FIVE-MINUTE WALK from the beach in the bayside suburb of St. Kilda in Melbourne, Australia. It was the Sixties and early Seventies, and St. Kilda was still a bit seedy—it has since been partially gentrified. The Jewish refugees from Europe would stand on Acland St. and converse in languages I could not understand. My Anglo-Dutch Jewish maternal grandfather—who had himself immigrated to Australia from London in the aftermath of the Great War—would call these more recent immigrants the refs, a derogatory term for refugees.

My Viennese father loved to take me on a three-mile, hour-long weekly walk along Beaconsfield Parade to Station Pier in Port Melbourne to see the ocean liners that had docked there. He was always drawn to the sea. Born in landlocked Vienna, he had fled to Shanghai in late 1938 and lived there for ten years, including almost four years under Japanese occupation in the Jewish ghetto under harrowing conditions. After the end of World War II, he easily made friends with visiting American sailors. In 1948, as a committed Zionist, he left on the second ship to depart from Shanghai with Jewish refugees for the newly formed State of Israel. But the country could not hold my father (who was the personification of the Wandering Jew) for long. In 1950, he returned to Vienna, mainly due to homesickness. Six years later, he was traveling by sea again—this time to Australia to start a new life there, just in time to attend the Melbourne Olympics. A few years after that, he met my Melbourne-born mother. Yet his wanderlust continued and, when I was almost eleven, we returned to Station Pier, this time as passengers.

The four-week voyage on an Italian ship took the remigrating tailor and his family back to Europe via the Cape of Good Hope (the Suez Canal was still under blockade following the Six Day War). I found life on the ocean liner somewhat boring; I was too old for the children’s’ room and too young for the adults’ activities. But I made some good friends onboard, and that helped pass the time. My most vivid memories from that voyage were the frequent announcements in the ship’s Sea Herald to set the clocks back by half an hour, as we traversed the globe and changed time zones, and the many times I sneaked into the small cinema on board to watch the Japanese sci-fi movie, The Green Slime. I loved the film so much that I would attend both the English and the Italian viewings.

Two more ocean crossings would ensue within the next three years, as my father found it difficult to decide where he wanted to live. It wasn’t the most stable lifestyle for his prepubescent son, but coming of age in both Australia and Austria was a good way to pick up languages and an internationalist outlook. Growing up Jewish in the Vienna of the 1970s certainly had its challenges. One of them was coping with occasional anti-Semitic remarks by our Klassenvorstand, our class director, at the local Gymnasium. One of his favorite bon mots was to refer to the Affentürkei (Turkey of the monkeys). At the time, I had no idea that this was an anti-Semitic comment, apart from being racist in other ways as well. The xenophobic joke in Vienna at the time was that the Orient began just east of the Danube Canal, where, before the Holocaust, most of the Jews, including my father, had lived. But it had also been home to the members of other ethnic groups from the East from the erstwhile Austro-Hungarian empire, mainly Czechs and Slovaks. In 1970s Vienna, it was still home to a small Jewish minority but also more recent arrivals from Yugoslavia and Turkey.

Even though I really took pleasure in those long walks to Port Melbourne, I subconsciously chose to live in landlocked cities in my adult life. From Vienna, I moved to Jerusalem, and then eventually to Pasadena in California, both an hour from the nearest beach.

Albert Einstein’s travel diaries are, by far, my favorite documents penned by him. I have always enjoyed his quirky style, his acerbic quips about the individuals he met, and the colorful descriptions of the hustle and bustle in his ports of call. It was only later that I started to notice the more troublesome entries in his journal, in which he, at times, made what amounted to xenophobic comments about some of the peoples he encountered. I began to ask myself: how could this humanist icon be the author of such passages?

The answer to this question seems very relevant in today’s world, in which the hatred of the Other is so rampant in so many places around the world. Once again, there are destitute refugees desperately trying to flee persecution and violent conflicts, huddled on unseaworthy vessels, sometimes drowning, and—if they do survive—are penned up in barely humane conditions in refugee camps. Once again, parents are frantically trying to send their children to safety, only to endure heart-wrenching and perilous journeys. Once again, foreigners are being scapegoated for local social ills, and walls of cement, barbed wire, and prejudice are being erected to keep them out.

In such a reality, it is especially pertinent to explore how even the poster-child for humanitarian efforts—the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees once produced a placard brandishing Einstein’s image with the ingenious slogan: A bundle of belongings isn’t the only thing a refugee brings to his new country. Einstein was a refugee—could have held prejudiced and stereotypical beliefs about the members of other nations. It seems that even Einstein sometimes had a very hard time recognizing himself in the face of the Other.

Pasadena, California, October 2017

Acknowledgments

I EXPRESS MY DEEP APPRECIATION TO Al Bertrand, associate publishing director, at Princeton University Press, for his astute guidance and insightful advice throughout the publication process. I am especially indebted to Diana Buchwald, director of the Einstein Papers Project, for her discerning comments and unstinting and gracious support of this project. I am also grateful to Peter Dougherty, former director of Princeton University Press, and to Jürgen Renn, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, for their kind encouragement and sage counsel. Without the many years of the amiable collaboration of Christine Nelson, curator of literary and historical manuscripts at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, this publication would not have been possible.

It is a pleasure to express my gratitude to my dear colleagues at the Einstein Papers Project: to Barbara Wolff and Nurit Lifshitz for their kind assistance with my archival and library research and for their very helpful advice; to Dennis Lehmkuhl for his cheerful support and for making sure that I avoid committing any scientific howlers; to Emily de Araújo and Jenny James for their very gracious collaboration; and to Jeremy Schneider for his assistance. It has been a delight working with the exceptionally competent production team at Princeton University Press: Terri O’Prey, associate managing editor, Chris Ferrante, designer, and Dimitri Karetnikov, illustration manager; and with Cyd Westmoreland, my copyeditor, whose meticulous professionalism has been outstanding. I am also deeply indebted to Roni Gross and Chaya Becker of the Albert Einstein Archives for their kind help in research and copyright issues; to Thomas F. Glick for his valuable comments; to Mayuko Akagi of Hitotsubashi University; Anat Banin of the Central Zionist Archives; Joan Bieder of UC Berkeley; Brianna Cregle of Princeton University Library; Shimon Dias of the Japan Academy; Lisa Ginsburg of Los Angeles; the staff at Kodansha Ltd. of Tokyo; Yuki Ogawa of NYK Maritime Museum; H. Ooe of Waseda University; Marilyn Palmeri of the Morgan Library & Museum; the staff at the David Rumsey Map Collection; Ellen Sandberg of Granger Historical Picture Archive; Michael Simonson of the Leo Baeck Institute; Hideki Sugimoto of Osaka University; Jean-Michel de Tarragon of École Biblique; and Juan José Villar Lijarcio of Archivo General de la Administración for their assistance in securing copyright permissions for the facsimiles and illustrations; to Hallie Schaeffer and Kristin Zodrow at Princeton University Press for their helpful collaboration on the production of this publication; and to John Wade, Dan Agulka, Bianca Rios, and Ben Perez at the interlibrary loan department at the Caltech Library for their untiring efforts in catering to my very idiosyncratic document delivery needs.

Thanks are also due to those individuals who were instrumental in the work on the original publication of Einstein’s travel diary to Japan, Palestine, and Spain in Volume 13 of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein: Tilman Sauer, for his excellent work on the scientific contents of the diary; Seiyo Abiko, for his splendid research into Japanese historical materials; Yiwen Ma, for her charming assistance with Chinese-language sources; and Masako Ohnuki, for her gracious assistance with Japanese-language sources. Work on that publication of the diary was also assisted by Luis J. Boya, Danian Hu, Herbert Karbach, Adán Sus, and Victor Wei.

Last, but by no means least, I express my immense gratitude to my partner Kimberly Ady for her keen comments and loving support and encouragement.

THE TRAVEL DIARIES OF ALBERT EINSTEIN

Historical Introduction

The voyage is splendid. I am enchanted with Japan and the Japanese and am sure that you would be, too. Moreover, such a sea voyage is a splendid existence for a ponderer anyway—like a monastery. Added to it is the caressing heat near the equator. Warm water drips lazily down from the sky and spreads peace and a plantlike dozing— this little letter testifies to it.

Albert Einstein to Niels Bohr, near Singapore, 10 January 1923

This Edition

This new edition presents Albert Einstein’s complete travel diary from his half-year long voyage to the Far East, Palestine, and Spain from October 1922 to March 1923.¹ Facsimiles of each of the pages from the original journal will be accompanied by a translation into English. Scholarly annotations will provide identification of the individuals, organizations, and locations mentioned in the diary entries, elucidate obscure references, supply additional information on the events recorded in the diary, and offer details of his travel itinerary not mentioned by Einstein in his journal. Even though the diary constitutes a riveting historical source in which Einstein recorded his immediate impressions, by its very nature it only provides one piece of the puzzle for reconstructing the course of the trip. Therefore, to obtain a more comprehensive picture of the voyage, the annotations draw on the contemporary local press coverage from the various countries Einstein visited, additional sources from his personal papers, diplomatic reports from the time of the trip, and contemporary articles and later memoirs and reminiscences of the participants. The edition will also include supplementary documents authored by Einstein that provide further context for the travel journal: letters and postcards dispatched from the voyage, speeches he gave at various ports of call along his journey, and articles he wrote on his impressions of the countries he visited, both during his trip and in its aftermath.

This journal was first published in its entirety in Volume 13 of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein (CPAE) in 2012.² For the purposes of this edition, the translation published in the English translation of Volume 13 of the CPAE has been substantially revised.

Previously, selected excerpts of the travel diary had been published in translation: the section of the diary pertaining to Einstein’s visit to Japan appeared in Japanese in 2001; the Palestine entries in the diary were published in an edited version in Hebrew in 1999; and the entries for the Spanish leg of the journey appeared in English in 1988. A brief excerpt from the diary was also published in 1975.³

The Travel Diary

This journal is one of six travel diaries penned by Einstein. No diary is extant for Einstein’s first overseas voyage to the United States in the spring of 1921. Indeed, we do not know whether he kept a travel diary on that trip.⁴ The other extant diaries were written during his trip to South America, from March to May 1925, and his three trips to the United States when he visited the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena during the consecutive winter terms of 1930–1931, 1931–1932, and 1932–1933. Even though this amounts to five overseas trips, there are in fact six diaries, as Einstein used two notebooks on his last trip.⁵

The travel diary presented here was written in a notebook that consists of 182 lined pages. The diary entries appear on 81 lined pages. These are followed by 82 blank lined pages and 19 lined pages and one unlined page of calculations.⁶ These calculations were written on the verso of this document (i.e., at the back end of the travel diary) and upside down in relation to the diary entries. The calculations are not included in this edition.

The diary provides us for the very first time with gripping insights into Einstein’s journey experience. He wrote daily, on occasion accompanying his text with various drawings of interesting sightings, such as volcanoes, boats, and fish. He recorded both immediate impressions of his travel experiences and longer reflections on his readings, the people he met, and the places he visited. He also jotted down his musings on science, philosophy, art, and, occasionally, contemporary world events. The style of his diary was often very detailed, yet written in a quirky and (possibly due to lack of time) telegraphic manner. His observations of the individuals he encountered on his trip were frequently very succinct in nature—he could sum up their personalities and idiosyncrasies in just a few, often humorous or irreverent, words. As for the reason Einstein started to keep a travel diary for this specific trip, we can only speculate. However, it was most likely intended both as a record for himself and as reading matter for his two step-daughters, Ilse and Margot, who remained at home in Berlin.⁷ We can be certain that he did not intend it for posterity or for publication.

The history of this journal is an intriguing one. Following Einstein’s decision not to return to Germany in the wake of the Nazis’ rise to power in January 1933, his son-in-law, the German-Jewish literary critic and editor Rudolf Kayser, removed Einstein’s personal papers (including this travel diary) from his apartment in Berlin to the French Embassy there and arranged for them to be transferred to France by diplomatic pouch. From there, they were shipped to Princeton, New Jersey, where Einstein had taken up residence.⁸

In his last will and testament of 1950, Einstein appointed his loyal friend Otto Nathan and his long-term secretary Helen Dukas as trustees of his estate and Nathan as its sole executor. After Einstein’s death in April 1955, Dukas also became the first archivist of his personal papers.

In February 1971, an agreement was signed between the Estate of Albert Einstein and Princeton University Press to publish a comprehensive edition of Einstein’s writings and correspondence. This endeavor became The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein. Physics professor John Stachel was appointed as editor-in-chief of the enterprise in 1976. A year later, it became evident that Otto Nathan was not satisfied with Stachel as editor. After first suggesting that he be dismissed, Nathan then urged that a triumvirate of editors be appointed that would include Stachel. When Princeton University Press decided to continue to support Stachel as the project’s sole editor-in-chief and reject Nathan’s demands, the Einstein Estate took legal action. As the parties could not reach an agreement, the matter eventually came before an arbitration judge in New York in the spring of 1980. As a result, the judge decided in favor of the Press. The legal actions and arbitration proceedings were very costly for the Einstein Estate.⁹ Therefore, the trustees decided to sell some of the original items in Einstein’s personal papers to defray the costs. In early 1980, Otto Nathan asked the New York publisher and bibliophile James H. Heineman of the Heineman Foundation whether he would be interested in purchasing material from the Einstein Archives. The Heineman Foundation had previously purchased a thirty-five-page scientific manuscript by Einstein in 1976. In a Note for the files, Nathan wrote that funds might be needed for the payment of legal expenses resulting from the Court actions against Princeton University Press and from the forthcoming arbitration transactions.¹⁰ In October 1980, the Foundation purchased three important essays by Einstein from the Estate and donated them to the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York.¹¹ In July 1981, the Estate requested appraisals of several Einstein manuscripts (including this travel diary) from two autograph sellers. One company claimed the market value of the journal was $95,000, whereas the other one priced it at merely $6,500.¹² The following month, the Heineman Foundation purchased the travel diary for an unnamed price from the Estate and immediately deposited it in the Dannie and Hettie Heineman Collection at the Pierpont Morgan Library (now the Morgan Library & Museum), where the journal remains to this day.¹³

Background of the Trip

Various decisive factors formed the background to Einstein’s extensive tour of the Far and Middle East and Spain in late 1922 and early 1923.¹⁴ Einstein had traveled beyond the confines of Europe for the first time in the spring of 1921, when he toured the United States, thereby accompanying Chaim Weizmann, president of the London-based Zionist Organisation, to raise funds for the planned Hebrew University in Jerusalem and to establish ties with the American scientific community in the wake of World War I.¹⁵ Without explicitly declaring that he was on a mission to disseminate his new theories of relativity after achieving overnight fame in November 1919, by the time he had embarked on his trip to the Far East, Einstein had already lectured on his theories in numerous locations around Germany, as well as in Zurich, Oslo, Copenhagen, Leyden, Prague, and Vienna.¹⁶ On his return trip from the United States, he had also made a brief visit to the United Kingdom.¹⁷ During his first trip to Paris since the war in April 1922, Einstein participated in discussions on relativity at the Collège de France and at the French Philosophical Society.¹⁸

The initiative that eventually led to Einstein’s trip to the Far East, Palestine, and Spain originated with the president of the Kaizo-Sha publishing house in Tokyo, Sanehiko Yamamoto. However, there are various accounts as to the precise details surrounding the invitation. Writing twelve years after the visit, Yamamoto recalled that Einstein’s invitation had come amidst the sudden ideological change in Japan between 1919 and 1921, a notable sign of which was the publication by Kaizo-Sha of a novel by the Japanese Christian pacifist and labor activist Toyohiko Kagawa.¹⁹ The novel’s huge commercial success provided the funding for inviting Einstein and other prominent intellectuals, such as John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, and Margaret Sanger, to Japan. When asked to name the three greatest people in the world during his visit to Tokyo, Russell had allegedly told Yamamoto: First Einstein, then Lenin. There is nobody else. Yamamoto wrote that he had then consulted the philosopher Kitaro Nishida and the science writer and former professor of physics Jun Ishiwara about relativity, in consequence of which he decided to allocate some 20,000 US dollars for Einstein’s visit and dispatched his European correspondent Koshin Murobuse to visit Einstein in Berlin to discuss the terms.²⁰ However, according to Jun Ishiwara, Yamamoto had consulted with Nishida and himself some nine months prior to Russell’s visit to Japan.²¹ In yet a third account, Aizo Yokozeki, a former executive director of Kaizo-Sha, claimed that when Ishiwara suggested that the publishing house invite Einstein, they did not know what to do. They consulted with Tokyo physicist Hantaro Nagaoka, who, while recommending that they invite Einstein, noted that the Japanese universities themselves had no funding to send Japanese students abroad or to invite Einstein to Japan.²²

In any case, there seems to have been some lack of coordination concerning the initial invitation. In late September 1921, Ishiwara extended an invitation to Einstein on behalf of the Kaizo journal to visit Japan for a