Book Review: Was Einstein's Science Jewish?, Einstein's Jewish Science: Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion

Abstract

WAS EINSTEIN'S SCIENCE JEWISH? Einstein 's Science: Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion. Steven Gimbel (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2012). Pp. viii + 245. $24.95. ISBN 978-1-4214-0554-4.It is well known that Einstein was excoriated by the Nazis for his science. This book is a rumination on what that term might mean from a variety of perspectives. It provides quick overviews of the history of Judaism, Nazi Germany, intellectual life, and the anti-Einstein Aryan physics movement. The book's argument is rather fractured and it is unclear what the reader is intended to take away. The core question of the book is precisely the one asked by the Nazis: was Einstein's Jewish? Gimbel remains undecided about the answer. The book ends: So, is Einstein's theory of relativity science? Yes and no. And that is precisely what makes it Jewish (p. 217). But this conclusion really does not help us understand either Einstein or his critics better. For the most part, are simply left exactly where started.It is clearly important to the author that Einstein's be in some sense. If not, he says, we have no choice but to reduce Einstein to the level of Adam Sandler (p. 5), i.e., to just one more famous Jew. It is uncertain what the origin of this standard is (and it is not applied to Freud, whose is not labelled as Jewish). In his efforts to show how could be considered Jewish, Gimbel does a marvellous job showing how the examples of Descartes and Newton argue for the cultural dependence of scientific methods. Frustratingly, Gimbel's argument becomes quite weak once he tries to extend those examples to Einstein. He presents a very vague notion of a metaphorical science, which he suggests Einstein's work resembles. Talmudic is described as saying that absolute truth can never be accessed directly, but only assembled from a variety of different viewpoints. It is unclear how seriously the reader is supposed to take this notion: if seriously, then the Nazis were right (in terms very similar to those used by Lenard and Stark). If not, what exactly is being argued for? Near the end of the book even this metaphorical sense of science is abandoned and relabelled as being the of the oppressed.Gimbel clearly does not want to agree with the Nazis, so he tries to split the difference by saying that Einstein's methods were Talmudic even while the content of relativity theory was not. It seems to me that this is precisely backwards. …