Volume 36, Number 8 · May 18, 1989
Einstein & the Jews
By Shloime Perel, Reply by Robert Craft
In response to Jews and Geniuses
(February 16, 1989)
To the Editors:
It is not at all clear that Einstein, as Robert Craft says [NYR, February 16], "felt no ties at all with the faith of his fathers." Einstein's friend Willi Hermanns reports in his Einstein and the Poet that the physicist, in a 1948 conversation with a Protestant minister says:
My religion is based on Moses: Love God and love your neighbor as yourself. And for me God is the First Cause. David and the prophets knew that there would be no love without justice or justice without love. I don't need any other religious trappings…. The cross was used to make wars, to make warriors, to make a concordat with Hitler. I feel that such a cross has lost its meaning.
Shloime Perel
Montreal, Quebec
