Hebrew University of Jerusalem unveils 110 new Albert Einstein documents
Albert Einstein won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921.
Hebrew University of Jerusalem on Wednesday unveiled 110 new documents of Albert Einstein, containing mathematical derivations and letters to family and friends.
Einstein, who was one Hebrew University’s founding fathers, bequeathed the university his archives, making it the world's most extensive collection of his documents, with some 80,000 items.
“We at the Hebrew University are proud to serve as the eternal home for Albert Einstein’s intellectual legacy, as was his wish,” the Archives’ Academic Director Professor Hanoch Gutfreund said on Wednesday.
The 110 new documents were donated to Hebrew University by the Crown-Goodman Family Foundation in Chicago.
Among the documents unveiled were a letter from 1935 to Einstein’s son, Hans Albert, who was living in Switzerland at the time.
"I read with some apprehension that there is quite a movement in Switzerland, instigated by the German bandits. But I believe that even in Germany things are slowly starting to change. Let’s just hope we won’t have a Europe war first…the rest of Europe is now starting to finally take the thing seriously, especially the British. If they would have come down hard a year and a half ago, it would have been better and easier,” Einstein wrote his son.
Born in Germany in 1879, Einstein decided to immigrate to the United States after Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany in 1933. It wasn’t until 1935 that Einstein decided to apply for American citizenship.
Four letters from Einstein to his friend and fellow scientist, Michelle Besso, were also unveiled on Wednesday by Hebrew University.
Three of the letters date back to 1916 in which Einstein discusses the absorption and emission of light by atoms, but they also contain personal remarks about Jewish identity and family matters.
“You will certainly not go to hell, even if you had yourself baptized,” Einstein wrote Besso after he had converted to Christianity.
"As a goy, you are not obliged to learn the language of our fathers, whilst I as a 'Jewish saint' must feel ashamed at the fact that I know next to nothing of it. But I prefer to feel ashamed than to learn it," another paragraph reads, referring to Besso who was learning Hebrew.
Einstein’s cousin Karen Cortell Reisman flew in from Texas to attend Hebrew University’s unveiling of the new manuscripts.
“Whenever someone came to visit our home, we always showed them our ‘Einstein Wall’ which was full of photos and letters from my grandmother’s famous cousin,” Reisman said.
“Later, when I got married, instead of a Tiffany bowl or crystal vase, I asked my family for a gift that would be much more meaningful to me: a July 1949 letter that Einstein, along with my father and mother, wrote to Lina,” Reisman shared.
The new collection acquired by Hebrew University includes 84 sheets, most of them mathematical derivations from 1944-48.
Hebrew University is now working with Caltech’s Prof. Diana Kormos-Buchwald of the Einstein Papers Project to decipher the scientific and mathematical contexts for the calculations.
Einstein, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921, is best known for developing the theory of relativity and his mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2.
The Nobel Prize winner would have celebrated his 140th birthday on March 14.