August 8, 2012 How Jewish is relativity? “If my theory of
relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a
German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the
world,” Albert Einstein quipped in 1922. “Should my theory prove
untrue, France will say that I am a German, and Germany will
declare that I am a Jew.” Steven Gimbel, author of “Einstein’s
Jewish Science: Physics at the Intersection of Politics and
Religion” (Johns Hopkins University Press, $24.95), puts
Einstein’s self-effacing joke in context: “Sometimes even the
cynics aren’t cynical enough.” Thus begins Gimbel’s lively,
intentionally provocative and wholly compelling inquiry into the
Jewishness of Einstein himself and the world-changing scientific
revolution that he set in motion. Einstein’s theory, of course,
was proved to be correct long before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but
the Nazis and their supporters in the German scientific
establishment dismissed it as “Jewish science.” Scientific
truth, as they saw it, belonged exclusively to