einstein

directed to the cottage amid the dunes. As he approached, he saw two robust men, who certainly did not look like Einstein’s usual visitors, in
intense conversation with Elsa. Suddenly, as Frank later recalled, “the two men saw me, threw themselves at me and seized me.”
Elsa, her face chalky white with fright, intervened. “They suspected you of being the rumored assassin.”
Einstein found the entire situation quite hilarious, including the naïveté of the people in the neighborhood who kindly showed Frank the way to his
house. Einstein described his exchange of letters with the Prussian Academy, which he had put into a folder with some lines of humorous verse he
had composed for an imaginary response: “Thank you for your note so tender / It’s typically German, like the sender.”
When Einstein said that leaving Berlin had proved liberating, Elsa defended the city that she had loved for so long. “You often said to me after
coming home from the physics colloquium that such a gathering of outstanding physicists is not to be found anywhere else.”
“Yes,” Einstein replied, “from a purely scientific point of view life in Berlin was often very nice. Nevertheless, I always had a feeling that something
was pressing on me, and I always had a premonition that the end would not be good.” 43
With Einstein a free agent, offers flowed in from all over Europe. “I now have more professorships than rational ideas in my head,” he told
Solovine. 44 Although he had committed to spend at least a few months each year in Princeton, he began accepting these invitations somewhat
promiscuously. He was never very good at declining requests.
Partly it was because the offers were enticing and he was flattered. Partly it was because he was still trying to leverage a better deal for his
assistant, Walther Mayer. In addition, the offers became a way for him and the various universities to show their defiance of what the Nazis were
doing to German academies. “You may feel that it would have been my duty not to accept the Spanish and French offers,” he confessed to Paul
Langevin in Paris, “however, such a refusal might have been misinterpreted since both invitations were, at least to some extent, political
demonstrations that I considered important and did not want to spoil.” 45
His acceptance of a post at the University of Madrid made headlines in April. “Spanish Minister Announces Physicist Has Accepted
Professorship,” said the New York Times. “News Received with Joy.” The paper pointed out that this should not affect his annual stints in Princeton,
but Einstein warned Flexner that it could if Mayer was not given a full rather than an associate professorship at the new Institute. “You will by now
have learned through the press that I have accepted a chair at Madrid University,” he wrote. “The Spanish government has given me the right to
recommend to them a mathematician to be appointed as a full professor ...I therefore find myself in a difficult position: either to recommend him for
Spain or to ask you whether you could possibly extend his appointment to a full professorship.” In case the threat was not clear enough, Einstein
added, “His absence from the Institute might even create some difficulties for my own work.” 46
Flexner compromised. In a four-page letter, he cautioned Einstein about the perils of becoming too attached to one assistant, told tales of how
that had worked out badly in other cases, but then relented. Although Mayer’s title remained associate professor, he was given tenure, which was
enough to secure the deal. 47
Einstein also accepted or expressed interest in lectureships in Brussels, Paris, and Oxford. He was particularly eager to spend some time at the
latter. “Do you think that Christ Church could find a small room for me?” he wrote his friend Professor Frederick Lindemann, a physicist there who
would become an important adviser to Winston Churchill. “It need not be so grand as in the two previous years.” At the end of the letter, he added a
wistful little note: “I shall never see the land of my birth again.” 48
This raised one obvious question: Why did he not consider spending some time at Hebrew University in Jerusalem? After all, it was partly his
baby. Einstein spent the spring of 1933 actively talking about starting up a new university, perhaps in England, that could serve as a refuge for
displaced Jewish academics. Why wasn’t he instead recruiting them for, and committing himself personally to, Hebrew University?
The problem was that for the previous five years, Einstein had been doing battle with administrators there, and it came to an untimely showdown
in 1933, just as he and other professors were fleeing the Nazis. The target of his ire was the university’s president, Judah Magnes, a former rabbi
from New York who felt a duty to please his wealthy American backers, including on faculty appointments, even if this meant compromising on
scholarly distinction. Einstein wanted the university to operate more in the European tradition, with the academic departments given great power
over curriculum and tenured faculty decisions. 49
While he was in Le Coq sur Mer, his frustrations with Magnes boiled over. “This ambitious and weak person surrounded himself with other
morally inferior men,” he wrote Haber in cautioning him about going to Hebrew University. He described it to Born as “a pigsty, complete
charlatanism.” 50
Einstein’s complaints put him at odds with the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann. When Weizmann and Magnes sent him a formal invitation to join
the Hebrew University faculty, he allowed his distaste to pour forth publicly. He told the press that the university was “unable to satisfy intellectual
needs” and declared that he had thus rejected the invitation. 51
Magnes must go, Einstein declared. He wrote Sir Herbert Samuel, the British high commissioner, who had been appointed to a committee to
propose reforms, that Magnes had wrought “enormous damage” and that “if ever people want my collaboration, his immediate resignation is my
condition.” In June he said the same to Weizmann: “Only a decisive change of personnel would alter things.” 52
Weizmann was an adroit broken-field runner. He decided to turn Einstein’s challenge into an opportunity to lessen Magnes’s power. If he
succeeded, then Einstein should feel compelled to join the faculty. On a trip to America later in June, he was asked why Einstein was not going to
Jerusalem, where he surely belonged. He should indeed go there, Weizmann agreed, and he had been invited to do so. If he went to Jerusalem,
Weizmann added, “he would cease to be a wanderer among the universities of the world.” 53
Einstein was furious. His reasons for not going to Jerusalem were well known to Weizmann, he said, “and he also knows under what
circumstances I would be prepared to undertake work for the Hebrew University.”That led Weizmann to appoint a committee that, he knew, would
remove Magnes from direct control of the academic side of the university. He then announced, during a visit to Chicago, that Einstein’s conditions
had been met and therefore he should be coming to Hebrew University after all. “Albert Einstein has definitely decided to accept direction of the
physics institute at the Hebrew University,” the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported, based on information from Weizmann.
It was a ruse by Weizmann that was not true and would never come to pass. But in addition to frightening Flexner in Princeton, it allowed the
Hebrew University controversy to simmer down and for reforms to be made at the university. 54
The End of Pacifism
Like a good scientist, Einstein could change his attitudes when confronted with new evidence. Among his deepest personal principles was his
pacifism. But in early 1933, with Hitler’s ascension, the facts had changed.
So Einstein forthrightly declared that he had come to the conclusion that absolute pacifism and military resistance were, at least for the moment,
not warranted. “The time seems inauspicious for further advocacy of certain propositions of the radical pacifist movement,” he wrote to a Dutch