Travel diaries show different side of Einstein
Descriptions raise questions about scientist’s views on race
LONDON — In 1922, the same year he received the Nobel Prize in physics, Albert Einstein set out with his wife, Elsa, on a 5½-half-month odyssey of discovery of a new world: the Far East and Middle East.
Along the way, he was feted by a Japanese empress and had an audience with the king of Spain. He also kept a travel diary, noting in stark, often racist terms his impressions of the people he encountered on stops in Hong Kong and Singapore, China, Japan, India and Palestine.
The personal writings do not only reveal the musings of a man grappling with a jolt to his view of the world. According to Princeton University Press, which has published the first full English-language edition, they also expose “Einstein’s stereotyping of members of various nations and raise questions about his attitudes on race.”
The first volume of the trove — previously available in German but now available under the English title The Travel Diaries of Albert Einstein — complicates the portrait of a man often described as the most brilliant physicist of the modern era.
Einstein was a German-born Jewish scientist who was targeted by the Nazis and became known as an advocate for human rights. He once said in an interview, “Being a Jew myself, perhaps I can understand and empathize with how black people feel as victims of discrimination.”
But in his private writings on that journey from October 1922 to March 1923, “other peoples are portrayed as being biologically inferior, a clear hallmark of racism,” according to Ze’ev Rosenkranz, assistant director of the Einstein Papers Project at the California Institute of Technology and the editor of the book.
“I think a lot of comments strike us as pretty unpleasant — what he says about the Chinese in particular,” Rosenkranz told the Guardian. “They’re kind of in contrast to the public image of the great humanitarian icon. I think it’s quite a shock to read those and contrast them with his more public statements. They’re more off guard; he didn’t intend them for publication.”
While many may insist on dismissing the diary entries as merely reflecting the attitudes of the era, Rosenkranz said the xenophobia and prejudice they revealed had been far from universal.
“That’s usually the reaction I get: ‘We have to understand, he was of the zeitgeist, part of the time,’ ” he said. “But I think I tried here and there to give a broader context. There were other views out there, more tolerant views.”
In China, however, many social media users seemed willing to give Einstein the benefit of the doubt, or even to agree with him.
“That was the impression China gave to the world back then,” wrote one user of Weibo, a Twitter-like social network. “If it were now, Einstein wouldn’t say such things.”
“After you snoop in someone’s diary, you’re blaming them for not liking you,” another Weibo user wrote.
If anything, Einstein’s travel diaries add an unexpected twist to the legacy of man who, in no uncertain terms, evolved.
Einstein’s shifting views may be most powerfully illustrated by the way he put his scientific fame at the service of the American civil rights movement.
According to Smithsonian Magazine ,he joined a committee in 1931 to protest the injustice of the Scottsboro Boys trial in Alabama, in which nine African-American youths were falsely accused of raping two white women.
And in a 1946 commencement speech at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, he declared: “There is separation of colored people from white people in the United States. It is a disease of white people. I do not intend to be quiet about it.”