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  • Einstein’s Violin:Jews and the Performance of Identity
  • Sander L. Gilman (bio)

Who are the three most famous Jewish violinists of the twentieth century? Ask any member of the generation that grew up after World War II in the United States, and the answer is easy: Jasha Heifetz (1900–1987), without question; Jack Benny (1894–1974), the Jewish comic of radio, film, and concert hall fame; and, of course, Albert Einstein (1879–1955). Why is this of any interest?

The role of music, especially of the violin, was a central aspect of Albert Einstein's life and, more importantly, of his public persona. But it is also an emblem of the integration of the Jews into Western high culture during the twentieth century. It is certainly part of our contemporary image of Einstein that links both personal and historical meanings. In Richard Power's brilliant novel of 2003, The Time of Our Singing, Einstein as a musician haunts the pages of this extraordinary chronicle of twentieth-century American life at the color bar. He first appears in the 1930s as "a white-maned old New Jersey violinist in a moth-eaten sweater, who spoke German with David [the German Jewish protagonist] and frightened Ruth [his African American wife] with incomprehensible jokes." It is he who first recognizes the extraordinary gift of their son and insists that the boy have "the strongest musical education possible." Money should be no object: "They didn't dare oppose a man who'd rooted out the bizarre secret of time, buried since time's beginning. Einstein was Einstein," David thought, "however Gypsy-like his violin playing." This Einstein—the violin player—stands at the periphery of this brilliant novel of race relations and music in the American twentieth century. He embodies both abstract notions of the physicist's world and the persecution of the Jews of Europe. David Strom is in an America where he is still haunted that "his appointment in the Physics Department at Columbia . . . would certainly be taken away by anti-Semitism, anti-intellectualism, rising randomness, or the inevitable return of the Nazis." This sense of a specific moment of alienation that links Jewish identity and Einstein recurs at a stream-of-conscious moment after David and his sons are confronted by an American anti-Semite: "[David] shepherds the boys through the crowd, out onto the street and their next public humiliation, talking as he [End Page 219] walks. 'I told him what Einstein says. Minkowski. "Jewish physics." Time backward and time forward: Both are always. The universe does not make a difference between the two only we do.'" With all the power that radiates from the image of Einstein, Powers does have it wrong: it is not the exoticism of the "gypsy violinist" that Einstein's violin embodies but, rather, the calculus of European high culture, of Bach and Mozart, who also stand at the very heart of his novel.1

Now thinking about Einstein and music one could make an argument that Einstein's relationship to music reflects the inner mathematical nature of music itself. For from Pythagoras to Helmholtz an ever-greater understanding of the relationship between music and mathematics had been evolving. Even Newton saw music as one of the spaces in which numbers provide insight into the aesthetic.2 Yet Einstein sensed that the relationship was more complex. "Music," Einstein wrote to Paul Plaut in October 1928, "does not influence research work, but both are nourished by the same sort of longing, and they complement each other in the release they offer."3 Music was part of his emotional world. Here I want to make a rather more concrete argument about the meanings attached to the image of Einstein's violin—that in the course of the twentieth century playing "serious music" on the violin was the intersection of the image of the Jew and the rewards and status of European high culture.4 That intersection provided Einstein with a means of thinking about himself simultaneously as a Jew (in his time) and as a universal human being with claims on all high culture.

As early as Shakespeare the stereotypical Jew was denied any special relationship...

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