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Foreword ) When chided for agreeing to make his first trip to the United States as part of a Zionist delegation, rather than as a representative of German science, Einstein replied to his colleague Fritz Haber, the Nobel Prize winner in chemistry: Despite my expressed internationalist orientation, I nevertheless always consider it my duty to intervene on behalf of my persecuted and morally oppressed tribal colleagues, as much as is in my power. I therefore gladly agreed [to the request to travel to the United States with a Zionist delegation ], without debating for more than five minutes, although I had just turned down all the American universities. This therefore is rather an act of loyalty than one of disloyalty. The prospect of erecting a Jewish university in particular fills me with special joy, since I have recently seen numerous examples of the perfidious and loveless manner in which one treats splendid young Jews and seeks to sever their educational possibilities. I could also list other events of the past year that would have to drive a selfrespecting Jew to take Jewish solidarity more seriously than seemed proper and natural in earlier days. A few days later Einstein reiterated in a letter to his close friend Heinrich Zangger: “On Sunday it’s off to America. Not only to speak at universities, which will happen as well, but for the founding of the Jewish university in Jerusalem. I feel the keen need to do something for this cause.” Thus, Albert Einstein, who had received numerous invitations to lecture in America over the preceding few years, traveled from Berlin via the Netherlands in the spring of 1921 with a full agenda and schedule: he would spend most of his time accompanying Chaim Weizmann on a tour of East Coast cities, making numerous, brief appearances at large gatherings intended to arouse enthusiasm for the Jewish colony in Palestine and its planned cultural and educational institutions. In addition, Einstein was to deliver a series of lectures at Princeton University on his contributions to modern physics. Einstein had been propelled to international fame in the fall of 1919, at age forty, with the confirmation of his general theory of relativity by two teams of British astronomers who had observed the 1919 solar eclipse and produced evidence confirming Einstein’s prediction of light bending in the vicinity of massive objects. He had been celebrated as the greatest physicist of the twentieth century on the front pages of all major American and European newspapers. As one of only a handful of German scientists who had publicly criticized Germany’s war aims, Einstein could have expected to travel to former Allied countries without fearing overt anti-German sentiment. Since the end of World War I, however, he had not been officially invited except by formerly neutral or Central power European countries, such as Holland, Switzerland, and Austria. Although the British Royal Astronomical Society had considered awarding him their Gold Medal in 1920, the nomination had ultimately failed to gain the majority needed, and Einstein’s planned trip to England to receive this honor had been canceled. During 1920, Einstein received several invitations to teach or lecture in America. He toyed with the possibility of an extended lecture tour and exchanged letters with representatives of Columbia University, the University of Wisconsin, Harvard University, Princeton University, and the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. By the end of the year, Einstein was even studying English pronunciation and was expecting to travel soon to the United States. But by early 1921, it had become clear that, in the climate of postwar economic hardships, not even American institutions of higher learning could come up with the ambitious sum of fifteen thousand dollars that Einstein was hoping to be paid for his U.S. lectures. Distinguished European scientists had begun traveling to America in the previous two decades, received enthusiastically by an academic community eager to adopt the practice of research-oriented scientific education that had taken hold, primarily at German universities, since the late nineteenth century.Physics,and theoretical physics in particular,had experienced extraordinary growth in Germany since Hermann von Helmholtz, Felix Klein, Max Planck, and other distinguished physicists had started the intellectual revolution leading eventually to quantum physics and relativity , fields in which Einstein had made his most remarkable and lasting contributions between 1905 and 1915. It had been customary for American students to travel to the great chemical and physical laboratories of Berlin or Leipzig for postgraduate work and...

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