A thorough research into the colorful history of the Jewish people shows that there are a lot of people who were influential and who remain popular until now. At the top of these lists are people like Moses, Abraham, and Jesus Christ, all of whom were deeply associated with the Christian religion. However, one character that is different from the religious ones and appears to be in all lists is Albert Einstein. Most people do not know he was Jewish. To make the discussion interesting, I will pick Albert Einstein and discuss his life and how important he is to Jewish history as most of the other top influential people have their stories popularly told.
Albert Einstein is was a theoretical physicist who was originally German. One of his theories, the theory of relativity, is among the most discussed theories by scientists until now. He also came up with the mass-energy equation, E = mc 2 which has since been labelled the most famous equation of all time. Another famous theory that finds wide application even today is the law of the photoelectric effect which is also the discovery that triggered his journey to the Nobel Prize in physics in 1921. Einstein got the award as a result of his mighty contributions in the field of theoretical physics. The science guru proceeded to publish over 300 works related to science and over 150 others that were not. Most of the other works were philosophical. In 1999, the physics community named Einstein ‘the person of the century’. Most people regard him as a genius.
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Einstein was not exactly a religious person as other Jewish greats were. He, therefore, was not directly involved in any event that was of any significance in the history of Judaism. The scholar goes down as the third Jewish person to be awarded a Nobel Prize in physics. This was a key event in his career. However, Einstein lived in a time that saw one of the biggest events taking place in Jewish history, the Jewish Holocaust. Although Einstein was not a victim of the Holocaust, the happenings affected him in different ways. Apart from this, the rise to power of by the Nazis steer wheeled by Adolf Hitler, Germany’s new chancellor at that time, came at a time when Einstein was in the United States. He knew that the war could not allow him to go back to Germany and that is how he settled in the United States.
Einstein was deeply immersed in science and philosophy that he did not grow up to be religious. According to him, some stories in the bible were not true. This makes it difficult to find a ritual, text, or symbol of Judaism that was associated with him. In one of his interviews, Einstein was quoted saying that the idea of one having a personal god is childish. He believed that faith in a god made one weak. The scientist preferred the attitude of humanity. Both of his parents had rejected Jewish rituals stating that they were superstitious and outdated. This was queer as most Jewish had a strong belief in their rituals and ethics. Jewish ethics have been seen as a combination of western philosophical tradition and Judaism. This was caused by beliefs in biblical ethics which stood for Christianity, medieval ethical literature which discussed philosophies from notable philosophers such as Aristotle, and modern ethical literature which was composed of contributions by Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, the Musar Movement, and the Reform movement among a few others. However, most of their ethics are based on Christian teachings with holidays such as Shabbat, which seeks to observe God’s completion of creation, taking center stage.
