Einstein: The Passion of Pure Reason

"Einstein: The Passion of Pure Reason," Commentary, September 1950.

Excerpt:

Einstein’s new Jewishness was not the result of his discovering a hidden Jewish self. It was, on the contrary, a new means of escaping from his self. The flight to Reason from the chaos of existence, which seemed to have succeeded so well, was now acknowledged to have been, at least in part, a failure. Something ponderable and indissoluble had been left behind: the flesh-and-blood Jew born of woman, the specific presence of the absent-minded professor. And Einstein once again fled—into Community, the ghetto, the warm mass of Jewry. What could not be transmuted into Reason would be absorbed into The Jew.

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