Albert Einstein 'God Letter'

A reply to a book he did not want to read

In 1952 the philosopher Eric Gutkind published Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt, his third book. It presented the Bible as a call to arms and the Jewish people as incorruptible: 'The soul of the Jewish people was never a mass-soul,' Gutkind wrote. 'The soul of Israel is incorruptible.' Einstein read it only because the Dutch mathematician and philosopher L.E.J. Brouwer kept urging him to.

On January 3, 1954, Einstein wrote to Gutkind from Princeton, in German, by hand. He opened warmly, saying the two shared a factual attitude to life: an ideal beyond self-interest, a striving to refine existence, an 'un-American attitude' (a phrase he wrote in English). Then he explained that without Brouwer's push he would never have engaged with a book 'written in a language which is inaccessible to me.'

What followed is why the letter is famous. 'The word God is for me nothing but the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of venerable but still rather primitive legends,' he wrote. 'No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can (for me) change anything about this.' He extended the same verdict to the faith he was born into: 'For me the unadulterated Jewish religion is, like all other religions, an incarnation of primitive superstition.'

The letter's English wording varies with the translator. An earlier, widely circulated translation renders the Bible as 'a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.' The German original is the same; the quotations on this page follow the full translation published with the 2018 sale.

Einstein and religion

Einstein was born into what he called an 'entirely irreligious (Jewish)' family. As a boy in Munich he attended a Catholic primary school, then the Luitpold Gymnasium, which taught religion to its Jewish students, and he went through a short, fervent religious phase. It ended around age 10, when popular science books convinced him that much in the Bible could not be true. 'The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of free-thinking,' he wrote later, and a suspicion of authority 'that has never left me.' Applying for Swiss citizenship, he listed his religion as 'konfessionslos,' non-denominational.

In Zurich he read Baruch Spinoza, the 17th-century Dutch Jewish philosopher whose impersonal God is the order of nature itself. Spinoza appears in the Gutkind letter as 'our wonderful Spinoza,' cited against the idea of a limited causality. Einstein spoke more openly about belief after his Nobel Prize and his 50th birthday, but never as bluntly as here.

The letter is not anti-Jewish. Einstein calls the Jewish people a group 'to whom I gladly belong, and in whose mentality I feel profoundly anchored,' while insisting they have no different dignity from other peoples: 'Otherwise I cannot perceive anything chosen about them.' He had been offered the presidency of Israel after Chaim Weizmann's death in 1952 and declined. Two months after the letter, at 75, he called himself 'a deeply religious nonbeliever,' and in a letter of March 24, 1954, he wrote: 'I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly.'

Princeton, 1954

Einstein had come to Princeton in 1933 as a refugee with his second wife, Elsa, who died in 1936, and he became an American citizen in 1940. His 1939 letter to President Franklin Roosevelt had helped set in motion the research that became the Manhattan Project. By 1954 he was 74, aware of his failing health, and still working on a unified field theory. His companion in those last years, Johanna Fantova, a curator at Princeton's Firestone Library, kept a diary in which he compared his body to an old car.

It was a year of Cold War alarm in the United States. The first nuclear submarine, USS Nautilus, was launched in January. On March 1 the Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll ran far beyond its predicted yield. In May the Supreme Court ruled school segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education, and in June the Army-McCarthy hearings produced Joseph Welch's question, 'Have you, at long last, no decency?'

Einstein died the following year. Gutkind, the letter's first owner, died in 1965.

From a private letter to a record

The letter, whose recorded ownership runs from Gutkind himself, came to auction in London on May 15, 2008. Its guide was £6,000 to £8,000. Interest after a newspaper story was so heavy that the auctioneers added 11 phone lines. It hammered at £170,000, £207,600 with fees, reported in the United States as $404,000, about 25 times the estimate and roughly four times the previous record for an Einstein letter. One account says the biologist Richard Dawkins was among the underbidders; the buyer was described only as someone with 'a passion for theoretical physics.'

In October 2012 the anonymous owner offered it in a 10-day online auction with an opening price of $3 million, and a bidder placed an offer at that price within about 10 minutes of the opening. The listing said the letter had been kept in a temperature-, humidity- and light-controlled vault at an academic institution. The sources consulted do not report that this sale was completed, and the letter returned to auction six years later.

On December 4, 2018, at auction in New York, it was offered with an estimate of $1 million to $1.5 million. Two telephone bidders fought for four minutes, and it sold for $2,892,500, a world auction record for an Einstein letter. The buyer was not named. A senior specialist at the auction house called it 'one of the definitive statements in the religion vs science debate.'

What the object is

The letter is two handwritten pages in German, each 215 by 280 millimeters, dated 'Princeton, 3. 1. 1954' and signed 'A. Einstein.' It carries several of Einstein's own corrections. It travels with its original transmittal envelope, which bears its stamp and Princeton postmark, and the 2018 lot also included a black-and-white photograph of Gutkind and a copy of Choose Life.

Its value rests on content rather than rarity. Einstein letters come to market fairly often; what is rare is a document in which he states his views on God this directly. When the letter was offered in 2012, the listing noted that it had been known to scholars for more than 50 years and its authenticity had never been questioned.

Timeline

1. 1877

   Eric Gutkind is born; he studies in Berlin.

2. 1879

   Albert Einstein is born.

3. 1933

   Einstein arrives in Princeton as a refugee.

4. 1940

   Einstein becomes an American citizen.

5. 1952

   Gutkind publishes Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt.

6. Jan 3, 1954

   Einstein writes to Gutkind from Princeton.

7. Mar 1954

   Einstein turns 75 and calls himself 'a deeply religious nonbeliever.'

8. 1955

   Einstein dies.

9. 1965

   Gutkind dies.

10. May 15, 2008

    Sold at auction in London for £170,000 hammer (£207,600 with fees, reported as $404,000).

11. Oct 8, 2012

    Offered in a 10-day online auction at an opening price of $3 million.

12. Dec 4, 2018

    Sold at auction in New York for $2,892,500 after a four-minute contest between two phone bidders.

The world in 1954

• Jan 21, 1954

  USS Nautilus, the first nuclear-powered submarine, is launched in Groton, Connecticut.

• Mar 1, 1954

  The Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll yields 15 megatons, far above prediction.

• May 6, 1954

  Roger Bannister runs the first sub-four-minute mile, in Oxford.

• May 7, 1954

  The Battle of Dien Bien Phu ends in French defeat.

• May 17, 1954

  The Supreme Court rules segregated schools unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education.

• Jun 9, 1954

  Joseph Welch asks Senator Joseph McCarthy, 'Have you, at long last, no decency?'

Price record

A realized auction price is what a buyer actually paid on the date shown, including the buyer's premium where the sale reported it. It is the strongest kind of reference price, and it is a record of one sale of one object on one day, not a promise of what the next example will bring.

By reference price, Albert Einstein 'God Letter' is number 30 of 100 in the memorabilia entries of the FLOAT 100. 100 of those 100 rest on a realized sale; the rest carry an asking price or a guide value, and each page says which. Rank within the FLOAT 100 itself (23 here) is editorial: how much an object defines its field, not price alone.

Did you know

• Einstein admitted he read Gutkind's book only because L.E.J. Brouwer kept recommending it.
• The phrase 'un-American attitude' is written in English in the otherwise German letter, and Einstein meant it as praise.
• In 2008 the London auctioneers installed 11 extra phone lines for this one lot after a flood of overseas interest.
• The 2008 price beat the previous record for an Einstein letter by about four times.
• One version of Einstein's 1939 letter to Roosevelt warning about atomic weapons, a more famous document, sold for less, $2,096,000, in 2002.
• As a boy, Einstein briefly kept kosher and composed hymns he sang to himself on the way home from school.