Books

Until There emerges an intellectual cousin to the Nazi propagandist who has discovered that Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s last name really is Rosenfeld, to “inform” us that Nobel was a Jew, and that members of the Nobel prize committees either are Jews or else are under instruction to select as many Jews as possible, even the Aryan world will have to continue to accept (no matter how grudgingly) the Nobel awards as measures of excellence and superiority, in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, philosophy and literature.

Dr. Abraham Myerson, author and professor of neurology at Tufts College Medical School, and Dr. Isaac Goldberg, author and lecturer on Hispano-American literature at Harvard, have written a little book entitled “The German Jew” and subtitled “His Share in Culture”, which is published by a third Jew, Alfred Knopf.

It is a brief book, a packed book and an informative book. It tells us what German Jews have done, from Heine and Moses Mendelssohn on to the present. There is no idle boasting in it. In fact, the mere data of Jewish contribution to the arts and sciences makes boastfulness superogatory—quite unnecessary, in fact. The authors have found it naturally difficult to exclude Austrian Jews, especially in the field of letters, since they too use the German language. And they have of course been compelled to accept in their category those half and quarter Jews whom the “pure” Aryans are rejecting, on the assumption, of course, that a quarter of a Jew is more potent than three-quarters of a German.

Ten percent of the men of science, letters, philosophy and promoters of peace who have received Nobel awards are Jews, the authors compute. These are not all German Jews, of course, nor are all the winners pure Jews, Heyse and Bohr, for example, being only half Jews. Germany’s percentage likewise is ten percent, justifying the conclusion that 10,000,000 Jews are culturally equal to the 60,000,000 Germans”, which is an inadvertent justification of the Nazi assumption that a fraction of Jewish blood is culturally equivalent to six times as much pure German blood.

In physics, six Jews—German, German-American and Danish—have won Nobel awards, namely, Einstein, Bohr, Michelson, Franck, Hertz and Lippman. In chemistry, the contributions of Haber and Willstaetter, also Nobel prize winners, helped Germany not only in reputation, but in so practical a manner as creating nitrates during the war blockade of Germany and building up the dye industry. Even in their rarely sober moments those Germans drunk with the heady draught of Nazi propaganda must realize how much the contributions of these two Jews lengthened and strengthened the endurance of Germany against the Allies.

In medicine, the Jewish Nobel prize winners are Barany, Ehrlich, Carrel, Myerhof and Landsteiner. Merely to recall that it was Ehrlich who discovered the “666” cure for a very well known social disease is to indicate the extent of the Jewish contribution to medicine. The preeminence of the race in the exact and applied sciences is so striking that its contributions in the arts and literature add up, comparatively, to little.

Boerne and Heine lived and worked before there were Nobel prizes. There is nothing negligible about the joint labors of Feuchtwanger, the Zweigs (unrelated to each other), Alfred Neumann, Max Brod; in art, Liebermann, Pechstein and Grosz; in music, Korngold, Schoenberg, Mahler, Kreisler, Walter and Klemperer; and reverting to the pure and applied sciences, Virchow, the Zondeks, Jacques Loeb, Emil Berliner and, to use a customary phrase, many others too numerous to mention.

It should be said for Drs. Myerson and Goldberg that they have done much more than to throw together a lot of names and paragraphs from biographical encyclopaedias; they have tried to record Jewish achievement in Germany in relation to the whole of Germany, and have included pungent summaries on the record of anti-Semitism in Germany, and on the comparative evaluation of genius. This little book helps us to understand how the anti-Semitic movement is, intrinsically, a movement against learning and culture. Two of the Nobel prize winners for peace are Jews. This is the only fact at which the jingo Nazi can sincerely mock.

RELATIVITY SIMPLIFIED

In “The Relativity Theory Simplified and the Formative Period of Its Inventor”, the author, Max Talmey, M.D., has compressed the thinking of a quarter of a century, begun in the expectation of conveying to the layman an explanation of the theory burdened by as few difficult astronomical or mathematical formulae as is possible. The book has an introduction by Prof. George B. Pegram of Columbia University and is published in New York by the Falcon Press. Dr. Talmey writes:

“An attempt to explain the theory without touching in the least on mathematics is bound to fail of its purpose”. Slosson’s “Easy Lessons in Einstein” was indeed too easy. Talmey uses only algebra of the simplest kind. Although we lose the depth of insight by skipping the mathematical equations there is much that merits our thoughtful consideration that is entirely free from the mathematical symbolism.

Very suggestive is the subtitle—the last word “Inventor”. Relativity as an invention interests Dr. Talmey. Perhaps some of us prefer to think of Einstein’s Relativity as an epoch-making discovery. Perhaps in the strictest sense Einstein discovered, invented and formulated his theory.

Part I deals with space and foot rules, with time and clocks, with simultaneity and how to establish it. Then follow studies in aberration of light, Doppler’s principle, experiments of Fizeau and of Michelson, the union of mass and energy, Minkowskie’s “world”, the ether and other related matters.

In Part II, General Relativity, we come to an elder Einstein, wiser and more profound, but still objective. Ernst Mach’s critique of Newton has been mastered. Inert forces have been freed from space and tied to the distant stars—all the matter in the universe. Gravitation becomes a point of view. Light, Einstein predicts, has weight. How much does it weigh? Einstein told and challenged astronomers to check him. The answers came in slowly, for we had to wait until an eclipse of the sun occurred and a sky was clear enough for measurement. At first the answer was: O. K.; then came doubt; then O. K. again; finally, O. K.

—R. A. Wetzel.