On the last day of 1930, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency printed an open letter from Albert Einstein, praising the Talmud’s “high cultural values” and its importance both to the Jewish people and to “science,” and calling for its continued operation “as a living force.” The letter’s original recipient was Chaim Tchernowitz, an energetic Russian-American rabbi who wrote frequently in the Hebrew and Yiddish press under the pseudonym Rav Tsa’ir. As Yair Rosenberg explains, it was Tchernowitz who made the renowned physicist—himself entirely ignorant of the Talmud—into a passionate advocate for that text:
[Tchernowitz] and Einstein were friends for twenty years—from their first meeting [until] Tchernowitz’s death in 1949. The two men visited each other on multiple continents, kept up a regular correspondence, and even took vacations together. . . . The story begins in September 1930, when Tchernowitz arrived in Berlin for a short stay and received a surprise invitation to Einstein’s summer home. Sending such overtures was actually a popular pastime for the famed physicist. Whenever a prestigious thinker or political official came to town, he would invite him to his residence.
Tchernowitz, of course, said yes. “I had seen him before in passing,” the rabbi recalled in his memoir of their encounter, “but had never spoken with him in person.” What, then, prompted Einstein’s overture? Tchernowitz soon found out: “Immediately upon my arrival, he asked me in all earnestness—without looking at my face—if I was indeed an expert in the Talmud, as he had heard, and what exactly is the Talmud?”
In fact, notes Rosenberg, Einstein more than once bemoaned his own lack of Judaic knowledge:
“How deeply do I regret not having been more diligent in studying the language and literature of our fathers,” Einstein wrote to his childhood Jewish-studies teacher, Heinrich Friedmann, in 1929. “I read the Bible quite often, but the original text remains inaccessible to me.”
And perhaps it was precisely for that reason that he came to endorse Tchernowitz’s project to make talmudic wisdom accessible in English—which was the impetus to the letter quoted above.
Read more on Atlantic: https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/deep-shtetl/618d3d7fd581bf0020f7828d/why-did-einstein-promote-the-talmud-when-he-couldnt-read-it/