{"id":78378,"date":"2018-06-14T12:12:11","date_gmt":"2018-06-14T19:12:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=78378"},"modified":"2018-06-14T12:12:11","modified_gmt":"2018-06-14T19:12:11","slug":"einstein-the-anti-racist-not-in-his-travel-diaries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2018\/06\/14\/einstein-the-anti-racist-not-in-his-travel-diaries\/","title":{"rendered":"Einstein the Anti-Racist? Not in His Travel Diaries"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Yonette Joseph<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Tiffany May\u00a0Courtesy The New York Times<\/span><\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n
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LONDON \u2014 In 1922, the same year he\u00a0received the Nobel Prize in Physics<\/a>, Albert Einstein set out with his wife Elsa on a five-and-a-half-month odyssey of discovery of a new world: the Far East and Middle East.<\/p>\n

Along the way, he was feted by a Japanese empress and had an audience with the king of Spain. He also kept a travel diary, noting in stark, often racist terms his impressions of the people he encountered on stops in Hong Kong and Singapore, China, Japan, India and Palestine.<\/p>\n

The personal writings do not only reveal the musings of a man grappling with a jolt to his view of the world. According to Princeton University Press, which has published the first full English-language edition, they also expose Einstein\u2019s stereotyping of members of various nations and raise questions about his attitudes on race.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first volume of the trove \u2014 previously available in German but now available under the English title The Travel Diaries of Albert Einstein<\/a>\u201d \u2014 complicates the portrait of a man often described as the most brilliant physicist of the modern era.<\/p>\n

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Einstein was a German-born Jewish scientist who was\u00a0targeted by the Nazis<\/a>\u00a0and became known as an advocate for human rights. He once said in an interview, Being a Jew myself, perhaps I can understand and empathize with how black people feel as victims of discrimination.\u201d<\/p>\n

But in his private writings on that journey from October 1922 to March 1923, other peoples are portrayed as being biologically inferior, a clear hallmark of racism,\u201d according to Ze\u2019ev Rosenkranz, assistant director of the Einstein Papers Project at the California Institute of Technology and the editor of the book.<\/p>\n

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I think a lot of comments strike us as pretty unpleasant \u2014 what he says about the Chinese in particular,\u201d Mr. Rosenkranz\u00a0told The Guardian<\/a>. They\u2019re kind of in contrast to the public image of the great humanitarian icon. I think it\u2019s quite a shock to read those and contrast them with his more public statements. They\u2019re more off guard; he didn\u2019t intend them for publication.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Rosenkranz was traveling and could not be reached for comment, Caltech said on Thursday.<\/p>\n

When Einstein set out on his journey, he was in his 40s, already renowned for his work on the\u00a0photoelectric effect<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0on relativity<\/a>, and developing a second reputation as a progressive public figure.<\/p>\n

The travel diaries, however, lay bare a different side of a remarkable mind.<\/p>\n

In Hong Kong<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u2022 He expresses sympathy for the stricken people, men and women, who beat stones daily and must heave them for 5 cents a day.\u201d He adds, The Chinese are severely punished for the fecundity by the insensitive economic machine.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n