The B'nai B'rith magazine · 1927-07-01 · 10 (7.1927) · p. Seite 430

430 B'NAI B'RITH MAGAZINE The Jews and Relativity (Continued from page 425) Plessner is a permanent guest at the House. In his sculptured portraits, Plessner is at his best. Sculptures of his father, of Dr. Arthur Kahn, another prominent Ben B'rith of Germany, and of Moses Mendelssohn, the latter of which is in the art collection of the Greater Berlin Jewish Community, are masterpieces in their faithfulness to character. They are permeated with the soul and spirit of the men they represent; they are bronze embodiments of idealistic nights of fancy, of sad experience, of wisdom. One has only to see the half-uplifted right hand of Mendelssohn to obtain a complete, unforgettable impression of the character of this man who combined the qualities of Socrates, Hillel and Pestalozzi. Just as masterly is the bust of the "Young Roman" which epitomizes the distinguishing traits of hi« race. We obtain an insight into the soul of the artist from his "Beggar Women of Perugia," quite the most beautiful of Plessner's creations. It reflects a great love for the human creature, a warm sympathy for the sorrows of existence. In the faces of the two blind women is the artist's disdain for the arrogance of society. If this work contains a dumb, yet eloquent reproach of the human system, there is an almost philosophical critique upon human manners in many of his animal sculptures. His "Tete a Tete" seems to smile knowingly and to hint that the distance between our life and that of the lower animal is really not so very great. Some of Plessner's works are purely imaginative. They include "The Return from the Harvest," "The Bookworm," copies of which are in great demand among book-lovers, and the various fountains which combine humor and the simple joy of life. However, Plessner does not belong to that category of artists with whom imagination is the primary force. Bold, startling outlines, "creation out of nothing," are not his style. He approaches existing objects as an observer and a discoverer. Only after he has sufficiently studied and explored them do they arouse his fancy. Then he tirelessly sets to work to enrich them, to interpret them in a manner that will bring their truth to the surface. Plessner cannot be content with a hasty, impressionistic or expressionistic sketch, but requires the full, real and spiritual totality represented in the subject he has chosen. the matter rests for us. We must go on further in our search. As psychologists, have we not a right to ask whether or not the gap between Newton and Einstein bespeaks the gulf between the Semite and the Aryan? Our search may be fruitless, but the question nevertheless suggests itself. Newton's mind could not conceive a space that was not absolute. Einstein was ready to deny even to time an absolute character, so that when Lorentz suggested that the only way to reconcile the negative results of the Michelson- Morley experiment was to posit an artificial time side by side with a real time, Einstein was quick to perceive that both times were real but relative to the observer. Both he and Minkowski gave the most emphatic expression to the principle that space and time together go to make up a single continuum. What, then, characterizes Eihstein's type of thought? We know it was a bold step to take in the first place. While others were seeking to explain the experimental results with as little damage as possible to the existing conception of physics, Einstein dared to change the whole point of view and on the basis of that speculation, built up a new system. It was no less an illustrious mathematician than the late Henri Poincare who spoke enthusiastically about the originality of Einstein's mind and the thorough-goingness with which he followed his trend of thought to its ultimate conclusion. I do not wish to claim that none but a Jew could have formulated the principle of relativity in its definite form. That were perilously near committing the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc, or in a broader view, it would simply be a case of faulty generalization. But it is, I think, justifiable to hold that Einstein, being a Jew, might have found it easier to cut himself loose from the absolutistic moorings than his gentile colleagues. The Jewish mind, it would seem from a survey of Jewish thought, is less susceptible to dogma, to rigid conventional discipline than, let us say, was the Greek mind. The latter always aimed at definition; and what is definition but setting a limit to a concept, laying down laws? In Jewish philosophy from Philo to Spinoza, we find the dictum, Omnis determinatio est negatio —"Every determination is a negation," playing a prominent part. The Jews were not scholastic in the real sense of the term. Some of the mediaeval Jewish philosophers were, of course, influenced in their method by their non-Jewish contemporaries, but where in Maimonides, Ibn-Gabirol, Kreskas and Gersonides do we find the absolutistic method pursued by St. Thomas Aquinas, the prince of Roman Catholic philosophers? The Jews, possibly because of their constitutional make-up, steered clear of the Scylla of absolutism and the Charybdis of nihilism (Gorgias in Greece and the Hindus in general). Even the most pessimistic of Jewish thinkers, Ecclesiastes, is, as the late Morris Jastrow called him, a gentle cynic, probably comparable in this respect with the great half-Jew, Montaigne. Out of such soil, relativity can very well be expected as a product. It is my belief that a theory, principle or even law, must be in us first before we can discover it in nature. Millions of people may have the same facts before them without seeing the unity to which they point. Is it not possible, then, that certain cultural groups are prone to make certain discoveries rather than others? Evolution as a theory may have been cultivated by German and French biologists and naturalists, but it was by Englishmen that the evidence reached its crystallized form. Similarly, the principle of conservation of energy was rather a German product than a French discovery, although many Frenchmen worked along these lines. We are all trained to see and interpret natural phenomena in much the same way, but there is always a personal equation, and it is my contention that the personal equation contains an unknown national quantity, which sets the world athinking. In the development of the relativity theory, it is perhaps significant that the Jewish stamp is found at almost every turn. Were Einstein, alone of all Jewry, responsible for the vast physical transformation, the connection between relativity and the Jews could be regarded as wholly fortuitous, but where the names of Michelson, Levi-Civita, Minkowski and Silberstein are all associated with Einstein's achievement, one begins to feel that the "Elders of Zion" have unwittingly conspired to explain the world's most baffling phenomena, and apparently have met with success.