EPP Editors' Reflections on CPAE Vol. 17: Ze'ev Rosenkranz
Documentary editing is a meticulous process. Thorough research and skillful attention to detail are expected standards among practitioners in the field. One thing people outside of the field may not consider is that editors work to avoid injecting their present day understanding of historical events into their annotation of documents. Separating one's knowledge of events as they later unfolded from factual details of the historical record requires rigor and balance. Editorial work and editorializing are distinct and separate things. Einstein Papers Projects editors engage in the former, working to contextualize facts without the interference of hindsight. Project historians and researchers spend years sorting, analyzing and researching the materials that go into our volumes. Understanding this makes it especially interesting to find out what our editors think of the documents they edit, beyond the confines of the documentary editing process. Here, EPP Senior Editor, Ze'ev Rosenkranz writes about the materials that were most challenging for him when working on our forthcoming book: The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 17.
The most challenging materials I worked on for Vol. 17 were, undoubtedly, the documents related to Einstein's reactions to the outbreak of interethnic violence in Palestine in August 1929 and its aftermath. The materials were challenging for three reasons. Firstly, Einstein's public statements and private comments on the dramatic events, as with so many other political and social issues he was confronted with, fluctuated over time. Secondly, it was also difficult to unravel which public declarations were his own and which formed collaborations with colleagues and associates. And lastly and most importantly, the other reason these documents were formidable to annotate was due to the fact that the eruption of intercommunal violence between Palestinians Arabs and Jews in that period was unfortunately only a portent of the decades of intense bloodshed that has occurred in the region hence and is still ongoing.
Einstein's extensive correspondence on the events of the summer 1929 and their outcome and his various proposals on these matters came to play a major role in the ensuing public debates of the period. His opinions on the events that are referred to as "the Wailing (or Western) Wall riots," "the events of 5689 (i.e., 1929)," and "the al-Buraq uprising" developed over time. In the immediate wake of the violent disturbances, he seemed to support the mainstream Zionist arguments on their causes. However, he gradually became more critical of what he perceived as the intransigent nature of the Zionist leadership's stance on the matter and did not hesitate to voice this criticism in public declarations. From the beginning, he blamed the lack of daily contact between Palestinians and Jews for the mutual fear and mistrust between them. In his opinion, the psychological barriers between the communities needed to be overcome, and blinding chauvinism had to be avoided.
Einstein's most significant correspondence on the conflict was conducted with Hugo Bergmann, cofounder of Brith Shalom, a small pacifist movement among Jewish intellectuals in Palestine. In his letters, Einstein stressed the importance of creating "a genuine symbiosis between Jews and Arabs in Palestine" and clarified that he viewed such a symbiosis as "the existence of continuously functioning, mixed administrative, economic, and social organizations" (Doc. 70). In contrast to the Zionist mainstream view represented by Chaim Weizmann, Einstein declared in one of his interviews that it was not possible or desirable to develop Jewish reconstruction in Palestine against the will of the Arab people. He advocated that the Jews must treat the Arabs in the same way they wanted other peoples to treat them and that they must seek to understand the Arabs in the same way they wanted others to understand them (Appendix E). In the wake of the interview, he warned Weizmann that without finding "the path to honest cooperation and honest negotiations with the Arabs," "we have not learned anything on our way of two thousand years' suffering and deserve the fate that is in store for us" (Doc. 128).
Einstein also conducted an important public exchange with the Palestinian Arab journalist Azmi al-Nashashibi and put forth a concrete suggestion for the future governance of the country: he proposed the establishment of a secret council consisting of four representatives from each side, independent of any political body. The representatives would be a physician, a jurist, a workers' representative, and a cleric (Einstein 1930w [Doc. 265]). Ultimately, he was deeply disappointed in the Zionist leadership's reaction to the violence and vented to his sister Maja that "our Jews have revealed themselves in the Palestinian-Arab matter as chauvinistic nationalists without psychological instinct and sense for equity. Good thing that they are powerless and don't have cannons" (Doc. 274).