Bidspirit auction | EINSTEIN, ALBERT. About Zionism. Speeches

EINSTEIN, ALBERT. About Zionism. Speeches and Letters. Edited by Leon Simon. FIRST AMERICAN EDITION. pp. 94. Couple of inscriptions in red. Portion of dust-jacket including portrait of Einstein tipped to opening paste-downs. Original boards, lacking full dust-jacket. 8vo. New York, 1931. Three of Einstein’s editorials and lectures on the subject of Zionism, with an introduction by the translator and select bibliography. “Professor Einstein, some of whose scattered speeches and letters on Zionism and kindred questions are collected in this volume, is better known to the world as a physicist than a Zionist. Yet for many years past he has given abundant proof both of a keen interest in Zionism and of a penetrating insight into its underlying ideas. Himself an assimilated Jew, he is impelled to Zionism by his acute consciousness of the excessive price at which the blessing of assimilation are bought by the Jewish communities of the western world…” (Leon Simon, from the introduction). Sir Leon Simon (1881-1965) was a leading British-Jewish scholar, civil servant and a Zionist who took part in the drafting of the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and served on the Zionist Commission with Chaim Weizmann (the future first President of the State of Israel). Simon was an advocate of cultural Zionism and the revival of Hebrew language.