But all this begs the question why Einstein bothered to claim Jewishness, if Judaism itself as a practice and a body of belief had no hold on him.

To beg the question means to assume the truth of a conclusion in the premise on argument or alternatively to assume a proposition in an argument which is not obvious. It does not mean “to raise the question” which I surmise is your intended meaning here.

Einstein wrote to him:

“I am frankly annoyed that you have this caprice of being without religious affiliation; give it up for your children’s sake. Besides, once you are a professor here, you can go back to this curious whim again – and it is only necessary for a little while.”

Once again, Einstein indicates here that religion was simply not worth discussing.

The Ehrenfest job search did not end in Prague. He later got a position at Leiden which did not require a religion.

(The quote is found on page 59 of:
Segre, Gino, _Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics_, Penguin Books, New York, 2008)

” … coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies.”

In recent times the telling of lies by the state, bald faced lies told without any apparent sense of shame by a government which is supposed to be a “democracy,” has reached dimensions paralleled by Bismarkian Germany or the corrupt Austro-Hungarian aristocrats. An example of youth being told lies is seen with the military recruiters in high schools peddling this war based on fraud.

The virtues of Judaism lie in part with its historical status as a minority religion. I suspect that if historical circumstances had been different and Judaism swept a portion of the world it would culturally be similar to Islam. It would not have inculcated the sense of social justice which has marked the culture of Judaism in modern times. The God of the Torah is not a particularly “nice guy,” and even calls himself jealous. YHWH in fact calls for the extermination of the “Jebusite, Hittites, Perizites, … with no mercy. The gift Judaism imparted to the world is the idea that the world exists in categories, as can be seen in the creation story. There the central Judaic concept of kodesh or separation can be seen in that the world is created in dualistic or distinct categories — light from dark, dry land from sea and so forth. The next crucial element is the idea that God operates by law, which we humans must obey, and with the implication that so too the world also obeys “laws.” So the 10 commendments in addition to the Leviticus, Deuteronomic “Mosaic code” of 613 laws comes the idea that God is not purely whimsical or fickle —- though the story of Job examines this bit with some criticality. The add to this considerable tempering necessary for a minority religion and the result has been a fairly religio-cultural thread which has a measure of learnedness.

It is likely for this reason that the proportion of Jewish intellectuals is remarkably high, and why two of the 20th centuries most luminary scientists, Einstein and Feynman, were Jews. The catalyst for getting the Jewish intellect moving came after Napolean when Jews began to leave the Stetls. I reject any notion of there being a genetic basis for this, but Christianity is a majority religion and in a triumphal sense proclaims itself as “inerrant and true,” declaring its revealed truths supereme over all. These is a relative paucity of southern Baptists who become great thinkers.

The problem with all religions is that they propose a “top-down” system of cosmology. Laws or rules are derived from the top, and handed down. We hapless humans are meant to obey, with various agricultural analogues given through the bible. Science has taught us that if there is some heirarchy to the physical world, say a heirarchy based on complexity, that things are more bottom-up. A more accurate view might be that all heirarchies are in some ways subjective and really fundamentally don’t even exist. In “da-mix” of this of course is Charles Darwin, the devil incarnate to many religious folks, who told us that life was interrelated. We appear to have outgrown the need for religous ideas about things, just as children outgrow Santa Clause.

Lawrence B. Crowell

You don’t just need to justify that evil can exist in the face of a good god, but that every single last minute detail of evil that exists is being allowed. You don’t just need to argue that the Holocaust was for the greater good in the end for future generations, you need to argue that the same good could not have been achieved if a single additional child had survived.

In the end these arguments always return to “God is mysterious and it’s really complicated so better don’t question it, as we have no way of understanding how this is good for us in the end.”

Whoops! Yes, of course, it was J.Edgar