Einstein's letter sold for $3 million
"Dear Mr. Gutkind,
At Brower's insistent recommendation, I have read most of your book in the last few days. Thank you for sending it to me. The following is particularly striking: we are remarkably similar in our actual attitudes toward life and human community: a supra-personal ideal of striving for freedom from egocentric desires, a desire to make existence more beautiful and noble, with an emphasis on the purely human, so that the inanimate is merely a means for us, and in no way manifests its dominance. (This point of view especially brings us together as an "un-American attitude").
And yet, if not for Brower's recommendation, I would never have delved into your book, since it is written in a language inaccessible to me. The word "God" means nothing to me more than a product and expression of human weakness, and the Bible is a collection of many revered, yet still primitive, legends. Their interpretation, no matter how skillful, will not convince me otherwise. These sophisticated interpretations, naturally, differ greatly from one another and have almost nothing in common with the original text. For me, the true Jewish religion, like all other religions, is the embodiment of primitive superstitions. The Jewish people, to whom I gladly belong, and whose mentality is deeply akin to me, however, has no special dignity for me compared to any other people. As experience tells me, Jews are no better than other groups of people, and only the absence of power saves them from the worst vices. I find nothing else in terms of their "chosenness."
Overall, I am depressed that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it with two walls of pride—an external, universal one, and an internal one—as a Jew. From a universal position, you claim a certain degree of freedom from the causality recognized in other cases; as a Jew, you claim the privilege of monotheism. But limited causality is no causality at all, as our remarkable Spinoza was apparently the first to recognize with all his insight. And the animistic concept of natural religions is not, in principle, abolished by their monopolization. Thanks to such walls, we can only achieve a certain self-deception, but they will not inspire our moral efforts. Quite the contrary.
Now that I have sincerely expressed to you the differences in our intellectual positions, it is nevertheless clear to me that, in essence, we are very close, namely in our assessments of human behavior. What separates us is only the intellectual framework, "rationalization," in Freud's language. And I think we would get along well if we discussed specific issues.
With gratitude and best wishes.
Yours, Albert Einstein
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