During the 1970s, feminists were animated and the ladies were asking a lot of questions. Linda Nochlin, in her essay “Why have there been no great women artists?” asked a question she already knew how to answer. There have been no “great” women artists simply because we live in a patriarchal society. And the boys don’t want competition from the ladies. And although women have excelled in many fields, their glory gets easily grounded. Often, it’s because men have the power to steal their ideas. And these thefts need to be exposed.
That Albert Einstein took advantage of his wife’s mathematical skills to promote his own ideas was fairly common knowledge. To better understand their arrangement, I ordered the book “The Forbidden History of Mileva Einstein-Maric’” by Christopher Jon Bjerknes. The first page has a quote from Einstein: “The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.” And that is exactly what he did.
Despite the title, Mileva is not, unfortunately, the protagonist of this book. Einstein is.
Mileva Maric’ (1875-1948) was born in Serbia. She had a dream that took her to the Zurich Polytechnic where she was the only female student. Einstein was also attending the Polytechnic. He noticed Mileva’s talent especially as a mathematician and began pursuing her. In 1903, they were married and Einstein got a job at the patent office in Bern. He and Mileva began working together on the theory of relativity, appropriating many of their ideas from Poincare and Lorentz. In fact, I always believed that Einstein got the Nobel prize for the theory of relativity, but he was ineligible for the prize because of his well-known plagiarism regarding it. Instead, Einstein got his Nobel for “his services to theoretical physics and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.”
Albert Einstein was not an easy man to live with. He physically and mentally abused his wife. He was also a hardcore womanizer and had numerous affairs including one with his married cousin, Elsa Lowenthal. Elsa wanted to get married so Einstein asked Mileva for a divorce. Part of the divorce agreement was that Mileva would get the money from the Nobel if Einstein were ever to win it. When Einstein won, he gave the money to Mileva who used it to buy a home for herself and their two sons.
I knew that Einstein was Jewish and that he was considered a pacifist. However, I didn’t know he was a racist. He hated gentiles especially the Europeans and the Chinese. He was a convinced Zionist and believed that anti-Semitism was necessary to force segregation so Jews and Gentiles would keep away from one another and thus preserve the Jewish race.
From Einstein I learned that just as there is anti-Semitism, there’s also anti-Gentilism.
Mileva raised their two sons on her own. The youngest son, Eduard, suffered from schizophrenia. Mileva died of a stroke in 1948 at the age of 72. Einstein had his son institutionalized then never saw him again. Eduard died 17 years later.
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