Albert Einstein Archives

• 1. Introduction

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  The Albert Einstein Archives hold roughly 55,000 items on the Givat Ram campus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. These are the personal papers of the 20th century physicist Albert Einstein. Among them is a letter to the Arabic newspaper Falastin proposing a "Secret Council" of Arabs and Jews to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. The collection also holds love letters Einstein wrote to several women, including Elsa, who became his second wife. Einstein's own will handed this material, and its copyright, to the Hebrew University. How did papers scattered across Berlin, Paris, and Princeton end up together in Jerusalem? And why did it take until the 21st century for the public to see much of it?

• 2. Ties To Jerusalem

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  In 1923, Einstein spent 12 days in Palestine, delivering the first lecture ever given on the Mount Scopus campus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The university itself would not open for another two years, in 1925. Menachem Ussishkin, president of the Zionist Executive, invited Einstein to settle permanently in Jerusalem. Einstein never returned; that single trip remained his only visit to the city. He also became a member of the university's first board of governors. In 1925, the original 46-page manuscript of his general theory of relativity arrived at the Hebrew University. It stood as a physical link to Einstein, years before any formal archive existed there.

• 3. Saving The Papers

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  From 1919 onward, as his fame grew, Einstein relied on his stepdaughter Ilse to manage his correspondence as a secretarial assistant. Helen Dukas (1896-1982) took over that role with much stricter organization starting in April 1928. Even so, Einstein did not keep everything, and some outgoing letters were never saved at all. When the Nazis seized power in 1933, Einstein's son-in-law Rudolf Kayser, helped by the French Embassy, rescued his papers out of Berlin. At the family's summer house in Caputh, Brandenburg, some material was destroyed on purpose to keep it out of Nazi hands. Most of the work from 1930-1932 survived that danger. The rescued papers passed through Haberlandstrasse, the Berlin street where Einstein had lived, then on to Paris. From there they crossed the Atlantic to Princeton, New Jersey, where they sat in storage until after Einstein died.

• 4. Organizing The Estate

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  Einstein's 1950 will named Helen Dukas and Otto Nathan as trustees of his estate. It stated plainly that "All literary rights and assets shall be vested in the Hebrew University." Einstein died in 1955, and the two trustees spent years afterward putting his papers into order. By the 1960s, Dukas had teamed up with the physicist Gerald Holton of Harvard University in the United States to reorganize the whole archive. Their goal was publication, carried out as a joint project between the Hebrew University and Princeton University Press. The collection had grown from about 14,000 documents at the time of Einstein's death in 1955 to roughly 42,000 by 1982. To support that work, the papers moved from Einstein's former Princeton home to the Institute for Advanced Study nearby. In 1982, the Einstein Estate transferred his personal papers from Princeton to the Jewish National & University Library in Jerusalem. President Avraham Harman of the Hebrew University and Milton Handler of the American Friends of the Hebrew University oversaw that transfer. Additional material continued arriving from the Princeton home in the years after 1982.

• 5. A New Home In Jerusalem

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  The Dibner Fund of Connecticut established the Bern Dibner Curatorship in 1988 to manage the Albert Einstein Archives going forward. Manfred Waserman served as the first curator, 1988-1989. Ze'ev Rosenkranz succeeded him, serving 1989-2003, the same year the catalogue first went online. Roni Grosz has led the Archives since 2004. The Archives joined the Hebrew University's Library Authority in January 2008, then moved that July into the Levy Building on the Givat Ram campus. In March 2012, the university announced it had digitized the collection and would make more of it accessible online. It released an initial 2,000 documents to start. Since the 19th of March 2012, the Archives have continued adding more of Einstein's papers online. Princeton University Press has also played an active role in that ongoing effort.