Eric Gutkind

• 1. Introduction

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  Eric Gutkind sent Albert Einstein a copy of his book "Choose Life: The Biblical Call To Revolt" sometime before January 1954. Einstein wrote back from Princeton on the 3rd of January 1954, and what he said was blunt. God, Einstein wrote, was "nothing but the expression and product of human weaknesses." The Bible, he added, was "a collection of venerable but still rather primitive legends." It is a striking moment: one of the twentieth century's most famous minds dismissing the life's work of a philosopher who had spent decades arguing that the Bible contained the key to human transformation.

  Gutkind was born in Berlin on the 9th of February 1877, and by the time that letter arrived he had lived through two world wars, crossed the Atlantic to escape fascism, and built a reputation as one of the more unusual thinkers in the German Jewish tradition. He died in Chautauqua, New York, on the 26th of August 1965. What happened in between is a story about mysticism, pacifism, a remarkable intellectual circle, and a philosopher who kept insisting that ancient Jewish texts held something urgent for the modern world.

• 2. Gnosticism to Kabbalah

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  Gutkind studied at the Humanistic Gymnasium and the University of Berlin, where he worked across philosophy, mathematics, the sciences, and the history of art. He studied anthropology with J. J. Bachofen, a scholar whose work on mythology and ancient societies shaped several European intellectuals of the era. From Bachofen's broad view of history, Gutkind developed his own starting point: a vision of history that had something in common with ancient Gnosticism, the old tradition that held material reality to be fallen and knowledge to be the path toward liberation.

  That Gnostic orientation proved to be a beginning rather than an endpoint. Over time Gutkind grew increasingly drawn to Jewish philosophy, and he began recasting his ideas in the language of the Kabbala. The Kabbala offered him a framework dense with symbol and cosmological ambition, a tradition that had always tried to find hidden structures beneath the surface of the sacred texts. His trajectory from Bachofen's anthropology through Gnostic history-reading and into Kabbalistic philosophy was not a set of discontinuous leaps; it was a single sustained effort to locate a ground beneath ordinary religious and secular categories.

• 3. The Pacifist-Mystical Circle

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  Walter Benjamin, Martin Buber, and the mathematician L. E. J. Brouwer all, at different points, belonged to the same intellectual circle as Gutkind. So did the painter Wassily Kandinsky, the economist Franz Oppenheimer, the statesman Walther Rathenau, the French writer Romain Rolland, the American novelist Upton Sinclair, and the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore. This was not a formal school with a fixed membership; it was a loose pacifist-mystical network of European thinkers who shared certain commitments and kept each other's company across national borders.

  Gutkind's 1910 book, published under the pseudonym Volker, served as a focal point for this circle. The book's German title translates roughly as "Sideric birth: seraphic peregrination from the death of the world to the baptism of action." In the 1920s it became the philosophical basis for the New Europe Groups organized in London by the Yugoslavian teacher Dimitrije Mitrinovic. Those groups drew figures including Sir Patrick Geddes, Sir Frederick Soddy, and John Cowper Powys. Mitrinovic and Gutkind also collaborated directly, publishing articles together in the literary magazine The New Age.

• 4. Choose Life and Einstein's Reply

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  "Choose Life: The Biblical Call To Revolt," published in the United States in 1952, was Gutkind's most consequential book in American terms. It was a reinterpretation of traditional Judaism, and it drew to his lectures students who were dissatisfied with both liberalism and orthodoxy alike. They were looking, as the source puts it, for something more concrete and dynamic than either tradition offered, and Gutkind's synthesis of Kabbalistic thought with a call for active revolt seemed to supply it.

  The copy Gutkind sent to Einstein provoked a response that has since become famous in its own right. Einstein's letter of the 3rd of January 1954 rejected not just Gutkind's reading of the Bible but the entire framework of Jewish religious identity. He wrote that he could not see anything "chosen" about the Jewish people, and he described the Jewish religion, like all religions, as "an incarnation of the most childish superstition." Einstein did not dismiss Gutkind the man; the letter was a genuine philosophical engagement. But the gulf between them was total. Gutkind had spent his career arguing that ancient texts contained a living call to transformation. Einstein saw only primitive legend.

• 5. The Absolute Collective

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  His second book, "The Absolute Collective," appeared in London in 1937, translated from German into English by Marjorie Gabain. The full subtitle was "A Philosophical Attempt to overcome our Broken State," a phrase that positioned the work explicitly against the fragmentation Gutkind saw in modern life. Henry Miller read the book and called it "true in the highest sense, entirely on the side of life."

  Gutkind had arrived in the United States in 1933, the year that also saw the collapse of the Weimar Republic and Hitler's appointment as chancellor. By the time "The Absolute Collective" was published in London, he had already begun teaching at the New School and at the College of the City of New York. The source notes that by then he already had an influential following, which suggests the reputation he had built in Europe translated across the Atlantic without needing to be rebuilt from scratch. A posthumous collection of his papers, "The Body of God: First Steps Toward an Anti-Theology," edited by Lucie B. Gutkind and Henry LeRoy Finch, appeared in New York in 1969.