Einstein's Jewish Science by Steven Gimbel is an important work of intellectual history and a valued parsing of a hateful assertion. Gimbel is a philosopher who is intellectually eclectic enough that he also edited a volume of “pop” philosophy on the Grateful Dead—this man has my attention!

Gimbel uses the Nazis’ vulgar argument that Einstein's work is/was worthless because it was “Jewish science.” The ability of the Third Reich to internally ban Nobel Prize winning scientists from the academy required much more than slick propaganda. Gimbel takes seriously the social framing of how Einstein's theory of relativity was turned into a corruption that only a Jew could conceive. The book offers readers a process of deconstruction that leads through the complex overlapping histories of physics, religion, German philosophy, and the development of Einstein's theory.

When I teach the Hebrew Bible to undergraduates, I constantly remind them that there is no text without a context and when we add a reader we add yet another context. Gimbel is able to take very complicated and often dense material and parse it by showing how each item has a context and then add our own perspective as twenty‐first century readers with our post‐Holocaust context. Einstein's popularity permits Gimbel to expend very little biographical energy even as he outlines the work of many German scientists whose work is foundational to Einstein. Most challenging is Gimbel's attempt to contextualize the Jewish intellectual elements of Einstein's thinking.

“Why Did a Jew Formulate the Theory of Relativity?” is the title of Chapter Three and Gimbel uses this and other rhetorical questions to lead his readers far beyond the Nazis’ hateful label. “Is there a Jewish style of thinking, an approach that may not be limited to Jews or found in the work of all or even most Jewish thinkers, but which is typical of a certain type of Judaic inquiry?” (69). Gimbel does not want us to imagine Einstein as a Talmudist, but he does want us to think about Descartes as a Catholic thinker and Newton as influenced by Protestant theology. Therefore, it is only logical that Einstein, a Jew, should be “methodologically [using] Jewish science” (69). He pushes his assertion without a conclusion: While there is certainly no link between Einstein's work and rabbinic tradition, there is an interesting resemblance between their approaches to problems. We can find formal patterns that resemble Talmudic reasoning in “Einstein's special theory of relativity…” (86).

“The heart of the Talmudic view is that there is an absolute truth, but this truth is not directly and completely available to us. We can only see it through our experience, which is limited to a context. In our search for deeper meaning, we must try to understand how that limited view of the truth fits together with seemingly contrasting views of the truth from other different perspectives and contexts…. The problem isn't in the science, it is in the interpretation” (96–97). Like the early rabbinic sages who created hermeneutic principles that opened the biblical text to the challenges of life outside the biblical context, Einstein thought about time, space, and measurement in a way that conceded earlier perspectives and then shockingly offered a paradigm shift that goes beyond all prior understandings of time and space. In this way, Gimbel invites his readers to celebrate Einstein's daring as doing physics “Jewish style,” which simultaneously permits readers to repudiate the Nazis’ bigotry.

Gimbel distracts this reviewer with his choices of idiomatic discourse. “Jewish style” is his attempt to model that, unlike the Nazis who used Jewish as an anti‐Semitic stereotype that has no objective foundation, we can find an acceptable aura of what Jews among themselves sometimes call Yiddishkeit or Landsmannshaft—ethnic attributes that other family members recognize. Jewish style is used to describe deli food that meets a certain ethnic communal standard but is not Kosher—religiously sanctioned. Hence, Einstein does his scientific thinking within the experience of Jews: questions, answers, and then more questions—a communal hermeneutic of understanding an always‐expanding text and context. I take exception to Gimbel's unfortunate assertion: “The problem is that scientists before him have all been doing goyishe‐style science. They think there is an absolute state of the aether” (97). Goyishe is a disparaging Yiddish idiom (referring to Gentile‐like), and to describe Descartes and Newton in this way is tragically stereotypical of something said by Jews among Jews with an assumptive shrug of the shoulders, “Nu? What can you expect?”

Our author stumbles trying to find a discourse that is supportive, but not stereotypic, of the values and methodology from within which Einstein forever changed science. In the conclusion, he offers another curious idiom: “The method labeled as ‘Jewish style’ reasoning in which an absolute truth exists, but is unavailable to any particular frame of reference, provides the groundwork for what we might call a ‘cosmopolitan epistemology,’ that is, a new way of treating human knowledge in which we take seriously different perspectives, but do so in a fashion that does not undermine our belief in a real world or the human ability to develop objective truths about it” (213). Gimbel's choice of “cosmopolitan” is ironic because, like “Jewish science,” it too is tainted with its own anti‐Semitic stains.

When we characterize Einstein's theory of relativity as a paradigm shift, we are also noting that there are incommensurate differences in how we think about the contexts that preceded and then follow Einstein's thinking. Gimbel's sometimes‐awkward discourse is the rhetorical confirmation that we are still searching for the discourse that describes a difference that is so starkly different, we still cannot fathom how different. The Nazis understood that it was their culture in which Jews had thrived for centuries that provided the intellectual environment from within which Einstein's paradigm shift emerged, but the repugnance of Jews required that they reject anything that was not Aryan. Gimbel's challenge of parsing their anti‐Semitic repudiation is a fascinating intellectual exercise that stimulates the way we think about our thinking—it is a wonderful reflection worth our time and serious consideration.