Albert Einstein and George Bernard Shaw’s anti-Nazi dinner menu up for auction

The dinner invitation with which Lord Rothschild wanted to gather on 28 October 1930 at thehotel Savoy of London, the best of British culture and beyond, to create awareness of the growing danger posed by the National Socialist Party in Germany and to raise funds for the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe threatened by growing anti-Semitism. Will be presented by the British auction house Lawrences on March 21st.

The guest of honor was none other than the German Jewish physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955), already very famous for his theory of relativity but also for his anti-militarist and pacifist positions, who arrived in London (in those years he was traveling between the United States and Germany) precisely to attend the dinner.

The guests – over 370 people – gathered in the famous London hotel at the invitation of Rothschild to raise funds for the Joint British Committee of the Societies Ort-Ozein support of Jewish communities in Europe, and the menu itself, according to Robert Ansell, who handles the auction for Lawrences, represents “a symbol of unity in a period of growing oppression for the Jewish people in the years preceding the Second world War”.

In fact, precisely in those days, in October 1930, the Nazi Party had won a sufficient number of seats in the Reichstag to form the second party in the German Parliament, and the growing anti-Semitism worried many in Germany and abroad: the Joint British Committee from the Ort-Oze Society it was intended to alleviate the hardships of German and Eastern European Jews. The famous playwright George Bernard ShawNobel Prize winner for literature in 1925, was tasked with presenting a toast to Einstein, while the physicist delivered his speech in German, translated live by Leon Rees.

Shaw toasted the scientist by praising him as “the destroyer of the Old Absolutism and builder of a new order” and comparing him to Pythagoras, Ptolemy, Aristotle, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton. Thanking him, Einstein instead confessed: “It is not easy for me to overcome the inclination to a life of quiet contemplation. However, I cannot help but respond to this cry. Because it is to the very cry of our harshly oppressed people that I respond.”

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The scientist, who was sitting next to the writer HG Wells and Lord Rothschild, signed the menu which is now going up for auction, together with those who were sitting next to him; that evening, 24 thousand dollars were raised for charity.

A few years later, in 1933, with Hitler’s rise to power, Albert Einstein and his wife Elsa emigrated to United Stateswhere the physicist died in 1955 after obtaining American citizenship.