This article appeared in the Guardian on Tuesday May 13 2008 on p3 of the Top
stories section. It was last updated at 11:58 on May 13 2008.

An abridgement of the letter from Albert Einstein to Eric Gutkind from
Princeton in January 1954, translated from German by Joan Stambaugh. It will be sold
at Bloomsbury auctions on Thursday

... I read a great deal in the last days of your book, and thank you very
much for sending it to me. What especially struck me about it was this. With
regard to the factual attitude to life and to the human community we have a great
deal in common.

... The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of
human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive
legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how
subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly
manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the
original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation
of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly
belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality
for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no
better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst
cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them.

In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to
defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one
as a Jew. As a man you claim, so to speak, a dispensation from causality
otherwise accepted, as a Jew the priviliege of monotheism. But a limited causality
is no longer a causality at all, as our wonderful Spinoza recognized with all
incision, probably as the first one. And the animistic interpretations of the
religions of nature are in principle not annulled by monopolisation. With such
walls we can only attain a certain self-deception, but our moral efforts are
not furthered by them. On the contrary.

Now that I have quite openly stated our differences in intellectual
convictions it is still clear to me that we are quite close to each other in essential
things, ie in our evalutations of human behaviour. What separates us are only
intellectual 'props' and 'rationalisation' in Freud's language. Therefore I
think that we would understand each other quite well if we talked about concrete
things. With friendly thanks and best wishes

Yours, A. Einstein