J. Robert Oppenheimer: 5 Facts, including His Fraught Relationship with Judaism

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July 16, 2023

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Five facts about the tortured genius who developed the nuclear bomb.

Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Manhattan Project which created the first atomic bombs in the 1940s, was a controversial figure during his life, and even more so after his death in 1967. Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film Oppenheimer, in which he’s played by Cillian Murphy, delves into Oppenheimer’s genius, conflicts, and complicated legacy.

Here are five facts about Oppenheimer’s remarkable life, including his tortured relationship with his Jewish identity.

1. Jewish Background

In 1904, when Robert Oppenheimer was born, his parents Ella and Julius Oppenheimer were swiftly joining the upper classes of New York society. Julius was born into a Jewish family in Germany in 1871 and moved to America as a teenager; by the time Robert was born, he was building up a successful textile company which allowed his family to live in luxury. Robert’s mother came from an old Jewish Philadelphia family and was a gifted artist. Together, she and Julius collected art from exciting new painters such as Van Gogh and Picasso, which adorned their apartment walls.

When it came to Judaism, the Oppenheimers forcefully rejected Jewish practice. They sent Robert to the Ethical Culture School in New York from second grade through high school. Founded by the Jewish community leader Felix Adler, the Ethical Culture Movement - in the words of biographer Ray Monk - “was to be a religion without religious belief” (quoted in Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center by Ray Monk. Doubleday: 2012).

Robert Oppenheimer’s school taught him to reject traditional religion and Judaism. By all accounts, Oppenheimer was a highly nervous boy who showed signs of genius from a very young age, yet who had few friends as a child.

His school’s creed of non-religiosity was so extreme that when friends asked Oppenheimer what the J in his name stood for, he used to reply that it stood for nothing, unwilling to divulge that it stood for his father’s name “Julius” which was seen as a very Jewish name at the time.

A young Robert stands with his father, Julius (ca. 1905).

His rejection of Judaism extended to downplaying his Jewish family’s culture and worth. When Robert Oppenheimer was five, he and his parents visited relatives in Germany. Robert’s grandfather Benjamin gave his beloved grandchild many gifts, including an encyclopedia about architecture, and a box of mineral samples, each labeled with their Latin and German names. Robert credited his lifelong love of mineral collecting to his grandfather’s gift, yet as an adult he inaccurately described his grandfather as an untutored “peasant” living in a “hovel” in “an almost Medieval German village”. It was a curious way to describe his intellectual, inquisitive grandfather, and perhaps speaks to Oppenheimer's discomfort with his more visibly Jewish European relatives.

Some of Oppenheimer’s closest friends noted his tortured relationship with Judaism. One colleague, the Jewish physicist Abraham Pais, believed that rejecting Judaism permanently harmed Oppenheimer, who spent the rest of his life restlessly searching for an ethical and spiritual framework in which to assess his legacy. “Robert’s parents had rejected orthodox Jewish society,” Pais wrote. “This may in part explain why he never spoke of himself as a Jew. I recall a discussion with [the great Jewish physicist and Nobel laureate, and close friend of Robert Oppenheimer] Isidor Rabi in which we both concluded that it might have been much better for him if he had been freer in regard to his Jewish descent (quoted in J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Life by Abraham Pais, with supplemental material by Robert P. Crease. Oxford University Press: 2006).

2. Brilliant Physicist

A dazzling student from a very young age, Robert Oppenheimer began studying at Harvard in 1922, the very year that Harvard began asking candidates to disclose their “race and religion” in a bid to cut the number of Jews who enrolled. He graduated in just three years with a degree in physics, then began a Ph.D. at Cambridge. He eventually switched to the University of Gottingen, in Germany, and received his doctorate in 1927, after defining - along with his colleague Max Born - a new theory of quantum mechanics.

Oppenheimer returned to the United States to teach physics, first at Caltech, then at the University of California, Berkeley, where he began to be recognized as one of the premier physicists of his generation. Berkeley began to be seen as a leading center of physics, thanks to Robert Oppenheimer and his illustrious colleagues.

Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer

Yet antisemitism continued to dog Oppenheimer. At Berkeley, he lobbied for his department to hire the great physicist Robert Serber. Raymond Birge, the department head, refused, writing, “One Jew in the department is enough” to a friend. Oppenheimer seemingly forgave him.

At Berkeley, Oppenheimer discovered a way to satisfy the nagging sense that his life needed a spiritual center. He began to work with Professor Arthur Ryder, an expert in Sanskrit, learning that ancient Hindu language. It was Oppenheimer’s eighth language, and it allowed him to read the Hindu scriptures in their original language.

“One Jew in the department is enough.”

In a 1948 interview with Time, Oppenheimer recalled deriving satisfaction from Ryder’s sense of right and wrong. Attributing Ryder’s moral sense to the ancient Greek Stoic school of thought, Oppenheimer described: “Ryder felt and thought and talked as a Stoic…a special subclass of the people who have a tragic sense of life, in that they attribute to human actions the completely decisive role in the difference between salvation and damnation. Ryder knew that a man could commit irretrievable error, and that in the face of this fact, all others were secondary.” It was a moral outlook that would allow Oppenheimer to process his role in creating the greatest weapon the world had ever seen, and to discuss his feelings of guilt and horror.

3. Rescuing Relatives from the Holocaust

Oppenheimer was unable to ignore his Jewish relatives back in Germany. Years later, when he was brought before the Atomic Energy Committee in 1954 on charges that he was a Communist, Oppenheimer spoke eloquently about the way the antisemitism his Jewish relatives suffered in Germany galvanized him to take an interest in public affairs. Left-leaning all his life, Oppenheimer had a great many friends who were either Communists or were sympathetic to Communist causes, in part because of its opposition to Nazism.

Actor Cillian Murphy (L) portrays Robert Oppenheimer (R)

Oppenheimer told the panel: “Beginning in late 1936, my interests began to change…I had a continuing, smoldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany. I had relatives there, and was later to help in extricating them and bringing them to this country…”

4. Inventing the Atomic Bomb - and Calling for Restraint

In 1943, Oppenheimer was asked to be the director of the Los Alamos, New Mexico site of the Manhattan Project, a top-secret plan to create an atomic bomb before Nazi Germany did. It was a seemingly impossible task: physicists raced to create a bomb in which a small interior explosion caused a critical mass of plutonium to implode, releasing an unprecedented amount of energy. After years of work, on July 16, 1945, the team tested the bomb at a site in southern New Mexico. Oppenheimer named the site Trinity, after a beloved poem by the 17th Century writer and Christian thinker John Donne.

On July 16, 1945, the world's first atomic bomb was detonated approximately 60 miles north of White Sands National Monument.

When the bomb exploded, it shone brighter than the sun. With the force of 21 kilotons of TNT, the first atomic bomb was the largest explosion ever seen on earth. Shockwaves were felt a hundred miles away. Oppenheimer later explained that as he watched the atomic bomb’s mushroom cloud roar into the sky, he thought of a line from the Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Following the conclusion of World War II, Oppenheimer became an outspoken opponent of the nuclear arms race and vehemently opposed developing an even more powerful hydrogen bomb. He was brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1949, and in 1953 his security clearance was revoked. Oppenheimer insisted on a hearing, and in 1954 the Atomic Energy Committee heard all about Oppenheimer’s Communist sympathies, his association with known Communists, and his opposition to America’s arms race with the Soviet Union. His security clearance was never reinstated. For the rest of his life, Oppenheimer directed the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He never worked on a military project again.

Oppenheimer seemed to experience both profound regret and pride in his contribution to the Manhattan Project. When a play was produced about him in 1954 which featured his character expressing extreme regret at inventing the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer was outraged and threatened to sue. “It seems to me,” he angrily said at a conference at the time, “you may well have forgotten Gurnica, Dachau, Coventry, Belsen, Warsaw, Dresden, Tokyo. I have not.” Developing the atomic bomb had led to the end of a brutal war, Oppenheimer insisted.

Yet in 1965, during an interview on CBS, Oppenheimer admitted feelings of guilt: “I think when you play a meaningful part in bringing about the death of over 100,000 people and the injury of a comparable number, you naturally don’t think of that as - with ease. I believe we had a great cause to do this. But I do not think that our consciences should be entirely easy….”

5. Identification with the Jewish People

For all his rejection of Jewish life, Robert Oppenheimer kept some links with his family’s faith and culture. He was involved with Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science from its founding in 1934, sitting on its board of governors and visiting the Jewish state to dedicate the Weizmann Institute of Nuclear Science in 1958.

Yet his closest friends lamented his refusal to delve deeper into his Jewish heritage. Oppenheimer often seemed to be a tortured soul, searching for a guiding set of morals and a spiritual framework in which to wrestle with the enormous ramifications of his research. He often seemed deeply unhappy.

In his book Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma, physicist Jeremy Bernstein quotes a conversation he conducted with Oppenheimer’s close friend Isador Rabi. “‘What was his problem?’ I asked. ‘Identity,’ Rabi answered. ‘Oppenheimer wanted every experience. In that sense he never focused. My own feeling is that if he had studied the Talmud and Hebrew, rather than Sanskrit, he would have been a much greater physicist….’” (quoted in Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma by Jeremy Bernstein. Ivan R. Dee: 2005).

J. Robert Oppenheimer was a tortured genius whose complex legacy is still debated today. Now, a whole new generation of moviegoers will be able to learn more about him and ponder his actions and the aftermath of his world-changing work.

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NilsTak
NilsTak
2 days ago

Heartbreaking to hear about the antisemitism at UC Berkeley, my alma mater from professors in the Physics Department which is still very pervasive. Shocking that it seemed to have just glossed over Oppenheimer, who, like me, made Berkeley his home. Such a brilliant man but I fear that he was a self-hating Jew. A big gap in the Oppenheimer humanity profile.

frumy fogel
frumy fogel
6 months ago

Terrific article. Just wondering if his inner turmoil over lack of connection to spirituality will be portrayed in the movie at all.

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