Diego Moldes is the author of the book When Einstein Met Kafka: Jewish Contributions to the Modern World. The book has been translated from Spanish to English by Steven Capsuto. Moldes, the author of many other books, is based in Spain.
Q: Why did you decide to write When Einstein Met Kafka, and how was the book’s title chosen?
A: About 30 years ago, in 1995, the centenary year of cinema, I began to notice the disproportionate presence of Jewish screenwriters, directors, and producers in American and European cinema.
Then, starting in 2000, I began reading books on Jewish history and the history of culture and literature, and there I encountered the same phenomenon: a disproportionate presence of Jewish creators. In many cases, these Jews changed their surnames to ones that sounded more Anglo-Saxon, more English. The cause was anti-Semitism.
I began to organize the information by fields of activity in the sciences and humanities until I had identified some 15 or 17 professional areas. My initial idea was to publish a series of 17 books and assign a topic to each specialist, which meant that I had to bring together 17 writers from different academic fields. That was impossible in the Spanish publishing world. So I decided to write the book myself.
I was extremely fortunate that Joan Tarrida, founder and director of the Galaxia Gutenberg publishing house, trusted me and my book from the outset. And he continues to do so.
The original title was going to be The Importance of Jews in Modernity or The Contributions of Jews to the Modern World. I mentioned it to the director of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), Darío Villanueva, during one of our lunches. He told me to look for a title that didn't sound so academic and would be more appealing to readers of general interest books.
It was while thinking about a trip to Prague, as I recount in the prologue, that I came up with the idea of naming it after the meeting of these two great icons of modernity, Einstein as representative of the empirical sciences and Kafka as representative of modern literature.
Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that particularly surprised you?
A: The research process lasted about two decades, from the beginning of 2000 (just when I started working) until the publication of the book in Spanish in November 2019. This English version updates the information to June 2025, thanks to the joint work carried out by the translator Steven Capsuto and myself.
As for the most important contributions of the ancient Israelites to humanity, the ones that surprised me the most when I read them were those I included in the chapters entitled “Origins of the City, Origins of Cement” (in Jericho) and “Invention of Glass” (an invention that was not simultaneous in different parts of the world, as has been erroneously written, but rather emerged in Canaan and spread throughout the Fertile Crescent to the rest of the world).
Among thousands of ideas and things in all areas of our daily lives, we owe the skills and talents of the Jews the weekly day of rest, initially Saturday or Sabbath, the Ten Commandments—including the most sacred: thou shalt not kill—the end of human sacrifice (Abraham and Isaac, Genesis 22), the invention of cement more than 9,000 years ago (in Jericho, the oldest city in the world), the invention of glass in ancient Mesopotamia, paper money (medieval Chinese Jews), paper money (in Europe since the 17th century) and checks; vaccines and medical advances of all kinds, such as various treatments in the fight against cancer, hepatitis, and AIDS (Gertrude B. Elion, Bruce Beutler, Ralph Marvin Steinman), the first treatment for leukemia, modern immunology (Paul Ehrlich), the first effective medicinal treatment for syphilis (arsphenamine or Salvarsan), the discovery of vitamins (Kazimierz Funk), cholesterol (Konrad Emil Bloch), blood groups (Karl Landsteiner), the structure of DNA (Rosalind Franklin), antibiotics, polio vaccines (Jonas Salk), oral contraceptive pills (Gregory Pincus), quantum physics (Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Ernst Pauli, John von Neumann), the first Big Bang theory (Alexandre Friedmann), topology and topography (Solomon Lefschetz, Felix Hausdorff), psychology and psychoanalysis (Vienna Psychoanalytic Society: Freud, Alfred Adler, Karl Abraham, Sándor Ferenczi, Wilhelm Reich, Sabina Spielrein), sociology (Émile Durkheim) and modern anthropology (Claude Levi-Strauss), statistics, cybernetics (Norbert Wiener), neurology and neurophysiology (Otto Loewi, Abraham Low, Rita Levi-Montalcini, Karl Pribram), the initial development of nanotechnology (Richard Feynman), plastic surgery and rhinoplasty (Irving B. Goldman), the first immunosuppressive agent for organ transplants...
Q: Especially at a time of increased antisemitism, what do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: We are experiencing the greatest rise in anti-Semitism in 80 years, since the end of World War II in 1945. I have always said that anti-Semitism is the serpent's egg, the egg of hatred that harbors all other forms of hatred: xenophobia, racism, homophobia, sexism, Islamophobia, and so on.
Anti-Semitism, or rather Judeophobia, is like a virus that spreads everywhere, in all social classes and ideological sectors, in the East and in the West. I find it hugely unjust that a people who have made so many positive contributions to modern society should be treated so unfairly.
As my fields of work are education and culture, I decided at a very young age that I would devote part of my efforts to fighting anti-Semitism through education and culture. There are other areas, such as politics, but that is not my world. My world is culture. And modern culture cannot be understood in any way without the Jews.
Q: The scholar Harvey J. Graff called the book “the fullest and most historically grounded study of Jewish intellectual and cultural achievements and contributions.” What do you think of that description?
A: I am very grateful to Harvey Graff for his support for the book. I am familiar with his work as a historian of English language literacy, a field in which he is the leading authority. That is why his praise for my book is an undeserved compliment. I don't know if the description is exaggerated.
I can say that I don't know of any other book like mine, with its secular approach focused on people and their ideas, not religion, which, like politics, is not within my sphere of interest. My book is the only one that analyzes some 250 years of the Jewish presence in the West and its positive contributions to humanity. That is its originality.
I hope that readers in the United States and Canada, and all English-speaking readers around the world, will enjoy it.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I have just finished a novel, a political spy thriller that has taken me a year to write. I had the idea in London 20 years ago but couldn't bring it to fruition until now. I have also written a book of aphorisms. And a book that covers my 25 years as a film historian, Más grande que la vida. Escritos sobre cine 2000-2025 (Bigger than life. Writings on cinema 2000-2025).
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I would like to thank Robert Mandel, founder with Irene Vilar of Mandel Vilar Press, for committing to the publication of this book. Mandel's prestige in the US is a seal of quality that will help spread the word about the book among the educated American public.
I am also grateful, of course, to Steven Capsuto for his wonderful translation, after three years of hard work. In addition, he has adapted the book for American readers and corrected my mistakes, many of which were carried over from other authors, thanks to Steven's multilingualism and extensive research. He has improved my book.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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