Einsteins unpublished opening lecture for his course on relativity theory in Argentina, 1925

In a very short time Dr. Mauricio Nirenstein (1877Nirenstein ( -1935)), then the university’s administrative secretary, fulfilled all the requirements for the university’s invitation to be endorsed and delivered to the sage in Berlin. The visit took place three years later, in March-April 1925.

The Argentine press received Einstein with great interest and respect; his early exchanges covered a wide range of topics, including international politics and Jewish matters.

Naturally, the journalists were more eager to hear from the eminent pacifist than from the incomprehensible physicist. However, after his initial openness with the press, the situation changed and Einstein restricted his public discourse to topics on theoretical physics, avoiding some controversial political, religious, or philosophical matters that he had freely touched upon in earlier interviews.

Immediately after Einstein’s visit, Mauricio Nirenstein published a short paper in which he made some interesting remarks on the visit and the visitor. His paper was presented as a dialogue, a personal conversation in which Einstein outlined his views on the epistemology of the physical sciences. In a footnote, Nirenstein explained that Einstein’s thoughts on epistemology were based on an unpublished text. However, in his reference to Einstein’s text on epistemology, he indicated that Einstein’s remarks were given in response to a recent newspaper article. He did not mention that Einstein, in fact, had written this text for his opening lecture at the UBA. Consequently, he did not explain why he did not publish it verbatim or in translation.

occasionally to the use of violence. In 1930 a military uprising toppled the elected government and the more conservative university authorities began to adapt to the realities of world depression (Halperin Donghi 2003).

In 1922, the same year Nirenstein was designated the UBA Secretary, the university began considering proposals to invite Einstein to Argentina. Einstein’s invitation was very much in tune with the pacifist ideals of the Reform movement, which Duclout, one of the earliest advocates of relativity theory in Argentina, fully shared. Due to that convergence of objectives, members of the SHA also played a role in the gestation of the invitation, offering to help draft some wealthy German-Jewish businessmen established in Argentina to contribute financially and make the invitation more attractive. It was finally arranged that the visit would take place in March-April 1925.

Einstein’s invitation to visit Argentina was part of a much wider and persistent effort to attract foreign university teachers to help modernize Argentina’s scientific and technical base, a process the country had started in the 1870s and intensified further after the end of the First World War. In the same year Einstein was invited to visit Argentina, the eminent Berlin professor Georg-Friedrich Nicolai (1874-1964), a well known scientist and pacifist (Zuelzer 1981), as well as one of Einstein’s personal friends and co-signatory of the counter-manifest of 1914, accepted the offer of the chair of physiology at the old University of Córdoba, in Central Argentina (Ortiz 1995). The latter, founded in the seventeenth century as a Jesuit school, was also the place where the Reform movement had started precisely four years before Nicolai’s arrival.

In March 1925, as planned, the ship on which Einstein traveled to Argentina approached the coast of South America. The UBA’s Council sent a delegation of Argentine academics, which included its administrative secretary Nirenstein, to Montevideo, its last stop before reaching Buenos Aires. They welcomed Einstein there and accompanied him on the last leg of his journey across the River Plate to Buenos Aires. As a German speaker and a man intimately linked to the UBA and the SHA, and also in touch with the main financial contributors to the visit and with the German-Argentine Jewish community, Nirenstein was a natural choice as Einstein’s personal contact while in Argentina. In addition, he was a tactful, prudent, and well connected man who sensed the mood of national politics as well as that of the different groups sponsoring the visit.

From that journey on he established friendly contact with Einstein and later played a role of some influence in managing his visit. Sometimes with his wife, one of Holmberg’s daughters, Nirenstein accompanied Einstein on his academic trips inside Argentina. He would not, however, qualify to acco

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