Einstein’s hand-written letter sells for record $2.89m

Albert Einstein’s hand-written letter in which he questions the existence of God has been sold in New York City for a record $2.89m.

#AuctionUpdate: Albert Einstein’s God Letter sold at Christie’s New York for $2,892,500, against a high estimate of $1.5 million. https://t.co/yRdlqrtbLc

— Christie's (@ChristiesInc) December 4, 2018

The Nobel Prize winner had written the letter, dated 1954 and written in German to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, saying that he did not believe in God. The greatest physicist of the 20th century, a Jewish man who had fled Germany after Hitler’s advent, refutes any religious belief.

“The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses. And the Bible, a collection of venerable but nevertheless quite primitive legends,” writes Einstein a year before his death in April 1955.

“No interpretation, however subtle, will change anything (for me),” he adds in this one-and-a-half page letter to the German philosopher.

The last sale of this letter was in 2008, when it was sold to a private collector for $404,000, Christie’s said.