Is this quote about the Bhagavad Gita properly attributed to Albert Einstein?

Question

The Bhagavad Gita is Hindu scripture.

The blog of Sivana East claims that Albert Einstein said:

When I read the Bhagavad-Gita and reflect about how God created this universe everything else seems so superfluous.

Did Albert Einstein say this?

Answer 1

It's highly doubtful that that quote is authentic given Einstein's general views on traditional/organized religion:

The word God, he says, is “nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness,” and the Hebrew Bible is a collection of “honorable, but still purely primitive legends.”

So Einstein expressing awe at some other religious text (the Bhagavad-Gita) seems quite improbable. On the other hand, Einstein did have quasi-religious views, but of a somewhat different "pantheistic" kind, e.g.:

On 24 April 1929, Einstein cabled Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein in German: "I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind."[24] He expanded on this in answers he gave to the Japanese magazine Kaizō in 1923:

Scientific research can reduce superstition by encouraging people to think and view things in terms of cause and effect. Certain it is that a conviction, akin to religious feeling, of the rationality and intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a higher order. [...] This firm belief, a belief bound up with a deep feeling, in a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience, represents my conception of God. In common parlance this may be described as "pantheistic" (Spinoza).

(He elaborated on this some more in later writings/interview, but the above is enough here.)

Somewhat more clearly, in 1954 Einstein wrote:

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

So I think this latter view of Einstein was "cleverly" exploited by prepending the Bhagavad-Gita mention (possibly inadvertently or deliberately by confusion with Oppenheimer though) to something (the 2nd part of the questionable statement) that does sound a bit like something that Einstein could have said, although the fact that the questionable quote doesn't have any Spinoza/pantheism/science mentions makes it quite improbable that it is authentic in any part.

Answer 2

This blog post analyzes the quote.

Basically arguing that based on fuzzy grammatical structure, nonexistence of an exact source, and comparison in general to other Einstein quotes, the quote is probably fake.

I conclude by referring to this discussion and this clarification from Wikiquote which leaves very little room for doubt that this Gita endorsement of Einstein is an imposture and a crude fabrication of Hindu jingoists.

Answer 3

As you already know, the blog post you provided lacked any sort of citation and obviously was a bit suspect so I did a google books search of the quote to see if I could find a book that cited a source for the quote. Surprisingly I found a book that did, but the preview on both Google Books and Amazon did not allow me to check the actual citation, however I eventually found a preview that allowed me to view the citations and again surprisingly it was in a list of quite specific citations, however unlike the other citations listed which were full academic citations, the citation simply listed a URL and even worse a URL that returned a 404 error, so I used The Wayback Machine to find an archived version of the web article cited. When I found it I was admittedly disappointed as it was simply a list of unsourced quotes obviously of little value as a valid citation.

Bhagavad Gita on Effective Leadership by Pujan Roka in preview see quote on 107 and citation on 143 Archived source

Wikiquote's talk page has some theories on where this apocryphal quote originated and one editor suggested the quite recent date of origin as 2005. I would suspect, though I have no evidence to support it, that it originated as a merger of various paraphrased or misremembered quotes that Einstein made concerning his religious beliefs combined with a famous quote, by a physicist who was a contemporary of Einstein, Robert Oppheinheimer who famously quoted the Bhagavad Gita upon detonation of the first atomic weapon.

Wikiqoute

"We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another"

Federation of American Scientists article (video)