The letter, dated 1954 and written in German, is addressed to the philosopher Eric Gutkind. The physicist Albert Einstein puts into question the existence of God.

A handwritten letter from Albert Einstein in which the physicist questions the existence of God was sold Tuesday, December 4 in New York, $ 2.89 million in auctions organized by Christie's. This is a record for a letter from the Nobel Prize in Physics (1921). The price is significantly higher than the estimate range, between $ 1 million and $ 1.5 million.

#AuctionUpdate: Albert Einstein's Letter to 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

In March 2002, a letter sent in 1939 to Franklin D. Roosevelt, then President of the United States, warning him of the German atomic projects, had been acquired for $ 2.1 million.

In the letter sold to German philosopher Eric Gutkind on Tuesday, written in German in 1954, Einstein, the greatest physicist of the twentieth century, refutes all religious belief, he the Jew who fled Germany after the advent of 'Hitler.

"The word God is for me nothing but the expression and the product of human weaknesses, and the Bible is a collection of venerable but still primitive legends , " writes the researcher from Princeton University. New Jersey, a year before his death in April 1955. "No interpretation, however subtle it may be, will change anything (for me)" , he adds in this missive of a page and a half to the philosopher German.

$ 404,000 in 2008

The last sale of this letter dates back to 2008, when it was auctioned to a private collector for $ 404,000, Christie's said.

In his letter, the author of the theory of relativity, who died at 76, does not spare Judaism. "For me, the Jewish religion is, like all other religions, the incarnation of a primitive superstition ," he writes. And the Jewish people to which I proudly belong, and to the mentality of which I feel deeply rooted, do not have a form of dignity different from other peoples. In my experience, they are no better than other human groups, even if they are protected from the worst excesses by their lack of power. Otherwise I do not perceive anything "elected" at home. "