When Hitler came to power in January 1933, Einstein was in the United States and resigned from all his positions in Berlin. He returned to Europe and settled in Belgium. From March to October, he received several job offers. The first came from the government of the Second Republic in Spain, offering him a professorship at the Universidad Central in Madrid. In fact, the Spanish government made the news public on April 10, 1933 that the genius of physics had accepted the offer.

The key players in the story of the professorship were the writer Ramón Pérez de Ayala, the Spanish ambassador in London since 1931, who had the idea; Fernando de los Ríos, Minister of Education; the linguist and scholar Abraham Shalom Yahuda, a Jew born in Jerusalem who had studied Semitic languages at Heidelberg and Strasbourg and was professor of Hebrew at the Universidad Central of Madrid between 1914 and 1922, and Elsa Einstein, wife of the physicist.

Eventually Einstein would not accept the offer, among other reasons, because he became aware of the increasing political instability in Spain, and had more attractive offers.