Edward Teller was born in a Jewish family

It is a fact that Edward Teller was born in a Jewish family. He was born on January 15, 1908, into a Jewish household in Budapest, Austria-Hungary. Ilona, a musician, and Max Teller, an attorney, were his parents. He attended Fasori Lutheran Gymnasium and later the Lutheran Minta (Model) Gymnasium in Budapest. Teller, who was born Jewish, subsequently became an agnostic Jew. "Religion was not an issue in my family," he said later, "indeed, it was never discussed". His only religious education came from the Minta, which forced all pupils to take religion classes. His family celebrated one holiday, the Day of Atonement when they all fasted. Nonetheless, his father said prayers for his parents on Saturdays and on all Jewish holidays. He said that "The idea of God that I absorbed was that it would be wonderful if He existed: We needed Him desperately but had not seen Him in many thousands of years." Teller was a late talker who developed the capacity to speak later than normal youngsters, but he grew fascinated with numbers and would mentally compute enormous figures for amusement.

Teller fled Hungary for Germany in 1926, mainly due to Miklós Horthy's regime's discriminatory numerus clausus rule. During his adolescence, the political milieu and revolutions in Hungary established in Teller a deep hatred for both Communism and Fascism.