Velikovsky read it in 1939 in Tel Aviv, where the book “provoked outrage and inspired furious debates” in the Jewish community. Finally it made Velikovsky a name in the Jewish community, which provided him with an automatic audience for later writings.įreud also inspired Velikovsky to think in grand terms, particularly the formers Die Mann Moses und die montheistische Religion (1937), published in English as Moses and Monotheism in 1939. It also acquainted him with Jewish history and traditions (though, curiously, Velikovsky became neither an orthodox or reformed practitioner of Judaism). It gave him the confidence (or ego) to think in grand terms about philosophy, history, religion, and intellectual life generally. Gordin is not this speculative, but one gets the sense that this project did several things to Velikovsky. ![]() Its goal was to ‘demonstrate the role played in the scientific world by Jews.” Collaborators included Albert Einstein, who served as editor, and Elisha Kramer, who would become his wife. Velikovsky’s Weimar-era interest in Zionism coincided with, and fed into, his desire “to make a name for himself as a scholar.” This desire resulted in Velikovsky obtaining collaborators for editing and writing a large collection of Jewish scholarship, eventually published in multiple volumes as the Scripta universitatis atque bibliothecae hierosolymitanarum (or Scripta) in 1923. Velikovsky and his family remained in Princeton and in the United States until his 1979 death. ![]() They moved once more to Princeton, New Jersey, in 1952. They lived there until 1939, when they moved to New York City. Zionism remained preoccupation for Velikovsky, such that he and his family moved to Tel Aviv in 1930. Velikovsky became a proponent of Zionism through his father, Simon, and his father’s acquaintance, Theodor Herzl, around this time. The Velikovsky family moved to Weimar Berlin in 1921. Velikovsky’s training in psychoanalysis occurred under the “distinguished Freudian Wilhelm Stekel” in the early 1930s. He obtained a medical degree at Moscow University (conferral date is unclear in the text, but probably around 1920). Born of Jewish parents in Vitebsk, Belarus (the “Pale of Settlement”) in 1895, Velikovsky received training as a physician and psychoanalyst. Immanuel Velikovsky is of course Gordin’s protagonist. Since the live fire behind the culture and intellectual wars chronicled in this book have ceased, some review of its main character and signal events is in order. Debates about the science connected to vaccinations, evolution, and climate change become more, and less, understandable after a close reading of Gordin’s analysis of Velikovsky and the Velikovskians. The result is a book that speaks to our current predicament. This unfortunate dialectic and its differing historical contexts is used by Gordin to introduce a number of still relevant themes and topics: the ongoing debate about demarcating good science from junk science the problems of suppression, policing, and academic freedom in the sciences the process of scientific peer review and the role of referees the role of consensus and the boundaries between history, science, and historians of science. Gordin argues that Velikovsky and “his doctrines were ground zero” for “the pseudoscience wars.” Those wars, which occurred from the late 1940s until the end of the 1970s, “raised scientists’ anxiety over the incursion of ‘pseudoscience’ among their students and the public at large to a fever pitch.” Those labeled ‘fringe’ responded, in turn, “by deploying new arguments against the establishment.” They most powerful counterargument, the one that resonated most with the public, was “that scientists were engaged in a conspiracy to suppress new knowledge.” This unfortunate dialectic, which began during the McCarthy era and its “nationwide panic about conspiracies,” resulted in what Richard Hofstadter termed “the paranoid style.” Gordin asserts that fringe scientists not only absorbed some of that style (especially through ‘mimesis’), but that the science-pseudoscience dialectic has become “fossilized in amber.” It is a fascinating and sobering story that will be of interest to all concerned about science, democracy, and the public good. Gordin’s intellectual history provides a sense of the characters, context, and complexity that surrounded Immanuel Velikovsky, his fans, and his followers. ![]() One hears unfamiliar terms such as cosmic catastrophism, geocentric catastrophism, flood geology, astral catastrophists, secularly-oriented catastrophists, and alternative cosmologies. To enter the thought world of Immanuel Velikovsky, the Velikovskians, and Velikovskianism is to be absorbed into a fantastical language of largess. The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringeģ04 pages.
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