Immanuel Velikovsky

The son of Shimon (Simon Yehiel) Velikovsky (1859–1937) and Beila Grodensky, he learned several languages as a child and was sent away to study at the Medvednikov Gymnasium in Moscow, where he performed well in Russian language and mathematics.

Immanuel Velikovsky (Иммануи́л Велико́вский; 10 June 189517 November 1979) was a Russian-American psychoanalyst, writer, and catastrophist.

Immanuel Velikovsky was born in 1895 to a prosperous Jewish family in Vitebsk, Russian Empire (now in Belarus).

He graduated with a gold medal in 1913.

Velikovsky then traveled in Europe and visited Palestine before briefly studying medicine at Montpellier in France and taking premedical courses at the University of Edinburgh.

He returned to Russia before the outbreak of World War I, enrolled in the University of Moscow, and received a medical degree in 1921.

Upon taking his medical degree, Velikovsky left Russia for Berlin.

With the financial support of his father, Velikovsky edited and published two volumes of scientific papers translated into Hebrew.

The volumes were titled Scripta Universitatis Atque Bibliothecae Hierosolymitanarum ("Writings of the Jerusalem University & Library").

He enlisted Albert Einstein to prepare the volume dealing with mathematics and physics.

This project was a cornerstone in the formation of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as the fledgling university was able to donate copies of the Scripta to the libraries of other academic institutions in exchange for complimentary copies of publications from those institutions.

In 1923, Velikovsky married Elisheva Kramer, a young violinist.

Velikovsky lived in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine from 1924 to 1939, practising medicine in the fields of general practice, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis which he had studied under Sigmund Freud's pupil Wilhelm Stekel in Vienna.

During this time, he had about a dozen papers published in medical and psychoanalytic journals.

He was also published in Freud's Imago, including a precocious analysis of Freud's own dreams.

In 1939, with the prospect of war looming, Velikovsky travelled with his family to New York City, intending to spend a sabbatical year researching for his book Oedipus and Akhenaton. The book was inspired by Freud's Moses and Monotheism and explored the possibility that Pharaoh Akhenaton was the legendary Oedipus.

Freud had argued that Akhenaton, the supposedly monotheistic Egyptian pharaoh, was the source of the religious principles that Moses taught to the people of Israel in the desert.

Freud's claim (and that of others before him) was based in part on the resemblance of Psalm 104 in the Bible to the Great Hymn to the Aten, an Egyptian hymn discovered on the wall of the tomb of Akhenaten's courtier, Ay, in Akhenaten's city of Akhetaten.

To disprove Freud's claim and to prove the Exodus as such, Velikovsky sought evidence for the Exodus in Egyptian documents.

One such document was the Ipuwer Papyrus, which he felt reported events similar to several of the Biblical plagues.

Since conventional Egyptology dated the Ipuwer Papyrus much earlier than either the Biblical date for the Exodus (c. 1500—1450 BCE) or the Exodus date accepted by many of those who accepted the conventional chronology of Egypt (c. 1250 BCE), Velikovsky had to revise the conventional chronology.

Within weeks of his arrival in the United States, World War II began.

Launching on a tangent from his original book project, Velikovsky began to develop the radical catastrophist cosmology and revised chronology theories for which he would become notorious.

For the remainder of the Second World War, now as a permanent resident of New York City, he continued to research and write about his ideas, searching for a means to disseminate them to academia and the public.

He privately published two small Scripta Academica pamphlets summarising his theories in 1945 (Theses for the Reconstruction of Ancient History and Cosmos Without Gravitation).

He mailed copies of the latter to academic libraries and scientists, including Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley in 1947.

He is the author of several books offering pseudohistorical interpretations of ancient history, including the U.S. bestseller Worlds in Collision published in 1950.

Velikovsky's work is frequently cited as a canonical example of pseudoscience and has been used as an example of the demarcation problem.

His books use comparative mythology and ancient literary sources (including the Old Testament) to argue that Earth suffered catastrophic close contacts with other planets (principally Venus and Mars) in ancient history.

In positioning Velikovsky among catastrophists including Hans Bellamy, Ignatius Donnelly, and, the British astronomers Victor Clube and Bill Napier noted "... Velikovsky is not so much the first of the new catastrophists ...; he is the last in a line of traditional catastrophists going back to mediaeval times and probably earlier."

Velikovsky argued that electromagnetic effects play an important role in celestial mechanics.

He also proposed a revised chronology for ancient Egypt, Greece, Israel, and other cultures of the ancient Near East.

The revised chronology aimed at explaining the so-called "dark age" of the eastern Mediterranean (c. 1100–750 BC) and reconciling biblical accounts with mainstream archaeology and Egyptian chronology.

In general, Velikovsky's theories have been ignored or vigorously rejected by the academic community.

Nonetheless, his books often sold well and gained enthusiastic support in lay circles, often fuelled by claims of unfair treatment of Velikovsky by orthodox academia.

The controversy surrounding his work and its reception is often referred to as "the Velikovsky affair".

In 1950, after eight publishing houses rejected the Worlds in Collision manuscript, it was finally published by Macmillan, which had a large presence in the academic textbook market.

Even before its appearance, the book was enveloped by furious controversy, when Harper's Magazine published a highly positive feature on it, as did Reader's Digest, with what would today be called a creationist slant.

This came to the attention of Shapley, who opposed the publication of the work, having been made familiar with Velikovsky's claims through the pamphlet Velikovsky had given him.

Shapley threatened to organise a textbook boycott of Macmillan for its publication of Worlds in Collision, and within two months the book was transferred to Doubleday.