Politics & Power Quote by Immanuel Velikovsky

"My father felt that his world of ideas was too liberal for traditional rabbinical teachings, and he looked for a chance to find a way in life"

Immanuel Velikovsky, Historian

About this Quote

Velikovsky frames a family origin story as an intellectual jailbreak. The line is built on a careful tension: “world of ideas” sounds expansive and modern, while “traditional rabbinical teachings” lands as bounded, inherited, and policed. By saying his father’s ideas were “too liberal,” he’s not just describing political leaning; he’s signaling a temperament that cannot stay inside a single canon. The phrasing turns ideology into atmosphere: the father doesn’t reject religion so much as experience it as a room with low ceilings.

The subtext is a familiar modern Jewish drama, sharpened by the timing. Born in 1895 in the Russian Empire, Velikovsky is writing from the shadow of mass migration, secularization, and the squeeze between communal authority and the new prestige of science, literature, and political theory. “Looked for a chance” reads like more than career ambition; it hints at social mobility as escape hatch, and at the necessity of leaving a closed ecosystem to breathe. “A way in life” is deliberately plain, almost humble, which softens what could sound like a polemic against tradition. It’s a rhetorical move: respect the old world while justifying departure from it.

Coming from a historian best known for grand, controversial reconstructions of the past, the sentence also functions as self-mythology. He casts his intellectual risk-taking as inherited: the impulse to roam, to distrust gatekeepers, to treat established teachings as provisional. The biography becomes an argument for method.

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About the Author

Immanuel Velikovsky (June 10, 1895 - November 17, 1979) was a Historian from Belarus.

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