“It was eerie. I saw myself in that machine. I never thought my work would come to this.”
The frail old man, amazed when he saw an image of his face while undergoing an MRI in 1987, was the world-renowned physicist and devout Jew Isidor Isaac Rabi.
Whether the technicians who used the MRI machine knew they were diagnosing its famous inventor is unknown. But it was Rabi whose earlier research on nuclear magnetic resonance in 1938 the magical machine possible.
Few in the hospital would have known their elderly patient as the winner of the Nobel Prize in 1944. Nor would they have known of Rabi’s stellar career at Columbia University, where he was head of the physics department. Under his direction, the department became one of the most prestigious in the world, drawing in scientists and students from around the globe.
Shortly after Rabi’s installation at Columbia in 1929, anti-Semitic campaigns against professors in Europe began. Some of America’s colleges and universities began to raise funds to help refugee Jewish scholars. As Laurel Leff points out, “at some universities, faculty members started funds to pay the salaries of displaced scholars. Columbia University was one of the most active. In 1933, 125 Columbia faculty members contributed a total of … almost $80,000 in contemporary dollars, for temporary fellowships.” (Italics mine.)
Leff was writing about the same institution of higher learning where recently pro-Hamas demonstrators displayed hatred of Israel and the Jews — the university where those same protesters managed to bar a pro-Israel Jewish professor Shai Davidai from the campus. While the protesters have since been forcibly removed from occupying a building on the campus, the underlying issue of antisemitism remains glaringly problematic.
Perhaps Columbia and other academic institutions should recall the historical context in which even the fundamental science of physics was assaulted by antisemitic (and anti-Christian) forces.
Shortly after Rabi began his long tenure at Columbia in 1929, a huge controversy about the nature of physics erupted. Adolf Hitler’s regime insisted on the sole legitimacy of what it termed “Aryan science,” a supposedly superior and uniquely German science, opposed to what was termed “Jewish science.”
The regime demanded that physicists disassociate themselves from “Jewish physics.” Nazi ideology infiltrated and corrupted the Jewish and Christian idea of science as founded on universal verities.
As Scientific American noted in 2015, quoting an excerpt from Philip Ball’s Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics under Hitler:
Anti-Semitism did not just deprive German physics of some of its most valuable researchers. It also threatened to prescribe what kind of physics one could and could not do…like a virus, it worked its way into the very fabric of intellectual life.
The reason for the rejection of “Jewish science” went far deeper than animus against Jewish scientists and cut to a foundational principle of science itself. Those committed to “Aryan science” believed that racial superiority determined true science. Ball describes the regime’s objections to “Jewish science”:
The fundamental problem lay with a foreign and degenerate approach to science itself. The popular notion that science has a universal nature and spirit, they said, is quite wrong. … Jews did science differently from true Germans. … The spirit of the German enables him to observe things outside himself exactly as they are. … Thus, it is understandable that natural science is overwhelmingly a creation of the Nordic–Germanic blood component of the Aryan peoples.
During the 1930s, mere association with “Jewish science” was enough to take many German scientists down. One consequence was that Werner Heisenberg was forced to fight identification as a “White Jew” because of his refusal to repudiate Albert Einstein’s work. Only a threat to resign and emigrate to America, where Columbia University had offered a position, extricated him from his dilemma.
In other words, the essential idea that science was based on universal principles that held true regardless of one’s race or nationality was jettisoned in favor of science as defined by a particular subset of humanity. One race was seen as having a higher status, elevating its members’ ideas about science above Jews like Albert Einstein. The result was that fascist ideology distorted and nearly destroyed scientific research in Germany.
What is essentially fascist ideology has intruded in today’s academic circles, making one’s race, sex, or nationality the measure of authentic research, including scientific research. As among other academic disciplines, there now is only legitimacy of individual perspective, not universal truths to be theorized, tested, and proven and declared fallible if rigorous criteria do not ratify theory. For those committed to the increasingly disregarded universal scientific method, there is feminist, patriarchal, black, white, queer, Western, Eastern, and Jewish science. For the scientist committed to the scientific method, there is just science — science that anyone can study, no matter what the race or nationality.
The rise of fascist racial ideology and its consequent ruination of academia were deplored by theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who saw the subversion and even destruction of foundational beliefs of Judaism and Christianity.
In 1930, Bonhoeffer visited Union Seminary, which was founded by ministers of the Presbyterian Church USA, and which was and supposedly is still a spiritual guide for Columbia University. He was shocked to find the seminary lacking rigorous intellectual and spiritual integrity.
But what he now would find at Union would have been unimaginable to him even during the 1930s. Today, he would find the academic catalogue offering a course on “Galatians: Queering Gender and Other Binaries.” St. Paul is presented as an advocate of a “a new trans-binary community.” As for the Hebrew Bible? It is described as a testament to “diversity of perspectives,” meaning Scripture is whatever one makes of it.
In brief, identity politics as defined by racial, victim, and gender politics is now shaping Union’s perception of theology in the same way “Aryan science” shaped science and theology during the Third Reich. As Victoria Barnett quotes in her essay on Bonhoeffer’s work After Ten Years:
The huge masquerade of evil has thrown all ethical concepts into confusion. That evil should appear in the form of light, good deeds, historical necessity, social justice is absolutely bewildering for one coming from the world of ethical concepts that we have received. For the Christian who lives by the Bible, it is the very confirmation of the abysmal wickedness of evil.
Who stands firm? Only the one … is called to obedient and responsible action. Such a person is the responsible one, whose life is to be nothing but a response to God’s question and call. Where are these responsible ones?
Isador Isacc Rabi, recipient of a special chair named after him at Columbia University and a friend of Werner Heisenberg and Robert Oppenheimer, was one of the “responsible ones.” He said,
Physics filled me with awe, put me in touch with a sense of original causes. Physics brought me closer to God. That feeling stayed with me throughout my years in science. Whenever one of my students came to me with a scientific project, I asked only one question, “Will it bring you nearer to God?”
The protesters at Columbia, though temporarily subdued, essentially support terrorism. They probably do not know the words written under Columbia’s logo: “In lumine tuo videbimus lumen.” The phrase is taken from Psalm 36: “For with Thee is the fountain of life: in Thy light shall we see light.”
For believing Jews and Christians, God is the universal source of light and wisdom. Columbia, Yale, Princeton, and other institutions gradually have been divesting themselves of the light of their Jewish and Christian heritage for many decades. Now they are seeing the darkness resulting from the extinguishing of the light.
Renouncing, and yes, even arresting promoters of terrorism may be a sign of return to principles on which so many of America’s top universities and colleges were founded.
If there is not a return, the current capitulation to fascist ideology within and outside Columbia and other leading institutions augurs the collapse of the entire academic enterprise, a collapse that threatens even Rabi’s beloved physics. As J. Robert Oppenheimer pointed out in his speech given in 1958 at Princeton Theological Seminary, “the very existence of science is threatened, and its value is threatened.”
Columbia University might conduct a litmus test indicating whether its faculty and administration are “responsible ones.”
The university founded the I.I. Rabi Science Scholars Program. According to the institution’s website, “about ten incoming first year students who demonstrate exceptional promise in the sciences are chosen to be Rabi Scholars.”
Columbia must answer the critical questions: are Jewish students of science allowed to apply? If accepted, will they need police to protect them?
The university’s answer will determine the fate of not only the students, but also much more.
Fay Voshell holds an M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary, which awarded her the prize for excellence in systematic theology. Her thoughts have appeared in many online magazines, including American Thinker. She may be reached at [email protected].
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