Publisher Draws Censorship Charge

EVANSTON, ILLINOIS--Book reviews in scholarly journals don't usually make much of a splash. But a review published in the journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES) led to charges of anti-Semitism against the author, followed by allegations of censorship against the journal's publisher, which in rum have led to a new publishing contract with a guarantee of editorial independence.

The flap started more than a year and a half ago with the publication of a book by Kevin MacDonald, a psychologist at California State University, Long Beach, entitled A People that shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy. MacDonald describes how Judaism has fostered "cultural and natural selection for intelligence and other traits" as well as an insular lifestyle that has made it vulnerable to anti-Semitism. The editors of HBES's journal, Ethology & Sociobiology, published by New York-based Elsevier Science Inc., asked John Hartung, an anthropologist, scholar of Jewish history, and professor of anesthesiology at the Health Sciences Center of the State University of New York, Brooklyn, to review the book. His review, Published in July 1995, discusses the "in-group morality" of ancient Jews and draws a parallel with modern Israel where Jews, after the Holocaust, have been able "to systematically purloin the land and property of people who were not those [Holocaust] victims' persecutors."

The piece hit some raw nerves, including those of Daniel Sperber, an anthropologist at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, who triggered a series of posts last fall on HBES-L, the society's Intenet discussion group, in which Hartung was accused of anti-Semitism. Journal editor Michael McGuire, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, suggested that Hartung publish a clarification in the journal. Hartung produced an "addendum" which, says McGuire, everyone thought would calm the waters.

Instead, it stirred up a new controversy. "Elsevier phoned me and said they wouldn't publish it," says McGuire. "They wouldn't let me talk to the decision-maker." Elsevier kept shifting ground, at different times offering different rationales for the action, says McGuire--such as not wanting to publish something that had already been on the Internet. Elsevier staff did not respond to phone calls from Science.

Hartung sees Elsevier's action as "a clear case of censorship." His critics, he says, "don't perceive their own in-group morality operating." Hartung, who has the support of a number of HBES members including Oxford zoologist William Hamilton, went to the annual meeting here 2 weeks ago prepared to pressure the HBES council to drop Elsevier and start a new journal if the publisher would not agree to a hands-off policy. A showdown was avoided, however. While Randolph Nesse of the University of Michigan, chair of the HBES publications committee, says he won't comment on a "privately negotiated contract," others say a new 5-year deal with Elsevier stipulates that the editorial board will be "solely" responsible for the content of the journal. And the episode has had a ripple effect in the electronic realm: At its business meeting, the society voted to modify HBES-L rules to ban "sensitive" and irrelevant" postings", such as those about Holocaust- revisionism that entered the Hartung debate. But--no surprise--just who decides what's insensitive isn't clear.