Russian Jew Khavkin created world's first cholera/plague vaccine
Jewish vaccine
04/03/2020
How a Jewish boy from Odessa defeated the global pandemic and why kosher food saved Jews from diseases for centuries, our columnist explains.
Against the backdrop of the struggle of all progressive and not so progressive humanity with the coronavirus pandemic, an important anniversary for world medicine, the 160th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Khavkin (aka Waldemar Haffkine), has almost gone unnoticed. And it would not hurt to remember his approach, since it is to this great bacteriologist and immunologist that humanity owes the creation of the first effective vaccines against cholera and plague, and the very methodology for developing any vaccines in general.
We have already told how he created his saving vaccines , and also published an interview with one of his descendants who told the curious details of the life of his great ancestor , but there are a few very Jewish touches from his biography that just need to be added.
Like all his Jewish peers, Khavkin began his studies in the cheder. And like many of them, having entered the university and became interested in science, he took off his yarmulke and stopped going to the synagogue. But like his teacher Ilya Mechnikov, in the depths of his soul, Khavkin remained a deeply religious person until the end of his life. This is also evidenced by his will: in it, Khavkin ordered to send his savings to a fund to help needy yeshivas in Eastern Europe, adding that it was the study of the Torah that was the key to the continued existence of the Jewish people. However, he, of course, did not fail to notice that it would be good for yeshiva students to combine the study of the Talmud with teaching physics, mathematics and other subjects, as well as mastering a useful profession.
It is noteworthy that a significant part of his articles were somehow connected with the issues of Judaism, and some were so directly devoted to him. For example, in the "Apology of Orthodox Judaism" he proves that the observance of the biblical commandments about the observance of the rules of hygiene, cleanliness and kosher nutrition, which seemed quite irrational for several thousand years, is quite rational and is designed to protect the Jewish people and humanity as a whole from various infectious diseases and epidemics. . And today it is precisely these works of his, oddly enough, that are even more relevant than purely scientific ones.
I remembered this because it was in the weekly chapter of Tsav, which religious Jews will read this week, though not in the synagogue, but at home due to the general quarantine, that the concept of uncleanness is first introduced. And although the context in which it appears may seem quite primitive to many current readers, it does not lose its topicality from this.
“The meat of the sacrifice, which comes into contact with anything unclean, must not be eaten,” says the biblical text. And this precaution against possible infections is a very essential quality now. But further - more: "If someone touches something unclean - the corpse of a person, an unclean corpse of an animal, or an unclean corpse of a reptile - and then begins to eat the meat of the temple sacrifice together with other people, he will be cut off from among his people." Seemingly irrational and mystical prohibitions, but any microbiologist will say that everything is absolutely true: it is the corpses of animals, as well as humans, that are often the source of a deadly infection, touching them is fraught with infection, and sitting down at a common table after such contact will certainly infect everyone around. And if there is even a minimal danger that a person has caught an incomprehensible infection, then he is strictly forbidden to go to public meetings. What is this if not the introduction of quarantine for the sick three and a half thousand years ago?
It is no coincidence that even at the dawn of the spread of coronavirus - in December 2019 - the Israeli Ministry of Health issued a communiqué in which it reported an increase in cases of pulmonary diseases of “incomprehensible etymology” in China, urged them to refrain from traveling to China, and asked those who did go " refrain from touching the carcasses of any animals and eat only food that meets generally accepted sanitary and hygienic standards.
Let us also note that in the light of the latest instructions from epidemiologists, the prescriptions of the Pentateuch, also described in the current chapter of Tsav, and requiring the high priest to put on special clothes before the sacrifice, seem quite logical to themselves - but how could it be without this? - and wash thoroughly afterwards. Thus, the events taking place around us involuntarily lead us to the thought of the great Jewish doctor (!) And the philosopher Maimonides: that everything irrational and rational in the Torah is closely interconnected, and if we do not understand for the time being the rational meaning of this or that idea, then life will show it to us.
In 1982, the Chabad Hasidic movement published three letters addressed to Haffkine by the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, who had engaged Haffkine to support the Jews living in communist Russia.