Elliot Cosgrove, PhD April 25, 2020
I have to imagine that when Waldemar Haffkine (1860-1930) heard this morning’s Torah reading, Tazria-M’tzora, it brought a smile to his face. After all, to the degree that there is a biblical precedent to WebMD, this week’s parashah is it: ancient Israel’s medical textbook on how to diagnose and address the outbreak of a plague. In the time of the Torah, the kohen, the priest, was both the religious and the medical authority of the community, the urgent care professional consulted when a person was afflicted with a debilitating condition.
Our Torah reading describes how the kohen would visit the afflicted, examine them, diagnose their condition, and, based on what he saw, prescribe a course of action. But the kohen was more than a first responder; he was also a public health official. The afflicted individual was isolated and put into quarantine as the broader community was informed of the outbreak. Had the plague spread throughout the household? Beyond that single home? Depending on the answer, extra measures were mandated for anyone who came into contact with the afflicted, and depending how bad things were, that person’s house could even be torn down. Finally, in his quasi-governmental role, the priest would signal the path by which an individual, once healed, could be reintegrated into society and society itself returned to normalcy. For young Waldemar Haffkine, a man who would spend his life in the enterprise of eradicating deadly plagues, Tazria-M’tzora must have been the scriptural and spiritual foundation for the ventures and adventures that would become his life work.
This morning, I want to offer a different kind of sermon. I want to tell you about Waldemar Haffkine, a man whom I would guess most of you know nothing about, someone about whom I knew nothing until I began to do a little digging into one of the most underappreciated, inspiring, and tragic figures in the history of epidemiology. I dedicate this sermon in honor of the medical professionals serving on the front lines of our present day public health crisis.
Our story begins, as do so many Jewish stories, in czarist Russia, Odessa to be precise, where Waldemar Mordecai Wolff Haffkine was born in the year 1860 – the same year, interestingly, as Theodore Herzl. Waldemar’s mother died when he was eight, and his father, a struggling merchant, enrolled young Waldemar in a local school at the age of ten. At the age of nineteen, he entered Odessa’s Faculty of Natural Science to study zoology under Élie Metchnikoff, a future Nobel prize winner in the field of immunology.
If you know your Jewish history, then you know that 1880s Russia was not an easy time or place for Jews. The antisemitic pogroms that broke out following the assassination of Czar Alexander II in St. Petersburg took a terrible toll on our people, with many Jews emigrating westward and a far smaller number following their hearts eastward in what would be the first wave of immigration, the first Aliyah, to Palestine.
Haffkine himself dreamt of social revolution, and although he was not personally involved in the assassination plot, he was a card-carrying member of the terrorist revolutionary group Narodnay Volya (“The Will of the People”), that was. Young Haffkine was not a religious man, though he did have a strong sense of Jewish peoplehood and was a member of the Jewish League for Self Defense. Not surprisingly, given his activism, Haffkine was expelled from university twice and arrested three times by the Russian authorities, released only on account of the intervention of his mentor, Professor Metchnikoff.
Principled as he was, Haffkine refused to convert to Christianity, a choice that would have paved the way toward his attaining a coveted professorship. He came to understand that he would have to leave Russia in order to advance his research career. At the time, Paris-based Louis Pasteur was opening up an entire branch of science to combat the devastating cholera outbreaks that were ravaging Asia and Europe. In 1888, Haffkine arranged passage from Russia to Switzerland and eventually, by 1890, he arrived in Paris where his old mentor Metchnikoff was working in the newly opened Pasteur Institute.
It is here where our story really begins. But before we step forward, we need to take a small step back to provide context for those of you, like myself, who have no medical training. In the face of an outbreak of infectious disease, there are – broadly speaking – two baskets of response. The responses in the first basket aim to control the epidemic, which, aside from preventive public health measures like sanitation and physical distancing, as prescribed by our parashah and our governor, is the world of inoculations. Think Edward Jenner and the smallpox vaccine, Jonas Salk and the polio vaccine, and the common flu shot. The second basket of responses aims to control the disease itself – the steps one takes to arrest and ease the symptoms of the afflicted with the goal of reducing the mortality rate. Think the discovery of penicillin by the great Scotsman Alexander Fleming; streptomycin by the American Jew Selman Waksman, which stemmed the devastating toll of tuberculosis; or our present-day efforts aimed to treat COVID-19. When I was a kid, my mother would kick me and my brothers out of the house on a Sunday so she could have some peace and quiet, and we would all go hang out in my dad’s doctor’s office. I remember watching him placing a patient’s bacteria sample onto a culture plate with tiny discs of antibiotics; he would then incubate the slide and then measure the circular area around the antibiotic in order to determine which one could combat the bacterial infection, something called the zone of inhibition, the technical name for the measure by which bacteria colonies grow, or, in retrospect, by which children of doctors are inhibited from growing into doctors themselves.
Haffkine’s interest was in the first category: he was a prophet of prophylactic inoculations. Through a series of networking moves worthy of Joseph in Pharaoh’s court, he figured out a way to get himself – a Jew from Odessa – sent in 1893 by the British government to India, which was suffering from a fifth devastating outbreak of cholera, which had killed millions. Haffkine’s efforts to develop a vaccine were opposed by local officials who were understandably suspect of his motives, and he survived an assassination attempt by Islamic extremists. No medical research could be possible without human trials, so Haffkine actually inoculated himself with live mitigated cholera bacteria, and though he suffered fever and discomfort, to make a long story short, he was eventually able to gain the trust of his colleagues and local Indian leadership. By 1895, tens of thousands of people had been inoculated, saving countless lives. His success was overwhelming, but Haffkine was exhausted and had contracted malaria along the way. He returned home to Europe, where he was showered with praise for his self-sacrifice, scientific zeal, and courage of conviction, with Haffkine himself attributing all of his success to Louis Pasteur.
Here is where things get really interesting . . . and tragic. In 1896, Haffkine returned to India this time not on account of cholera but for the scourge of plague that had broken out in India by way of a rat-infested ship from Hong Kong. Working fourteen-hour days, Haffkine once again set up a laboratory in order to create a vaccine which, once it proved successful in animals, he then used on himself, as was his custom. Though far from perfect, his vaccine worked, diminishing the death rate from the plague by as much as 80 or 90 percent. Haffkine’s plague prophylactic was improved upon and administered throughout India, his work saving millions of lives. Throughout it all, in all these years, Haffkine’s devotion to his people never wavered. In the early 1890s he founded a society for the revival of the Hebrew Language. He supported the efforts to open a plague hospital for Jews of all denominations in Bombay. Perhaps most interestingly, he worked behind the scenes to urge the Turkish Sultan to settle Jews in Palestine corresponding with Baron Edmond James de Rothschild on the goal of establishing a Jewish homeland.
So where is the tragedy? It came in 1902. Five batches of Haffkine’s plague vaccine produced in his Bombay lab in September arrived in the village of Mulkowal in the Punjab in November, and nineteen patients died after receiving vaccine from one contaminated flask, number 53n. Haffkine was suspended from his post and pay and then endured a four-year investigation which held him culpable. Eventually, the truth emerged that it would have been physically impossible for the contamination to have occurred in Haffkine’s lab months before the injections took place. Rather, the contamination had actually happened when an assistant at the Mulkowal lab dropped his forceps on the ground and then used the non-sterile instrument. But that truth came out only years later. As explained by Marina Sorikina, Haffkine’s “origin and independent scientific, civil and religious views did not find acceptance within the British colonial bureaucracy.” (“Between Faith and Reason: Waldemar Haffkine (1860-1930) in India,” p. 175). Haffkine, together with some of his defenders, mounted a vigorous defense, eventually leading to the overturning of the decision and his exoneration and reinstatement in 1907. Unofficially, the inquiry commission was referred to as the “Little Dreyfus Affair,” a reference to the Jewish French military officer falsely accused of treason a few years earlier. Haffkine returned to India in 1908, but by then, as in the Dreyfus case, the damage had been done. The stigma of the Mulkowal disaster remained; the terms of Haffkine’s employment were restricted; and his research activities were curtailed. Only one of the fifteen papers he wrote over his lifetime was published during these years. Upon reaching the minimum retirement age of 55 in 1915, he left the Indian civil service entirely.
From 1915 until his death in 1930, Haffkine lived a quiet life, largely ignored by the scientific community. He turned his attention to Jewish causes; having been deprived throughout his career of intimacy with his kinsmen, he wanted to return to his faith. He traveled around Europe and America seeking to establish schools of Jewish learning in Palestine and the diaspora that could bridge the gap between faith and reason. Having never returned to his hometown in forty years, he paid a final visit to Odessa. He wrote a fascinating article on Jewish identity and the nature of Jewish peoplehood that was later canonized in the commentary of the famous Hertz Pentateuch. If you are interested, it is the assigned essay for my Tuesday morning Essential Essays class. When Haffkine died in Switzerland in 1930, he left his entire estate of 1.5 million francs (about half a million dollars) towards fostering religious, scientific, and vocational education in Eastern European Yeshivas, stipulating that their curricula be expanded “so that [their students] not be reduced to misery and begging,” a tragic legacy given what we know was the ultimate fate of his beneficiaries just a few years later.
The life of Waldemar Mordechai Wolff Haffkine – a journey from revolutionary to life-saving epidemiologist to maligned Jew to scholar-philanthropist. It took years for Haffkine’s legacy to be restored. Eventually he would be honored by the Bombay plague research laboratory renamed in his honor; a few stamps, Israeli and Indian, issued with his picture; a memorial grove in Jerusalem planted in his memory; a laboratory flask bearing his name; and yes, millions and millions of people who would not have been born had it not been for him.
This, I suppose, is the enduring legacy and altogether relevant message of Haffkine for us today. In this moment, when we stand face-to-face with a pandemic the likes of which we have never contended with before, we would do well to pause, to consider, and to reflect with gratitude for those doctors, nurses, healthcare professionals, researchers, and others whose dedicated commitment to the preservation of life speaks to our highest ideals – not just as Jews but as human beings. As one attendee reflected at Haffkine’s funeral: “Great was his scientific work in that he literally saved millions of lives, but equally great was the personal character of the man, and most particularly, his modesty and humility. He never asked for help from any man but he was always ready to help others and befriend the needy.” That is an epitaph to which anyone devoted to the advancement of medicine should aspire. For that matter, it is a description which any human being would be lucky to earn. As Longfellow wrote, the lives of great men and women remind us that we too can make our lives sublime. Waldemar Haffkine was such a man. May his memory inspire us to aspire to the same for ourselves.
Sources Consulted and for Further Reading:
Haffkine, Waldemar M. “A Plea for Orthodoxy,” The Menorah Journal, 2:2 (April 1916)
Lutzker, E. “The Curious Case of Waldemar Haffkine,” Commentary, 69:6 (June 1980)
Sorokina, M. “Between Faith and Reason: Waldemar Haffkine (1860-1930) in India” in Western Jews in India: From the Fifteenth Century to the Present, Ed. by Wenneth X. Robbins, Marvin Tokayer. (Delhi: Manohar, 2013) pp.161–178.
Waksman, S. The Brilliant and Tragic Life of W.M.W Haffkine, Bacteriologist (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1964)