26 May 2021, 6:00-7:00 PM
This talk will focus on a little-known episode in world Jewish history: the impact of cholera and bubonic plague vaccines produced in Bombay by Jewish microbiologist Waldemar Haffkine (1860-1930) on the Indian people in general and Indian Jewish communities in particular. Haffkine experimented on himself in his Bombay laboratory (later the Haffkine Institute), but in 1897 he obtained help from Baghdadi Jewish entrepreneur Lady Flora Sassoon (1856-1936), who became one of the first volunteers to be infected, as half of Bombay’s population evacuated. In 1898, Haffkine established the Bene Israel Plague Hospital and Segregation Camp for the Bene Israel Indian Jewish community’s less fortunate members. Half a million Indians had been immunized against cholera and the bubonic plague by the end of 1902. The British Raj, however, suspended Haffkine as a result of the deaths of 19 out of 107 individuals injected at Mulkowal in Punjab, in what some have described as a mini-“Dreyfus affair.” Haffkine was then reinstated as director of Calcutta’s Biological Laboratory, where he maintained contact with Baghdadi Jews until his departure for Europe in 1915.
