Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

April 7, 2022

The Orthodox Jew Who Developed the Cholera and Bubonic Plague Vaccines

Mordechai Wolff Haffkine “savior of humanity.”

Mordechai Wolff Haffkine was born in 1860 in what is now Ukraine; as a youth, he founded the Jewish League for Self-Defense in Odessa and was injured while defending a Jewish home during the Odessa pogrom of 1881. As Saul Jay Singer documents, Haffkine was mentored by Louis Pasteur and almost singlehandedly developed the vaccines for both cholera and bubonic plague—often at great personal cost. He encountered significant anti-Semitism among the British and European officials and scientists with whom he worked, and became embroiled in what is now known as “the Little Dreyfus Affair.”

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