Indian Jews and Waldemar Haffkine’s Cholera and Plague Vaccines, 1893-1915

Dr. Shalva Weil, Hebrew University Jerusalem

This lecture will highlight a little-known chapter in world Jewish history: the effects of the vaccines against cholera and bubonic plague, developed in Bombay by the Jewish microbiologist Waldemar Haffkine (1860-1930), on the Indian population in general and on the Indian Jewish communities in particular. In his Bombay laboratory (later the Haffkine Institute), at first Haffkine self-experimented, but in 1897 he received support from the Baghdadi Jewish entrepreneur Lady Flora Sassoon (1856-1936), who became one of the first volunteers to be inoculated, as half the general population fled Bombay. In 1898, Haffkine set up the Bene Israel Plague Hospital and Segregation Camp for the less wealthy Bene Israel Indian Jewish community. By the end of 1902, half a million Indians had been inoculated against cholera and the bubonic plague. However, as a result of the death of 19 out of 107 people inoculated at Mulkowal in the Punjab, Haffkine was suspended by the British Raj in what some have interpreted as a mini-“Dreyfus affair”. Later, Haffkine was reinstated as director of the Biological Laboratory in Calcutta, where he maintained relations with the Baghdadi Jews until his departure for Europe in 1915.

Shalva Weil is Senior Researcher at the Seymour Fox School of Education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 2017, she was invited to Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi as GIAN Distinguished Professor on Indian Jews. She is the (co-)editor of the volumes, India's Jewish Heritage (Marg, 2002), Karmic Passages (OUP, 2008), Baghdadi Jews in India (Routledge, 2019), and The Jews of Goa (Primus, 2020). She has published over 120 articles, chapters in books, and Encyclopaedia entries on Jews and Judaism in India. She was the Founding Chairperson of the first India-Israel Friendship Association in 1992.

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Contact email: ch12@soas.ac.uk