–by Iskra Dolina
–Reading Time – 12 min Approx
I have always understood whatever I did that the burden of responsibility born by my people also rested on my shoulders. This thought was my lifelong guide star.
W.Haffkine
World-renowned epidemiologist and immunologist. Creator of the first-ever vaccines against cholera and the plague. During epidemics, thanks to “Havkin’s lymph”, more than 33 million people remained alive. Received an award from the hands of the Queen of the United Kingdom. In India, he is revered as a mahatma, a national hero. In Mumbai, the largest institute is named after him.
Member of the central committee of the Alliance Israélite Universelle.
Founder of the fund for assistance to yeshivas in Eastern Europe. Co-author of the work on the rights of Jews in Eretz Israel (within the framework of the Geneva Conference). Author of the famous article “A Plea for Orthodoxy.”
A favorite of the fortune?
Far from it!
OUTCAST
The vaccine created by him, a political immigrant and a Jew, and after successful trials, proposed to the government of the Russian Empire, was rejected.
In Europe, no one could appreciate his scientific breakthrough — as an experimenter, Haffkine was head and shoulders above his colleagues who worked in France, England, Spain, Germany, and Austria.
His scientific career was cut short due to the professional envy and intrigues of representatives of the international medical community, for which he always remained an outsider.
* * *
Markus-Wolf. That’s the name they gave him. He was born in Odessa.
Father, Aron Havkin, a college teacher. Mother, Rosalia Landsberg, daughter of a Hebrew language teacher.
Fix the world
Odessa. 1882. The “Narodnaya Volya” group prepared an assassination attempt on Major General Strelnikov,
a military prosecutor nicknamed “Torkvemada of despotism.”
It was their way to change the world for the better. Bring it closer to justice.
Volodya Havkin, student. An active participant in the revolutionary movement.
He was arrested three times, expelled from university twice — and for eight years, he lived in his hometown under police supervision. Vladimir realized that the world couldn’t be fixed by resorting to individual terror.
* * *
He remembered that moment vividly.
A damp solitary cell. A straw mat full of holes. The inhuman treatment by jailers. Hunger. Despair and fear. And so day after day.
And the search. What do I need to do? To save the world.
The political prisoner Havkin no longer noticed the cold walls and the terrible stench of the cell. He reflected on conversations with his teacher, the great Mechnikov.
“A scientist shouldn’t get into politics!” Ilya Ilyich told him.
“But I have to! This is the only way to change the world for the better!”
“Then go into science! Or you end up on the gallows.”
* * *
True. The general is shot. Havkin’s fellow members of “Narodnaya Volya” are hanged.
The revolution doesn’t lead to anything good.
But for the first time, Vladimir felt an urge in himself.
Understood his mission.
“Science will save the world,” he decided. And the fear was gone.
Instead, he felt awe for newly arising opportunities. Before mankind.
And it was in his power to realize them…
Heal the world
He chose microbiology.
Saving the world from diseases seemed as heroic as being a revolutionary.
But the Jew, Havkin could pursue science in Russia only after converting to orthodox Christianity. That was unthinkable for him. And following Mechnikov, Vladimir went first to Lausanne and then to Paris.
Havkin assumed: if live but weakened strains of microbes are introduced into the body, a human being will become immune to the disease.
He knew from the beginning who would be the first to vaccinate.
He was aware that, if his assumption was wrong, agonizing death would await him.
But… if it works out, millions of lives will be saved.
On January 10, 1897, Vladimir Havkin wrote on a blank sheet of paper: “I’m conducting this experiment for the sake of science.” And in the evening, when his colleagues at the Pasteur Institute left home, he injected himself with the live, weakened cholera vaccine, and six days later — with another one, this time stronger.
For two days, he was in fever but showed no sign of his condition. On the third day, the symptoms went away.
It was a success.
Vladimir inoculated himself with cholera bacteria and didn’t die.
In Russia, they had no confidence in Havkin and his discovery. Europe also remained indifferent.
“Too good to be true,” said his colleague Robert Koch, though he was the one who isolated Vibrio cholerae
in 1883.
The British were the only ones who became interested in the vaccine. They offered Havkin the job of state bacteriologist in India, their colony.
22 years of working in India. The creation of another vaccine — against the plague. The hardest trials. As a scientist, he did everything he could.
And the world hasn’t changed.
But Waldemar already knew. How to help… his world.
Live by the laws of the Universe.
Sometimes, to realize what life is given to you for, you need to change everything.
He left science forever.
Back in India, childhood memories awakened in the scientist, and with them — the Jewish attitude towards life.
“It so happened that for many years in my personal career, I found myself deprived of intimate communion with fellow-Jews. Throughout those years, I obtained consolation and support from endeavouring to observe our specific laws to the best of my knowledge and ability.”
The message that Haffkine conveys to us is a result of his multifaceted experience.
This is really the greatest wisdom that must be ‘written on the heart’:
“Slowly and by degrees, passing through innumerable stages in an analysis of the life of animals and plants and of the elemental phenomena of heat, light, magnetism, electricity, chemistry, mechanics, geology, spectroscopy, astronomy, Science is being brought to recognize in the universe the existence of one power which is of no beginning and no end; which has existed before all things were formed and will remain in its integrity when all is gone; the source and origin of all, in itself beyond any conception or image that man can form….”
“Truly, no law of nature operates with more fatality and precision than the law according to which those communities survive in the strife for existence that conform the nearest to the Jewish teachings on the relation of man to his Creator … By dint of endless trials and failures, the Nations are coming to recognize in the Commandments handed down to them by the Jews the only possible foundation of a prosperous and orderly life.”
THE ONLY WAY TO HAPPINESS IS TO LEARN AND OBSERVE THIS LAW.
“This sum total of the scientific discoveries of all lands and times is an approach of the world’s thought to our Adon Olam, the sublime chant by means of which the Jew has wrought and will further work the most momentous changes in the world.”
* * *
“The journey we make here upon the earth is so short. Before we know where we are, we are at the end, and called upon to answer an inner voice: ‘Have you finished the work you had to do?’ Happy are they who can think, yes, they have finished their work.”
That’s the kind of man he, Waldemar Mordecai Zeev Haffkine, was.
–by Iskra Dolina
