I am too young to remember my hometown of Glasgow, Scotland in the first decade after World War II.
My reliable memories only really start in the nineteen-sixties. Scotland and in fact most of the UK, was remarkably free of Jew-hatred then. The Nazis “excesses” had made it unfashionable.
My sister-in-law, who is older than I am by fifteen years, surprised me once when she told me that Glasgow’s famous Medical School still operated a quota system for Jews applying to become doctors throughout the 1950s.
She explained that this was a relatively benign form of antisemitism. The school simply felt that if they accepted candidates solely based on academic merit, Scotland’s Jews would simply outnumber other candidates. It was in fact, an early manifestation of today’s highly toxic DEI.
I recall wondering how many patients’ lives would have been saved if this artificial barrier and discrimination had been removed and the best students were allowed to become the best doctors whatever their race, religion and background.
That made me recall one of my personal heroes, Sir Waldemar Mordechai Wolf Haffkine. He was born in Ukraine in 1860 and passed away in 1930.
Lord Joseph Lister, the pioneer of antiseptics in surgery said about him, “He was a savior of humanity.”
Mordechai Wolf’s family was Orthodox. In a life where he travelled the globe and made medical discoveries that would save millions of lives, he never allowed his connection to Shmirat HaMitzvot to weaken.
His university, recognizing his brilliance, offered him a Professorship on one condition. Haffkine was welcome, as long as he converted to the Russian Orthodox Church. Mordechai Wolf refused and eventually joined the Pasteur Institute in Paris where he researched preventative medicine.
One of the deadliest diseases in the world at the time was Cholera. In 1892, at only 32 years old during an outbreak of the terrible disease, Mordechai Wolf Haffkine successfully developed a vaccine and experimented on himself to prove its effectiveness.
The antisemitism that dogged his early academic life returned as Europe’s medical establishment sought to cast doubts on the significance of his breakthrough.
India was then ruled by Britain and Haffkine was invited to take his vaccine there to prove its effectiveness. As soon as he arrived, he established a laboratory. By 1902, over half a million people were inoculated and their lives saved.
Ironically, Mordechai Wolf Haffkine’s greatest achievement was to develop a vaccine for a disease that Jews had been blamed for throughout the centuries; the Black Death, Bubonic Plague.
This scourge produced three catastrophic pandemics. In the 6th century an estimated 25 million people died. During the Middle Ages the second pandemic claimed 50 million victims with 60% of Europe’s population dead. The third pandemic was in the Nineteenth century.
In 1896, at the invitation of the country’s Governor, Mordechai Wolf Haffkine travelled to Mumbai, India where Bubonic Plague was raging. He immediately improvised a laboratory in a corridor of Grant Medical College and with a staff of one clerk and three servants, began experiments using his new anti-Bubonic Plague vaccine on laboratory animals.
Haffkine was convinced of the efficacy of his vaccine. On January 10, 1897 a doctor agreed to inoculate him in secret and the principal of a college agreed to be a witness.
Haffkine the Jew whose people had been blamed and slaughtered for “Causing” Bubonic Plague, volunteered as the “guinea pig” and proved that his vaccine worked.
His courage and genius saved countless millions of lives.
Another more recent example of a Jew saving millions of lives is Jonas Edward Salk. He was born in 1914 and was a virologist and researcher who developed one of the first polio vaccines.
After graduating from City College of New York (my father-in-law’s Alma Mater) Salk enrolled in New York School of Medicine. Tuition fees were comparatively low and crucially, it did not discriminate against Jews while most of the surrounding medical schools, Cornell, Columbia, Pennsylvania and Yale operated a strict quota system.
Yale, for example, accepted 76 applicants in 1935 out of a total pool of 501. Although 200 of the applicants were Jewish, only five got in.
Half a million people died or were paralyzed annually from this terrible disease before Salk’s breakthrough. He was immediately hailed as a “miracle worker.”
When the vaccine’s success was first made public in April 1955, this remarkable Jew chose not to patent the vaccine nor seek any profit from it in order to maximize its global distribution.
It is not just in the field of medicine that Jewish minds saved millions of lives. One immediately springs to my mind who saved billions!
Fritz Haber was a German Jewish chemist who was born in 1868.
He was the opposite kind of Jew to Haffkine and was desperate to be accepted into German culture and life.
He is still a controversial figure despite winning a Nobel prize in 1918 for the discovery and creation of a technique for massively increasing crop yields. Half the people on the planet today are alive because there is food to feed them, thanks to Haber.
The controversial aspect of his life is that he developed the use of poison gas and supervised its deployment by German forces in the First World War.
This terrible development and the thousands of deaths it caused to British and allied troops let loose latent Jew hatred that existed in British society. That outrage was not felt keenly enough though that it stopped British scientists from scrambling to develop and deploy their own versions of chemical warfare on German troops and their allies.
Had Haber not overcome the typical barriers against Jews that existed in so many German universities and if he had not been so keen to bury his Jewish roots (he went on to convert to Christianity), half of today’s humanity would not exist.
His 1905 breakthrough (long sought after by chemists) enabled nitrogen from air to form new compounds and create ammonia. That allowed new fertilizers that massively increased crop and food production.
Today, approximately 4 billion people are alive due to a Jewish scientist called Haber.
Or take one of the most brilliant scientific minds of the twentieth Century, Richard Feynman. His contribution to the world of Physics ranks with Oppenheimer and Einstein. When he sought entry to Princeton from MIT in 1939 to advance his work, the fact that the Far Rockaway, N.Y. born genius was a Jew became a problem.
One of his professors writing to a colleague at Princeton assured him that despite his heritage…
“Feynman’s Physiognomy and manner, however, show no trace of this (Jewish) characteristic and I do not believe the matter will be any great handicap.”
Physiognomy is the pseudoscience beloved of the Nazis that claims a person’s facial features or expression is indicative of personality, character and in particular, ethnic origin.
In other words, Feynman’s Professor was reassuring Princeton that they could safely accept Feynman as he didn’t look Jewish.
In today’s world, so defined and financed by Jew hatred both on the Left and Right, I wonder how many millions or even billions of lives will be lost, by the exclusion of Jews from places like Harvard, Yale or Columbia?