This is an accepted version of this page Waldemar Mordechai Wolff Haffkine CIE, born Vladimir Aronovich (Markus-Volf) Khavkin (Russian: Владимир Аронович (Маркус-Вольф) Хавкин; 15 March 1860 – 26 October 1930) was a Russian-French bacteriologist known for his pioneering work in vaccines.

Haffkine was educated at the Imperial Novorossiya University and later emigrated first to Switzerland, then to France, working at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, where he developed a cholera vaccine that he tried out successfully in India.

At that time The Jewish Chronicle noted "a Ukraine Jew, trained in the schools of European science, saves the lives of Hindus and Mohammedans and is decorated by the descendant of William the Conqueror and Alfred the Great.

[9] Haffkine continued his studies from 1879 to 1883 with Mechnikov at Odessa University, but after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, the government increasingly cracked down on people it considered suspicious, including intelligentsia.

Debarred from professorship, as a Jew,[7] in 1888, Haffkine was allowed to emigrate to Switzerland and began his work at the University of Geneva, as an assistant professor of Physiology.

[8][10] Haffkine began his scientific career as a protozoologist and protistologist, under the tutelage of Ilya Mechnikov at Imperial Novorossiya University in Odessa and later at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.

Even though his discovery caused an enthusiastic stir in the press, it was not widely accepted by his senior colleagues, including both Mechnikov and Pasteur, nor by European official medical establishment in France, Germany and Russia.

"Unlike tetanus or diphtheria, which were quickly neutralized by effective vaccines by the 1920s, the immunological aspects of bubonic plague proved to be much more daunting.

In three months of persistent work (one of his assistants experienced a nervous breakdown; two others quit), a form for human trials was ready and on 10 January 1897[14] Haffkine tested it on himself.

"[15] After these results were announced to the authorities, volunteers at the Byculla jail were inoculated and survived the epidemics, while seven inmates of the control group died.

"Like others of these early vaccines, the Haffkine formulation had nasty side effects, and did not provide complete protection, though it was said to have reduced risk by up to 50 percent.

"[13][15] Despite Haffkine's successes, some officials still primarily insisted on methods based on sanitarianism: washing homes by fire hose with lime, herding affected and suspected persons into camps and hospitals, and restricting travel.

[18] In 1898, Haffkine approached Aga Khan III with an offer for Sultan Abdul Hamid II to resettle Jews in Palestine, then a province of the Ottoman Empire: the effort "could be progressively undertaken in the Holy Land", "the land would be obtained by purchase from the Sultan's subjects", "the capital was to be provided by wealthier members of the Jewish community", but the plan was rejected.

Schama likened the persecution of Haffkine to the Dreyfus Affair, not just because of the injustice but also for the way the authorities, faced with conclusive evidence of their wrongdoing, resisted admitting it.

In this article, he advocated traditional religious observance and decried the lack of such observance among "enlightened" Jews, and stressed the importance of community life, stating: A brotherhood built up of racial ties, long tradition, common suffering, faith and hope, is a union ready-made, differing from artificial unions in that the bonds existing between the members contain an added promise of duration and utility.

Such a union takes many centuries to form and is a power for good, the neglect or disuse of which is as much an injury to humanity as the removal of an important limb is to the individual... 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; on the ordering of time for work and rest; on the formation of families and the duties of husband and wife, parents and children; on the paramount obligations of truthfulness and justice between neighbor and neighbor and to the stranger within the gates.In 1929, he established the Haffkine Foundation to foster Jewish education in Eastern Europe.