The Vaccination War in Late 19th Century Jewish London Rabbi Prof. Daniel Sinclair and Prof. Yehuda Lerman In early 18th century Europe it is estimated that small pox was responsible for the deaths of approximately 400,000 people annually and a third of all cases of blindness. The death rate decreased dramatically as a result of inoculation, and rabbinical opinion tended to permit it notwithstanding reports that it resulted in a very small number of deaths. Medical and epidemiological information was a feature of several rabbinic works in this period permitting the use of inoculation against smallpox on both halakhic and theological grounds. In 1798 the English physician Edward Jenner created the much safer smallpox vaccine and by the middle of the 19th century, laws mandating the compulsory vaccination of young children were becoming the norm. The first such law to be passed in the UK was the Vaccination Act, 1853. Towards the end of the century, stories of serious side-effects and distrust of the government and the medical establishment fueled a backlash against these laws, and there were numerous demonstrations in London and elsewhere against compulsory smallpox vaccinations. Parents who
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refused to vaccinate their children were routinely arrested, fined and in some cases, sent to jail. In 1896, one Henry Levy, a Jewish Londoner, refused to allow his child to be vaccinated and was duly charged, tried and imprisoned. At a public meeting in support of their jailed co-religionist a letter from Joseph Hiam Levy (no relative), a lecturer in economics at Birbeck College and an important figure in the Personal Rights Association was read out to the large crowd. The main points in the letter were that compulsory vaccination was an infringement of personal liberty; the statistical evidence in favor of vaccination had been “doctored” to make it look better than it was in reality, and that vaccination constituted an infringement of Jewish law and theology. Levy was wellinformed in Jewish matters and cited the Biblical prohibition on mixing different kinds (Leviticus 19:19; Deuteronomy 22: 9-11) together with the hygienic thrust of the Jewish dietary laws which in his view would undoubtedly be opposed to placing diseased animal matter into the body of a healthy child in favor of his
