Some Jewish Responses to Smallpox Prevention in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries: A New Perspective on the Modernization of European Jewry

Abstract

The reactions of a group of Jewish writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the practices of inoculation and vaccination are considered. Their discourse on smallpox and its elimination is especially interesting because the subject of scientific and medical authority, by challenging traditional rabbinic opinions and praxis, is an essential dimension of the history of the modernization of European Jewry. The generally positive response by Jewish physicians and rabbis alike to smallpox prevention is compared to their more polarized responses in the controversy over early burial. The latter issue produced a controversy that engaged traditionalists and modernists for nearly a century. Examination of several Jewish texts related to vaccination can help us understand how Jews were psychologically well disposed to tolerate and even promote the general medicalization of the nineteenth century.

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