Year: 2019

Rabbi Nachman of Breslov’s Endorsement of the Smallpox Vaccine

We have written about Rabbi Nachman of Breslov’s opposition to 18-century medicine. But what about vaccination? He was all for it!

The following essay was sent to me by a reader:

This disfiguring and often fatal disease [Smallpox] was then prevalent throughout Europe and Asia. A primitive form of inoculation had been in use for some time in Turkey and spread to the rest of Europe in the 1720s. However, it was not without its dangers, and the best that most people could do when there was an outbreak of smallpox was to flee.

It was not until the 1790’s that the English country physician Edward Jenner observed that those who had been infected with cowpox did not become infected with smallpox. In 1796 he performed the first vaccination on a young boy, and found that, despite the boy’s subsequent exposure to smallpox, he did not become infected. Knowledge of the new technique spread rapidly throughout Europe, and immunization against smallpox soon became a standard medical procedure. At first it was a subject of heated controversy within the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe, but in 1804 a Dr. Shimon of Cracow printed a broadsheet entitled “A New Remedy,” in which he encouraged all Jews to have their children vaccinated as a preventive measure. Within a short time, hundreds of Jewish children were being successfully vaccinated, including those of leading rabbis and Torah scholars (Sefer HaBrit I, 17:2).

In the midst of this controversy, Rebbe Nachman came out in favor of vaccination in the strongest terms:

“Every parent should have his children vaccinated within the first three months of life. Failure to do so is tantamount to murder. Even if they live far from the city and have to travel during the great winter cold, they should have the child vaccinated before three months” (Avaneha Barzel p.31 #34).

Rebbe Nachman’s championship of vaccination is clear proof that his opposition to doctors and medicine was in no way bound up with some kind of retrogressive attitude of suspicion towards modernity and innovation per se. Here was a newly-discovered technique with a proven power to prevent a dangerous disease, and within a matter of a few years Rebbe Nachman came out emphatically in favor – Jenner first discovered vaccination in 1796, and Rebbe Nachman’s (undated) statement must have been made some time before his death in 1810.

See the rest here.

Note: Not all vaccines are the same!

How Did Rabbi Moshe Mordechai Epstein Celebrate Lag Ba’omer? He DIDN’T!

Check out the short and fascinating account of Lag Ba’omer from a letter written by a student of the Chevron Yeshiva, plus analysis.

A cute quote:

It was an amazing sight, albeit a bit wild and lacking Jewish flavor. In didn’t find favor in my eyes at all, but it was interesting to watch. Mainly it was a Chag for their children who went around with fireworks in their hands and with beaming and shining faces.

The essay is called “Lag B’Omer through the eyes of a Litvak in 1925 – A Static and Evolving Chag“.

The Dirty History of the Minimum Wage Law: EUGENICS

Listen or read the transcript from The Corbett Report here.

An excerpt:

The early progressive economists made no attempt to hide their eugenic motivations in promoting minimum wage laws.

Take Henry Rogers Seager, a Columbia economist and president of the American Association for Labor Legislation, who wrote in a key paper on the minimum-wage law published in The Annals of the American Academy in 1913:

“If we are to maintain a race that is to be made up of capable, efficient and independent individuals and family groups we must courageously cut off lines of heredity that have been proved to be undesirable by isolation or sterilization of the congenitally defective. Michigan has just passed an act requiring the sterilization of congenital idiots. This may seem somewhat remote from the minimum wage but such a policy judiciously extended should make easier the task of each on-coming generation which insists that every individual who is regularly employed in the competitive labor market shall receive at least a living wage for his work.”

In 1910, Royal Meeker, a Princeton economist who served as Woodrow Wilson’s U.S. Commissioner of Labor, opined that:

“It is much better to enact a minimum-wage law, even if it deprives these unfortunates of work. Better that the state should support the inefficient wholly and prevent the multiplication of the breed than subsidize incompetence and unthrift, enabling them to bring forth more of their kind.”

Arthur Holcombe, a Professor of Government at Harvard and a member of the Massachusetts Minimum Wage Commission, wrote approvingly of how Australia’s own minimum wage laws:

“. . . protect the white Australian’s standard of living from the invidious competition of the colored races, particularly of the Chinese.”

This is the real history of the minimum wage in America. By their own admission, a belief in the eugenic effect of eradicating the lower classes from the gene pool is the reason that its early progressive proponents advocated for minimum wage laws at all.

Of course, no one is suggesting that the people marching under the Fight For $15 banner are eugenicists, or that they are trying to exterminate the “defective germplasm” of the “unemployables.” This is patently not the case.

Modern-day progressives instead turn to newer economic models and theories to defend their “living wage” movement. A highly cited 1994 study by Princeton economists David Card and Alan Krueger, for instance, purported to find that raises in minimum wage actually had, if anything, a positive effect on employment. If Card and Krueger’s findings are true, then, modern progressives might argue, it doesn’t matter why economists originally supported wage floors; the point is that they offer the working poor a hand up.

As the Minimum Wage Study at the University of Washington and similar research being conducted across academia are increasingly discovering, however, Card and Krueger’s paper (called an “intellectual revolution” by Paul Krugman) is incorrect or at the very least leaves out important details about the minimum wage’s true impact.

Read the rest here.