Yid­dish and Mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy, Maybe

by Elio

In a re­cent twi­light dream, I pon­dered if there was a con­nec­tion be­tween Mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy and Yid­dish. You see, since my youth, Mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy has not only been my vo­ca­tion but my av­o­ca­tion. On the other hand, Yid­dish was the lan­guage of my fore­fa­thers and, in my child­hood, the one we most of­ten used at home. Now, in old age, my in­ter­est in Yid­dish has reawak­ened. So, if you al­low me, is there a con­nec­tion be­tween Yid­dish and Mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy? In con­clu­sion, I found none.

Cos­tumes of Jews. Source

Among the early fig­ures in mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy there were Jews or part-Jews (Ja­cob Henle – a teacher of Robert Koch, Elie Metch­nikoff, Fer­di­nand Cohn, Paul Ehrlich, Al­bert Wasser­mann, oth­ers) but, best I can guess, none of them were Yid­dish speak­ers. There­fore, I could not as­so­ciate this lan­guage and their work.

But Yid­dish is such a flex­i­ble and adapt­able lan­guage that surely a con­nec­tion to Mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy may be found, if only ten­u­ous. I searched my knowl­edge of Yid­dish say­ings and found a rel­e­vant one, a curse: "Khap a kha­lerie!", which means "Catch a cholera!" Not so nice. On the other hand, it is pos­si­ble to make con­nec­tions be­tween Ju­daism (and I don't mean the Yid­dish lan­guage) and Mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy. Jew­ish di­etary laws were di­rectly con­nected to hy­giene, ergo Mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy. I am not re­lat­ing this to Yid­dish, just to Jew­ish cus­toms. In 1894, Al­fred Nos­sig, a Pol­ish Jew liv­ing in Paris, wrote a his­tory of "the so­cial hy­giene of the Jews and an­cient Ori­en­tal Na­tions" in which he ar­gues that the old codices of China, In­dia, Per­sia, Egypt, and what is now Is­rael, were not pri­mar­ily re­li­gion­ist but were ac­tu­ally rules of hy­giene de­signed to pre­serve the health of the peo­ple. Not every as­pect of the Jew­ish di­etary laws be­longs to this scrutiny, a sub­ject I will pru­dently not go into here. How­ever, many pro­scrip­tions deal with en­sur­ing that an­i­mals to be eaten were healthy and de­void of com­mu­ni­ca­ble dis­eases.

There is more, from a time that long pre­cedes the birth of Yid­dish (around the 10th cen­tury CE). For in­stance, the ba­sic tract of Jew­ish re­li­gion, the Tal­mud (orig­i­nat­ing around the 2nd cen­tury CE), refers to the use of some­thing called chamka or ku­tach bayli, a con­coc­tion of moldy corn mash soaked in date wine that was used to heal wounds. This is part of a larger story, wherein an­cient heal­ers made use of moldy bread and the likes. But to re­turn my orig­i­nal in­tent, even though con­nec­tion can be made be­tween Mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy and the Jew­ish re­li­gion, I have failed in my orig­i­nal in­tent, to re­late it to the Yid­dish lan­guage.

 

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