From Cowpox To Covid-19

For a year now, our lives have been dictated by Covid-19, a highly contagious infectious disease that spread around the globe within several months and has claimed more than 5.5 million lives to date (January 2022). Meanwhile, some vaccine sceptics and Covid deniers in Germany have been styling themselves as victims, imagining themselves as Anne Frank, or donning a yellow Star of David with the inscription “unvaccinated.”

The History of Vaccine Development
The development of vaccination methods and effective vaccines, as we know them today, began in the late eighteenth century with an inoculation for smallpox, which was a widespread disease at the time. With the further advancements of medical history, the discovery of bacteria and viruses as pathogens paved the way to the production of other vaccines against such maladies as cholera, diphtheria, measles, rabies, and typhus.

There are numerous different infectious diseases, and new pathogens have emerged in the past on many occasions. Science has not been able to find effective medicines for inoculating against or treating all of them. From 1918 to 1920, around 500 million people worldwide were infected with the “Spanish Flu” in a pandemic with several waves; between 50 and 100 million of those infected are estimated to have died of it. There was no vaccine against the illness. AIDS was first discovered in the 1980s, and research into a vaccine against HIV infection is still ongoing today.

Jewish Stances on Vaccination
Judaism has always been very receptive to vaccination against infectious diseases because Jewish law requires protecting life for oneself and others. More than a century ago, the US doctor and anthropologist Maurice Fishberg (1872–1934), who was Jewish, remarked in the Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden (Journal of Jewish Demography and Statistics):

“In fact, every physician who possesses experience with Jews knows well that they are always amenable to employing any new method to prevent or treat disease. There are virtually no vaccine opponents among them, nor any other kind of superstition that could induce them to resist the health authorities’ vaccination efforts. Furthermore, the Jewish clergy is always in favor of leaving medical matters up to physicians.” (“Die angebliche Rassen-Immunität der Juden” [The Supposed Racial Immunity of the Jews], 1908)

Obviously, there are Jews who refrain from getting vaccinated, but staunch opposition to the overall practice has always been an outlier.

The Historical Significance of Vaccine Certificates
The preservation of so many vaccine certificates for so many decades attests to how important these documents were when they were created, not least because the German Empire made vaccinations against smallpox obligatory. This legal obligation was introduced in 1874 and not rescinded in West Germany until 1976. In East Germany, the vaccine requirement remained in force until the German Democratic Republic dissolved and its territory joined the Federal Republic of Germany (formerly West Germany) in 1990.

By assiduously safeguarding vaccine certificates, a person could provide proof of having satisfied the legal obligation. These documents were frequently required to enroll in elementary school. 

But these records could also be vitally important when emigrating, especially during the Nazi era. In many cases, proof of vaccination was a requirement to receive an entry visa. Thus, a vaccine and the associated vaccine certificate could be life-saving in more ways than one.

Salomon Pollak had received the vaccine on 30 July 1818, but when he later became a medical student, he evidently needed the certificate in connection with his practice as a physician. According to the document, he “survived” the “genuine cowpox” – to which he had been exposed in order to confer immunity against smallpox – “reasonably well.” As hypodermic syringes would not become commonplace for another thirty tears, in 1818, an incision was made in Pollak’s skin and the vaccine was introduced directly in the open wound.

Jewish Physicians Who Administered Vaccines
A large share of the vaccine certificates in our Archive were issued by Jewish physicians. They therefore not only include information about the vaccinated individuals who included them in their bequests, but they also give clues to the physicians’ own careers.

Apart from these certificates, family collections also contain other documents from the doctors administering these vaccines. These can be found among all the papers from the professional training and careers of the Jewish physicians whose lives are documented in the Archive.

For example, the medical student Arthur Lewkowitz (1890–1966), who was enrolled at Heidelberg University, received a certificate in the summer semester of 1913 affirming that he had attended “the lecture on vaccination and immunization,” observed initial and second vaccinations and practiced “vaccination techniques”.


Max Kirschner (1886–1975), who worked as practicing physician in Frankfurt am Main beginning after the First World War and also administrated vaccines for the district, was relieved of this duty in 1931. The police commissioner thanked him for his “activities to date in the public interest”.

Emigration Papers
Emigrating to another country usually required a vaccine certificate among many other documents. The Handbook for Jewish Emigration, published in 1938 by Philo Verlag, devotes three separate entries to different synonyms of the German word for vaccine. The entry for “Schutzimpfung” (protective vaccine) reads:  “Smallpox v[accine] is required for most destination countries. Cholera & typhus v[accine] is advisable for [those intending to] live in or transit through endemic areas.”

If the immigrant presented a vaccine certificate issued during the preceding three years, this obligatory vaccination was waived. This was the case for Heinz Katz (1902–1969), who had been vaccinated against both diseases in Darmstadt on 18 July 1935, as attested by two official letters from district physicians. 

Vaccinated On Board
Anneliese Kuttner (1924–1994) was vaccinated by the “ship’s doctor” on 19 March 1939 “against small-pox and cholera, typhus and parathyphus” during her voyage aboard the Victoria, on which she was emigrating to Shanghai.

The married couple Jacob Intrator (1875–1943) and Rosa Intrator (1875–1951) fled Berlin in the autumn of 1941 on one of the last trains to Bilbao, Spain. On 4 February 1942, when they boarded the Nyassa, which would take them from Lisbon to Cuba, they were issued a Portuguese vaccine certificate.

In Shanghai
Our Archive includes a disproportionate number of vaccine documents from exile in Shanghai, many more than from other countries of exile. This may be related to the fact that almost all the people who took refuge there moved onwards to other countries after the end of the Second World War; a small number of them even returned to Germany.

Those vaccine certificates, all of them issued after the war’s end, were therefore preserved among their emigration papers and were accorded particular importance. Documents from Shanghai demonstrate particularly clearly that these documents were sometimes used as official identity papers. Many of them were affixed with passport photographs and signed by the vaccine recipient.

Abraham Meyer (1881–1950) and his wife Cilly (1889–1978) fled from Hamburg to Shanghai, where they were forced to live in a ghetto established by the Japanese occupiers until the war ended. They were vaccinated against cholera and typhus on 1 October 1947. In January 1948, they were finally able to emigrate from Shanghai to the US.

A military identity card dating from 1958 belonged to the Berlin-born Willi Löhr (b. 1937) whose mother had been murdered at Auschwitz. In the mid-1950s, he had emigrated to Israel, where he served in the army. His identity card lists his blood type alongside various vaccinations.

Vaccine Certificates as Records of Broader History
Vaccine certificates constitute more than important historical records of medical history. They can also provide personal biographical information. 

For example, the certificate from the twelve-year-old Berliner Jonni Teicher’s (1924–2017) booster vaccination on 19 May 1936 lists his vaccination district as the “private elementary school of the Jewish community.” This is the only surviving indication that he attended that school.

Vaccine papers from the Nazi period frequently attest to the discrimination and persecution to which Jews were subjected. When the Gumpert family from Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland) received their vaccinations against smallpox in their hometown before their planned emigration on 2 February 1939, not only did their certificates include the government-imposed second names of “Israel” and “Sara,” they also bore a stamp indicating that the Jewish physician “Dr. Israel Martin Biberstein” was “authorized to treat Jewish patients exclusively.” The stamp includes a Star of David.

Medical Care in the Ghetto
Vaccine certificates issued at the Theresienstadt ghetto are unique in our Archive. Along with the person’s name, these “vaccine cards” list the number of the “transport” within which the person was deported there.

Vienna-born Berta Richter (1875–1959) was deported from Troppau (today Opava, Czechia) in January 1944 as part of “transport” no. XXI/3 and was vaccinated against typhoid fever in January and February 1944.

In fact, it would have suited the regime’s intentions if infectious diseases were to run rampant in Theresienstadt, as they did in other ghettos and camps, claiming the lives of many prisoners. 

However, the Theresienstadt ghetto served for a while as a “show” camp to mislead the international public and visiting delegations from the Red Cross. In that context, vaccines were administered there as well. Berta Richter survived her detainment and died in 1959 at the age of eighty-five.

After Liberation
Vaccine certificates from the immediate postwar period have also been preserved in our collections, for example, this vaccine certificate for Klaus Zwilsky (b. 1932). 

Georg Marcuse’s (1901–1994) vaccine certificate is also printed on the back of such a military card.

Anna Münzer (1875–1974) was already seventy-one when she was vaccinated in late 1945. After liberation from the Theresienstadt ghetto, she went to the Deggendorf Displaced Persons Camp in the US occupation zone.

In November and December 1945, she was vaccinated there against typhus, typhoid fever, and smallpox. Half a year later, she was able to emigate to the US, where she joined her children. She died in San Francisco at age ninety-nine. 

Anuschka Wienskowitz’s (b. 1947) vaccine certificate may be emblematic for the fragile resumption of Jewish life in Germany after the Shoah. 

As a daughter of two Auschwitz survivors who had met and married at the Feldafing Displaced Persons camp, she was vaccinated against smallpox in Hamburg a few months after her birth. However, her parents did not see a future for themselves in Germany and the family of three emigrated to the US in 1949.

Covid-19 Today
And today? Covid-19 is also an intrusion on Jews’ lives and religious practices. During the first lockdown, prayer services had to be temporarily suspended. In addition, the public health rules raise many questions. For example, is it permissible to touch a mezuzah in an entryway and then kiss one’s hand? Today, German and European rabbis are appealing for people to get vaccinated against Covid-19. And the chair of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Dr. Josef Schuster, has spoken out in favor of the vaccination.

Because the Jewish Museum Berlin’s Archive preserves not only documents from the past, but also from contemporary Jewish life, it is quite possible that at some point, we will have a record of a Covid-19 vaccination in our holdings.