Abstract
Though vaccinations are usually considered a paradigm of bio-medical success, their use has frequently provoked fierce criticism and unparalleled opposition.1 This article focuses on the social history of vaccination policy and practices during the period of mass immigration to Israel. Between 1948 and 1956, the newly established country, with a population of only about 700,000, faced the formidable task of absorbing over one million new immigrants. Following a short overview of health and immigration policies during the first years of the newly established Israeli State, this chapter will focus on vaccination as a case study to demonstrate the reciprocal relationships between the health system, various health agents and the immigrants — particularly the immigrant’s body as an entity that the state seeks to supervise and define. Although the Israeli vaccination programme for immigrants was generally described by its designers as an unproblematic and necessary step in transforming the immigrants into members of ‘modern civilisation’, deeper research reveals that on many occasions vaccination policy did indeed encounter difficulties. As historian David Arnold has claimed, states supervise and control the body politic by disciplining individuals bodies.2 Vaccinations, as part of a broader system of regulations that govern the care of infants, hygiene and health, constitute one example of the ways countries supervise the bodies of their citizens.
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Notes
See Nadja Durbach, Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005)
John Colgrove, State of Immunity: The Politics of Vaccination in Twentieth-Century America (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2006).
David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth Century India (London, Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993).
On the civic potential of the history of anti-vaccination, see Robert D. Johnston, The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era, Portland, Oregon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 177–220.
See Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia (New York: Basic Books, 2003).
Roland Robertson, ‘Glocalisation: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity’, in Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash and Roland Robertson (eds.), Global Modernities (London: Sage, 1995).
On the concept of the ‘melting pot’, see Moshe Lissak, The Mass Immigration in the Fifties: The Failure of the Melting Pot Policy (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1999)
Tzvi Tzameret, The Melting Pot: The Frumkin Commission on Education of Immigrant Children (1950) (Ben-Gurion Research Center: Ben Gurion University Press, 1993)
See Nadav Davidovitch and Shifra Shvarts, ‘Health and Hegemony: Preventive Medicine, Immigration and the Israeli Melting Pot’, Israel Studies, 9 (2004), 150–79.
See also Rina Peled, ‘The New Man’ of the Zionist Revolution: Hashomer Hatzair and its European Roots (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2002)
On eugenics and Zionist ideology, see Raphael Falk, ‘Zionism and the Biology of the Jews’, Science in Context, 11 (1998), 587–607
Raphael Falk, ‘Eugenics and the Jews’, in Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 462–76
John Efron, Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press, 1993).
See Dafna Hirsch, ‘“We Are Here to Bring the West, Not Only to Ourselves”: Zionist Occidentalism and the Discourse of Hygiene in Mandate Palestine’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 41 (2009), 577–94.
Quotation from David, speaking before the Knesset and cited in Dvora Hacohen, ‘The Law of Return — Its Content and the Debate Surrounding It’, in Anita Shapira (ed.), Independence: The First 50 Years (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for the History of Israel, 1998), 57
The issue of the selection of immigrants on medical grounds had surfaced in the 1920s and 1930s but not as open public debate as was the case in the 1950s. See Shifra Shvarts, Nadav Davidovitch, Avishay Goldberg and Rhona Seidelman, ‘Medical Selection and the Debate over Mass Immigration in the New State of Israel’, Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, 22 (2005), 5–34.
Dr Yosef Meir, ‘Medical Plan for Absorbing New Immigrants, 24.12.1943’, in Dvora Hacohen (ed.), From Fantasy to Reality: Ben-Gurion’s Plan for Mass Immigration 1942–1945 (Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defense, 1995), 264–5
See Theodore Grushka, Health Services in Israel: A Ten Year Survey, 1948–1958 (Jerusalem: Ministry of Health, 1959), 113–21.
On the establishment of the Shaar Ha’aliya camp and its public health function, see Rhona D. Seidelman, S. Ilan Troen and Shifra Shvarts, ‘“Healing” the Bodies and Souls of Immigrant Children: The Ringworm and Trachoma Institute, Sha ar ha-Aliyah, 1952–1960’, Journal of Israeli History: Politics, Society, Culture, 29:2 (2010), 191–211
Rhona D. Seidelman, ‘Conflicts of Quarantine’: The Case of Jewish Immigrants to the Jewish State, American Journal of Public Health, 102 (2012), 243–52.
Abraham Sternberg, As a People is Absorbed (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1973), 124–5
See Nadav Davidovitch and Avital Margalit, ‘Public Health, Racial Tensions, and Body Politic: Mass Ringworm Irradiation in Israel’, Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, 36 (2008), 522–9.
See Yehuda Weissburger, Shaar Haaliyah — Mass Aliyah Diary, 1947–1957 (Jerusalem: World Zionist Organization, 1986), 71.
See Hadassa Heinreich, ‘The Vaccinations Customary in Eretz-Israel’, Dapim Refuim, 9 (1950), 167–75
See Herman Lichtenstein, ‘Results of Mass Reontgenography among Immigrants into Israel’, American Review of Tuberculosis, 69 (1954), 837–40.
See Dvora Hacohen, Immigrants in Turmoil: Mass Immigration to Israel and Its Repercussions in the 1950s and After (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003).
See Meira Weiss, ‘The Immigrating Body and the Body Politic: The “Yemenite Children Affair” and Body Commodification in Israel’, Body & Society, 7 (2001), 93–109.
See Shifra Shvarts, ‘The Development of Mother and Infant Welfare Centers in Israel, 1854–1954’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 55 (2000), 398–425.
See, for example, Emily K. Abel and Nancy Reifel, ‘Interactions between Public Health Nurses and Clients on American Indian Reservations during the 1930s’, Social History of Medicine, 9 (1996), 89–108.
See Phyllis Palgi, ‘How It All Began... A Personal Saga’, Practicing Anthropology, 15 (1993), 5–8.
See Lenore Manderson and Pascale Allotey, ‘Storytelling, Marginality, and Community in Australia: How Immigrants Position Their Difference in Health Care Setting’, Medical Anthropology, 22 (2003), 1–21.
On micro-resistance related to the settlement policy of the newcomers in the 1950s, see Adriana Kemp, Nedidat Amim oh ha’Be’era ha’Gdola: Shlita Medinatit ve’Hitnagdut ba’Sfar ha’Israeli, in Hannan Hever, Yehouda Shenhav, Pnina Motzafi-Haller (eds.), Mizrahim in Israel: A Critical Observation Into Israel’s Ethnicity (Tel Aviv: Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2002), 36–65
See Yehuda Shenhav, The Arab Jews: Nationalism, Religion and Ethnicity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006)
Sami Shalom Chetrit, Mizrahi Struggle in Israel, 1948–2003 (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2004).
There is already a rich and productive tradition of ‘body politics’ writing in health research. See, for example, M. Lock, ‘Cultivating the Body: Anthropology and the Epistemologies of Bodily Practices and Knowledge’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 22 (1993), 133–55.
Don F. Seeman, One People, One Blood: Ethiopian-Israelis and the Return to Judaism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010).
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© 2013 Nadav Davidovitch
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Davidovitch, N. (2013). Immigration and Body Politic: Vaccination Policy and Practices during Mass Immigration to Israel (1948–1956). In: Cox, C., Marland, H. (eds) Migration, Health and Ethnicity in the Modern World. Science, Technology and Medicine in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303233_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303233_8
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