Quarantine!: East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892 (review)

Headlines today raise fears that Southeast Asian and Latin American immigrants are responsible for a spike in the number of reported tuberculosis cases. Portraying the foreign-born as health menaces and debating whether the threat warrants a broader restrictionism is old wine in new bottles. All the more reason, then, to read with interest and enthusiasm Dr. Howard Markel’s penetrating volume on what happened a century ago, in 1892, when health officials alleged that typhus and cholera germs were arriving in the United States on the bodies of Russian Jewish immigrants and sought to control the looming health crisis through quarantine. Markel, a physician as well as a historian of medicine, understands typhus and cholera from a clinical perspective. Familiar with the history of Russian Jewry, he adroitly contextualizes the immigrants’ quarantine experiences. Adept at Yiddish, he conveys those experiences in the immigrants’ own voices with unusual sensitivity.

The 1892 outbreak of typhus in New York City was remarkable because most of the reported cases occurred among the 268 Russian Jewish passengers who had arrived on the SS Massilia and those who came into close contract with the immigrants. Public health officials called for quarantine. Jewish immigrant typhus victims from the ship, and their new neighbors who had contracted the disease, were forcibly removed to New York’s contagious-disease hospital on North Brother Island. Those just developing the disease and their healthy contacts were also quarantined. Soon, quarantine detention was extended to include all Russian Jewish newcomers, but not other immigrants arriving at the same time.

Markel explains the perils of the voyage, including the three-month stopover in Constantinople, where typhus was endemic and where the voyagers may have contracted the disease. He takes readers into the Lower East Side tenements, so filthy and ripe for typhus that Jacob Riis called the Jewish neighborhood “the typhus ward.” However, Markel’s most original contribution is his critique of health officers’ insufficient and inconsistent response to the crisis. New York Port Health Officer Dr. William R. Jenkins scrambled to calm public fears, but he could not overcome his own prejudices, at times practicing “quarantine by ethnicity.” Russian Jews were quarantined without the slightest evidence that typhus was present on the ships they had ridden to America. Yiddish writers such as Abraham Cahan and Getsl Zelikowitch protested, but to no avail. Meanwhile, congressional nativists such as Republican Senator William Chandler of New Hampshire, chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Immigration, sought unsuccessfully to capitalize upon the episode in support of immigration restriction.

Shortly after the typhus scare abated, public fears were further inflamed when cholera threatened New Yorkers. Cholera represented a broader, more frightening public health menace than typhus. Officials suspected that Jewish immigrants passing through Hamburg and sailing on the SS Moravia had brought Vibrio cholerae with them. President Benjamin Harrison directed that all passengers traveling steerage on every arriving ship undergo a twenty-day quarantine. Cabin passengers, holding more expensive tickets, were exempt. If Harrison hesitated to push for broader restriction, or to mention Russian Jews as a special threat, state and municipal public officials were less reticent. Again, Jewish spokesmen denounced the medicalized prejudice, but gained little satisfaction.

In 1893, Congress passed the Rayner-Harris Quarantine Act separating the controversial issue of immigration restriction from quarantine. The law, to be administered by the U.S. Marine-Hospital Service, called for a national system of quarantine regulations, immigrant inspection procedures, and health standards. Markel explains that because the typhus and cholera epidemics were short-lived public health crises, the backlash against immigrants was equally brief. Immigration restriction failed to pass in 1892. The episode was over, but the pattern of prejudice remained.

Howard Markel intentionally limits the scope of his book to the stigmatizing of Russian Jewish immigrants as health menaces in New York a century ago—but his work offers an impressive model for later scholars who...