"Jewish Fever": Myths and Realities in the History of Russia's Typhus Epidemic, 1914–22

In the summer of 1916, the Great European War entered its third year. In his memoirs, Isaac Bashevis Singer, then 13 years old, recalled living in Warsaw, which had been under German occupation for nearly a year. A typhus epidemic broke out that summer and, when Singer's brother Moshe became ill, his family had to make a quick decision:

We could not keep him at home because the doctors had to inform the police of all cases of typhus. A carriage (the notorious horse-drawn ambulance) came to take him to the hospital for epidemic victims on Pokorna Street. We knew what would happen next. Gentiles in white aprons would come and spray our house with carbolic acid, then take anyone they found to the disinfection house on Szczęśliwa Street. We decided that my father and older brother would find a place to hide, and that my mother and I would go for disinfection. Sure enough, the gentiles came and sprayed our house. The air was filled with poison. A policeman ordered mother and me to come with him. . .

We were taken to a strange building, full of male and female guards and officials. I was taken somewhere with another boy and we had our heads shaved. The scissors and clippers did away with my red sidelocks and, at that moment, I knew that this would be the end of my long sidelocks. I had wanted to be relieved of them for a long time.

"Take off your clothes!" a woman commanded us. Strip naked for a shiksa? I was speechless, but she, in her white apron and white nurse's cap, had no patience for any sort of shame. She tore my robe, shirt, and pants from me, and I was left standing there as naked as a newborn. Then she scrubbed me and the other boy down in a soapy bath. . . . We received new white robes and slippers, like hospital patients. . . . When I looked in a mirror I didn't recognize myself. Yidishkayt (Jewishness) had fallen away from me, along with my sidelocks and Jewish clothes.¹

Singer's account depicted in microcosm the impact of the wartime typhus epidemic on Warsaw Jewry. A coordinated sanitary regime confronted his family with a rapid sequence of invasive interventions, carried out by doctors, policemen, fumigators, bureaucrats, and nurses. The "disinfection house" was not far from where they lived in the city's Jewish quarter, but to pious Jewish families like his own, the institution signified something utterly non-Jewish and, thus, suspicious. Disinfection meant mandatory isolation for eight days, under guard, with no access to kosher food. There, people were shorn of body hair and clothing, which—from the medical authorities' view—facilitated the spread of disease. Hence, the family's strategic decision that Isaac and his mother would effectively comply so his father and older brother could abscond and, thereby, avoid the mandatory disinfection regiment.

Singer published his memoirs of life in Warsaw nearly 40 years later, for readers of the New York Yiddish daily Forverts. While he likely dramatized his experiences in retrospect, his account reflected a historical reality. Louse-born typhus became an epidemic in Eastern Europe shortly after the start of the World War in 1914, and it continued to rage across post-revolutionary Russia and Ukraine before its containment in 1922. Although attention to typhus has been historically eclipsed by the flu pandemic of 1918, it was the chief killer of populations in East European and Russian lands. An estimated 20–25 million people became infected with typhus during the Russian Civil War (1918–22), and a minimum of 2.5–3 million people died from it in those years.²

In the Polish lands under German occupation from August 1915 to November 1918, German authorities associated the disease so closely with the Jews that, in common parlance, typhus became known as "Jewish fever." Indeed, some claimed that the disease had infected nine out of every ten Jews in Poland.³ This essay treats the phrase "Jewish fever" as a subject of...