* Plehve’s nationalist agitations contributed to a new spasm of anti-Jewish pogroms, starting on Easter Day 1903 in Kishinev (Moldova), which encouraged more Jews to emigrate. Plehve was assassinated, but among those leaving fast was a Jewish dentist, Max Jaffe, and his son Henry, who left Vilnius, buying tickets for New York. A few days later, they landed in Ireland. When they grumbled, it turned out they had bought tickets for New Cork. They settled in Limerick in a neighbourhood known as Little Jerusalem until January 1903, when a local priest, Father Creagh, incited local peasants to attack the Jews, most of whom left for England. Henry Jaffe was a grandfather of this author.
* Crookbuster Charlie, who founded the Bureau of Investigation (the future FBI), was the grandson of King Jérôme and great-nephew of Emperor Napoleon.
* In 1882, a German professor in Berlin, Robert Koch, had discovered that tuberculosis, one of the biggest killer diseases, was caused by a bacterium, often passed to humans in milk. Koch was building on Pasteur’s work. Koch also discovered the bacterium that causes cholera. Germ theory changed the world – since, along with the development of anaesthesia and anti-septis and sterilized equipment, it enabled the development of invasive surgery for the first time. Yet it was widely questioned. It was a young Jewish Russian microbiologist, Waldemar Haffkine, born Vladmir Chavkin in Berdiansk, trained in Odessa, who was the first to create and use vaccines against cholera and the plague. When the pogroms started in 1881, Haffkine, aged twenty-one, helped defend Jews in Odessa but was wounded and arrested, before being released with the help of his professor. Escaping antisemitism and joining the Pasteur Institute, he tested his vaccines on himself. Frequent epidemics in India led him to start his programmes there. In 1896 Bombay suffered a bubonic outbreak, spread from Chinese ports in an outbreak exacerbated by the Taiping Rebellion via Hong Kong, where Alexandre Yersin finally discovered the plague organism. The plague killed over ten million Indians as the British tried to control it. Haffkine ultimately vaccinated millions of people and helped wipe out these diseases. In 1902, a contaminated vial led to nineteen deaths, which prompted accusations of misconduct in an atmosphere of antisemitism and he was dismissed. But the accusations were disproven and he returned to work in India. His Haffkine Institute is Mumbai’s main bacteriology research centre and he appeared on Indian stamps. Yet pasteurization was not fully accepted in the US until 1915, while the anti-TB Bacillus Calmette–Guérin (BCG) vaccine was not used until 1921 – forty years after Koch’s discovery.
* Du Bois invented the idea of ‘white supremacy’, proposing that the word coloured rather than black be used to describe ‘dark-skinned people everywhere’, and later he expanded his campaign to support black women.
* Nicky’s obsession with a Russian empire in east Asia alarmed the British viceroy of India, George Curzon, an unusual Etonian grandee who had travelled through Iran and central Asia. Just before the Japanese attacked Russia, Curzon dispatched a punitive expedition, 3,000 mainly Sikh and Pathan troops under Colonel Francis Younghusband, to secure Tibet against Romanov interference. On 31 March 1904, Tibetan troops, armed only with muskets, blocked the invasion, at which Younghusband open fire with his Maxims: ‘I got so sick of the slaughter that I ceased fire, though the general’s order was to make as big a bag as possible,’ recalled the commander of the Maxims. ‘I hope I shall never again have to shoot down men walking away.’ As the ruling Dalai Lama fled to Mongolia, Younghusband took Lhasa. Tibet agreed to become a British protectorate. Yet it was unnecessary. The Japanese war ended Russian ambitions in east Asia.
* In 1910 Japan annexed Korea altogether, declaring ‘enlightened administration’ while suppressing the rising resistance. Many Koreans escaped Japanese oppression by crossing the border into China’s northern province of Manchuria. Among them were a couple of Korean Presbyterians, Kim Hyong-jik and Kang Pan-sok, with their eight-year-old son, Kim Song-ju, who would in his teens join an anti-imperialist organization and later converted to Communism using the name Kim Il-sung. His grandson still rules North Korea into the 2020s.
* In 1901, Phili introduced Willy to a racist disciple of Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, son-in-law of Wagner, who preached racial superiority: ‘If we don’t decide to think resolutely’ about ‘our utterly Jew-ridden artistic life, our Germanic species will be lost’.
