Summary
A Berlin Zionist physician whose medical articles in Altneuland (journal) and whose role in founding Palestine’s Pasteur Institute for Hygiene embodied, in Peretz’s account, the entanglement of German colonial medicine and Zionist settlement (Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, PDF p.207-208).
Details
- Sandler was born in 1879 in an Orthodox family in Posen, studied medicine in Königsberg, supported the practical Zionists at the Sixth Zionist Congress in 1903, visited Palestine first in 1907 and moved there in 1934 after many years of Zionist activity in Berlin (PDF p.207).
- With other Altneuland protagonists he became a key figure in founding primary medical institutions in Palestine, such as the Pasteur Institute for Hygiene established in 1913, part of a German-Jewish scientific collaboration rather than of the French Pasteur network; he headed the Gesellschaft jüdischer Ärzte und Naturwissenschaftler für sanitäre Interessen in Palestine, with more than 140 members including Otto Warburg and Franz Oppenheimer (PDF p.207).
- Sandler held Palestine and the Middle East to be nosologically distinguishable from Northern Europe through four diseases — malaria, dysentery, trachoma and leprosy — and, against the editors’ optimism, doubted that swamp drainage could noticeably alleviate malaria within a short time; he advocated immediate hygienic action only in Jerusalem, where Jews made up the bulk of the population (PDF p.208-209).
- On trachoma he reported, through hygienic education and practice alone, an infection rate of one-half percent in a Jewish settlement close to Jaffa against 60 percent in the Arab population, and on leprosy no cases of Europeans or Jews contracting the disease in Palestine; he cautioned against rash conclusions on racial immunity until hygiene and hereditary disposition had been sufficiently investigated, and derided locals’ confidence in wandering healers (PDF p.209).
- Sandler, with Aaron Aaronson, considered German involvement in the institute detrimental to independent Jewish institutions, against Warburg’s defence of it (PDF p.208).
Related pages
Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, Altneuland (journal), Franz Oppenheimer, Otto Warburg