Another now somewhat forgotten ‘jewish invention’ myth – probably because it has to do with the Soviet Union and more specifically Lenin’s embalmed corpse that famously sits in Moscow to this day – is the idea that jews discovered/invented the first bactericide – a substance which kills bacteria – which Slava Bazarsky claims as such on his website.
He writes as follows:
‘Boris Zbarsky (Ber Elievich) - bactericide, with which he embalmed Lenin’ (1)
The interesting things about Zbarsky is that he was an ardent Bolshevisk precisely because he was jew – he joined the Bolsheviks because of the ‘anti-Semitism’ of Tsarist Russia – and the writer Boris Pasternak – famous for his 1957 novel ‘Doctor Zhivago’ – lived with Zbarsky and his family as a young man. (2) Zbarsky also claimed – after 1937 – to have been responsible for the coming up with the secret chemical mix that embalmed Lenin, which is what Bazarsky is referencing as his ‘invention of bactericide’ when in truth this had nothing to do with Zbarsky and was the sole creation of the Ukrainian anatomist Vladimir Vorobiov. (3)
However, about the specific claim that Bazarsky is making in that Zbarsky created/discovered the first bactericide?
Well, Zbarsky created nothing in particular in this field as we’ve already seen, but the first bactericide – more specifically known as a bacteriophage – was discovered by the English bacteriologist and polymath Ernest Hanbury Hankin in 1896 long before Zbarsky could even have been studying the issue!
As Wittebole, De Roock and Opal point out:
‘In 1896, Ernest Hanbury Hankin, a British bacteriologist working as the Chemical Examiner and Bacteriologist to the Government of the United Provinces and of the Central Provinces of India, demonstrated that the waters from the Indian rivers Ganga and Yamuna contained a biological principle that destroyed cultures of cholera-inducing bacteria. This substance could pass through millipore filters, known to be able to retain larger microorganisms such as bacteria. He published his work in French in the Annals of the Pasteur Institute.’ (4)
This is the first time that what we might call a natural antibiotic – a bacteriophage - was discovered and unfortunately it is not widely known that it was an English not a jewish invention!
References
(1) https://slavaguide.com/en/blog/jewish-inventors-and-jewish-inventions
(2) https://picklinglenin.wordpress.com/the-characters/boris-zbarsky/
(3) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/jewish-invention-myths-embalming
(4) Xavier Wittebole, Sophie De Roock, Steven Opal, 2013, ‘A historical overview of bacteriophage therapy as an alternative to antibiotics for the treatment of bacterial pathogens’, Virulence, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 227-228