“Humanity” and the Legend of Healing Discipline from Napoleon to Salanter

Abstract

The article reconstructs the transcultural folklore tradition to consider the moral courage and discipline as a cure for epidemic diseases. The starting point of the study was the legend of Rabbi Israel Salanter abolishing the Yom Kippur fast during the 1848 cholera epidemic. As the article argues, the Salanter legend formed in 20th century is typologically and genetically connected with the legend of Napoleon touching the plague buboes of his soldiers, and with its metamorphoses in the Russian Empire during the cholera epidemics of 1830–1831 and 1848. In the article, the legend of the healing discipline is considered as one of the manifestations of faith in the progress and in the ability of science to save humanity from suffering. Due to the lack of scientific ways to defeat the epidemics, the legend became a secular symbol of security. This symbol was an effective cure for the political bodies, but not for the human ones. The article traces changing status of this legend, which goes back to the Enlightenment idea of imagination as the cause of epidemics. Initially perceived as revolutionary and oppositional to the official medicine, it gradually becomes a part of generally accepted scientific knowledge.