Haffkine continued his studies from 1879 to 1883 with Mechnikov, but after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, the government increasingly cracked down on people it considered suspicious, including intelligentsia. Haffkine was also employed by the zoological museum at Odessa from 1882 to 1888. Debarred from professorship, as a Jew,[1] in 1888, Haffkine was allowed to emigrate to Switzerland and began his work at the University of Geneva.