Sherlockian Ruminations from a Stormy Petrel

by Brenda Rossini

  Jewish prostitutes awaited their customers indoors. The Ripper sought vulnerable women who wouldn’t recognize him and wouldn’t have a pimp in the shadows. It may be that Whitechapel streets were lighter in night traffic in a community observing, fasting, or breaking the fast within the home.

  One of the victims was killed in the vicinity of a church where the women often stood. Catherine Eddowes was picked up around the corner from Rabbi Hermann Adler’s Great Synagogue and her customer was observed by two Jewish congregants.

  All the victims were killed within a mile of the Spitalfields market and slaughterhouses. Annie Chapman may have met her customer in Spitalfields. The Ripper killed the women at their street assignations, except for one.

  With the victim subdued, he cut her throat, from left to right. He would have been blood-soaked but workers in their leather aprons were commonplace. They came through Whitechapel towards home, or to the public sinks, or the cesspools. The graffiti about “the Juwes” was inscribed after Eddowes’ murder, above a passage leading to Aaron Kosminski’s lodgings.

  Then, the murders stopped. There may be more victims on this list, but the opinions about them remain mixed because of divergences in the manner of death or method. Ripperologist, Martin Fido, in The Crimes, Detection and Death of Jack the Ripper, searched through asylum records to explain the cessation of the murders. Aaron Kosminski had been certified a lunatic and committed permanently to a London asylum in 1891. His family may have sheltered him. A witness who may in fact have identified him, perhaps in the asylum before he was permanently committed, refused to testify against a fellow Jew and see him hanged.

  Nicholl was left unpersuaded by Patricia Cornwell’s accusation of the artist Walter Sickert in Portrait of a Killer. In his Ripper study, Hartley Nathan devoted a chapter to “My Favorites” none of whom is Jewish or Cornwell’s Walter Sickert.

  Part 4

  Ruddy Annotations to the Red-Headed League

  “How in the name of good fortune” did Arthur Conan Doyle specifically choose red heads and then gather them within the nomenclature of a league? There was rhyme and reason behind Doyle’s tricks, and unmistakably saucy.

  No drafts of The Adventure of the Red-Headed League are available to Sherlockian researchers, and it is unknown whether any exist. Perhaps one is hidden in the “w” section of an 1890 Encyclopedia Britannica. The title of the story is as eccentric as the rest of the Red Headed League’s circumstances: the obese, untidy, dim-witted pomposity of a former pawnbroker sitting in Sherlock Holmes’ rooms, red-headed applicants crowding the city street, the longhand transcription of an Encyclopedia as a job assignment. The bank robbery may have come courtesy of heist man Adam Worth (see Ben Macintyre’s excellent book, The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, Master Thief). So did Conan Doyle lift these particularities from events simmering in the London of 1890 and 1891.

  I propose a few possibilities, concededly in the realm of coincidence, but persuasive nonetheless. Let us recall that Holmes himself remarked on the tug of coincidence which applied during his investigative stream of observation, deduction and analysis: “Amid the action and reaction of so dense a swarm of humanity, every possible combination of events may be expected to take place, and many a little problem will be presented which may be striking and bizarre...” The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.

  The connections in the Red Headed League are to the Salvation Army and to the suffragettes, both unnerving annoyances to the public and to Conan Doyle.

  The Red Headed League was published in August 1891 (though Watson recorded an entry of 1890). William Booth (1829-1912) founded the Salvation Army in 1865. He was a resident of Tunbridge Wells and of London, both places familiar to Conan Doyle. Before he embarked on his evangelizing Christian career, William Booth had been a pawnbroker’s assistant. How inapposite! Booth left pawnbroking because, having witnessed the plight of the poor and the debt-ridden, he believed that Christian salvation would ameliorate the inequalities. A character in the Red-Headed League was named after a Marxist in London’s Socialist League, William Morris - an agitator for workers and their wages (in RED, the pay was £4 pounds a week; England’s workers were generally paid about £60 a year.)

  Relations between the Salvation Army and Conan Doyle were prickly. The Army and Booth were actively opposed to spiritualism. The evangelical message was adherence to the message of Christ and not devotion to fairies and angels. They also preached strict temperance. They marched, invaded saloons, proselytized, and baptized. They collected money in villages and towns and established international missions. Their distinctive kettles, in which they collected donations, were symbolically red: red for the wounds of Jesus Christ. In 1890, Booth published In Darkest England and the Way Out, about the horrors of life in England’s slums.

  Booth was a public figure and became the scourge of a hostile and suspicious press. He and his soldiers were assailed as charlatans. Cartoons questioned what he would do with all the money he collected, and he was accused of hoarding donations.

  Booth was also mocked for “elevation of women to man’s status,” for he gathered women into the various leagues of his Army...the League of Love, the League of Mercy, or the Missionary Tea League. He allowed them to preach publicly, traditionally a male province, and the women hectored loudly against gambling and drink. Booth’s wife and daughters became militant suffragettes and Tunbridge Wells was their campaign center.

  Ezekiah Hopkins founded a League in his search for red heads (through the efforts of John Clay):

  “As far as I can make out, the League was founded by an American millionaire, Ezekiah Hopkins, who was very peculiar in his ways. He was himself red- headed, and he had a great sympathy for all red-headed men; so when he died it was found that he had left his enormous fortune in the hands of trustees, with instructions to apply the interest to the providing of easy berths to men whose hair is of that colour. From all I hear it is splendid pay and very little to do.’” (italics, ed.)

  Booth’s Salvation Army became an international concern and a family foundation, with places on the board for each of his children. Most compelling of Willliam Booth’s children was Evangeline Booth (1865-1950). In 1887, at age 21, she graduated from hawking the Army’s “War Cry” paper to become an officer of a corps in Marylebone where there was strong opposition to the Salvation Army.

  Holmes lived on Baker St. in Marylebone, a middle class neighborhood near the slums and the former gallows. The Army was unwelcome in this polite society primarily because many of them had come from the class of the wretched, the poor, former alcoholics, morphine addicts, and prostitutes.

  Then, in 1890, at a time when women were becoming energized in their struggle for civil rights and the right to vote, Evangeline was named General of her father’s Army. She spoke before many social reform Leagues: women’s leagues, prison reform leagues, leagues for political education, and temperance leagues.

  In 1889, Evangeline was among the founders of the Women’s Franchise League in England which would evolve into a satellite of the League of Women Voters in America. England’s women publicized their struggle for the vote by cycling throughout the country...some, we can presume, were even solitary cyclists in the countryside.

  Women and their campaigns, as well as their cycling predispositions, began pushing cricket out of the media spotlight. Conan Doyle, a member of the Allahakbarries of upstanding batsmen and also the Marylebone Cricket Club, was an excellent and enthusiastic cricketer. He was nominally supportive of the women’s cause, but only just so. Conan Doyle agreed in the granting of civil rights to women and reform of the divorce laws, but he believed women were to conduct themselves in restrained manner. Suffragettes often chained themselves to railings and set fire to mailbox contents, or in Conan Doyle’s case, despoiled his mail with lye. At least one cricket team wore the suffragette colors in support - Green, White, an
d Violet (Give Women the Vote). It has been suggested that Sherlock’s name was derived from two of Conan Doyle’s fellow ball players.

  Years later, in 1955, Sheldon Reynolds (of Andrea Reynolds’ and the case of the contested Arthur Conan Doyle estate fame) produced “The Case of the Careless Suffragette,” with Ronald Howard starring as Sherlock Holmes, in a magnificently puerile script based on Conan Doyle’s latter day opinion that suffragettes were responsible for “monkey tricks,” such as the burning down of a cricket field in Tunbridge Wells. The film was about a zealous but ingenuous suffragette who acquired a green croquet ball shaped like a bomb. She intended only to draw attention to the suffragette cause. As fate would have it, the ball, switched by an unworthy heir, exploded and killed a member of Parliament.

  Suffragettes in the movie - except for the star - were homely oddities. Yet, in real-life Evangeline Booth was a pistol of a personality. Descriptions of Evangeline were that she was red-haired, red-hot, and righteous! That red hair and Evangeline’s public prominence was catnip to Conan Doyle’s pen when writing the Red-Headed League.

  Evangeline’s activities were in the daily papers - the campaigning, organizing, demanding, and facing riotous crowds. As the applicants in the Red-Headed League crowded the streets of Saxe Coburg Square in hopes of employment, so too in 1890 did the suffragettes gather and protest, at the Great Suffragette Demonstration in London.

  Jabez Wilson was as “tenacious as a lobster” in committing the entries of the Encyclopedia Britannica to paper, in longhand, though he got only as far as the “a’s.” Why this book? Why the longhand?

  Shorthand was in vogue. Shorthand enthusiasts contacted one another in Victorian-era magazines, including the Strand, which published the Sherlock Holmes’ stories. Women could now enter the workforce as typists (Case of Identity) and as stenographers for which skills they trained in women’s schools. Strong, healthy men wouldn’t need to engage in these secretarial activities where now a woman’s delicate hand would be more amenable to the venue and the lower wages.

  In these revolutionary times, developing technologies allowed women to earn incomes, yet barred them from the rights accorded men, whether in wages, inheritance, or marriage. In1890, the 9th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was published and it acknowledged the women’s cause. It was the first of its editions with a chapter under “W” devoted to “Women, Law Relating To.” This edition would have been available to Jabez Wilson though it would have taken him months to reach the penultimate volume.

  Thus did the Red Headed League, Sherlock Holmes, and Conan Doyle unwittingly acknowledge the women’s movement with that pawky touch of red. It was an accidental nod, since Conan Doyle was striving to keep it at 1895, but the serrated side plot would live to see another day.

  Part 5

  Sherlock Holmes: the Jewish Connection - Who was that Hebrew Rabbi?

  It is next-to-impossible, and just as improbable, that either Sherlock Holmes or Arthur Conan Doyle would have contemplated Rabbi Akiva of ancient Israel as the “Hebrew Rabbi” in Scandal in Bohemia.

  No less collapsible was the fanciful idea that New York Rabbi Samuel Adler and his reformist inclinations were contemplated by Holmes in his index, or that Irene Adler was a New York converso. A late Sherlockian, Ruth Berman, identified Rabbi Hermann Adler as the “Hebrew rabbi” (reference to Ms. Berman’s conclusions supplement Les Klinger’s comments to Scandal in Bohemia, at p.17, of The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes (N.Y.; W.W. Norton & Co. 2005).

  In ACD’s world, the sun rises only upon the British Empire (which was still some years before the vivisection in The Guns of August). The “Hebrew rabbi” can be attributable only to the British family Adler.

  “This is indeed a mystery,” I remarked. “What do you imagine that it means?” “I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts....”

  Supplemental Twistings:

  Did Holmes study Hebraic texts? - Neither Rabbi Akiva’s (circa 40 C.E. - 140 C.E.) texts, nor the mishnah (debates) nor talmud - the written codes of oral Jewish traditions - were translated into English in the late 1800s. Whatever did arrive in Europe, following the fiery immolations of the Romans, came from manuscripts taken with the diaspora or from Egypt. Rabbinical students in Europe read the texts in the original...Aramaic cum biblical Hebrew. The talmud was not available in the vernacular until Adin Steinsaltz began publishing segments of his monumental text, The Essential Talmud, beginning in the 1980s, in modern Hebrew. In 1989, English translations appeared. Thus was the talmud opened to international and lay study. Where do we read that Holmes was familiar with biblical Hebrew or Aramaic?

  Holmes’ Biblical proclivities are most Christian, deriving from Arthur Conan Doyle’s Christian bible and as representative of a Christian nation. When Holmes discovers, accuses, or pardons a transgressor, he speaks from a Christian perspective. “I pray that we may never be exposed to such a temptation.” (BOSC). In The Blue Carbuncle, which occurs during Christmas, the accused cries out to Holmes: Oh, don’t bring it into court! For Christ’s sake, don’t!”

  Scandal in Bohemia and the Adler family: - The story is set in 1888. It is pre-Dreyfus (1894) and pre-Theodore Herzl and the national cause of Zionism (1895 et seq.). Britain is overwhelmed with massive immigration of Jews from eastern Europe. They were besieged, poor, unskilled, and medieval in religious observance. At this time, between Aug. 31,1888 and Nov. 9, 1888, Jack the Ripper is at work; Jewish men are suspected (the “Juiwes”, a vernacular spelling, appears in a graffiti accusation).

  RABBI NATHAN ADLER

  From 1844 to 1890, Rabbi Nathan Adler was chief rabbi of the Hebrew Congregation of Britain. The descriptive word is “Hebrew”. He centralized Britain’s synagogues into the United Hebrew Congregations of Britain. He began regular use of the title “rabbi” in England; prior to that time, “reverend” was equally applicable to Jewish men of religion. He was the first university-educated British Chief Rabbi as well as a Talmudic scholar. Where would Rabbi Akiva’s mishnah - had it existed - have lain but in the Adler chambers? Nathan Adler standardized Hebrew education and corresponded with synagogues around the British empire. He warned rabbis in Poland and Russia of the conditions facing Jewish refugees in London’s slums. His sermons referenced contemporary issues: Queen Victoria’s births, Montefiore’s travels to then-Palestine, the downtrodden Jews.

  Rabbi Nathan made the news in the British papers and the Jewish Chronicle. He was contemporaneously described as the “highest religious authority not only of London Jews but of all Orthodox Jews throughout the United Kingdom and the Empire.” Both Sir Moses Montefiore and Queen Victoria recognized his having served the rabbinate with honor and distinction. And this recognition of Rabbi Nathan wouldn’t have been noted by Sherlock Holmes? When Moses Montefiore died in 1885, Rabbi Adler presided, as he had for Judith Montefiore some years prior. Cecil Roth wrote in retrospect that Rabbi Nathan had been “the father of the Anglo-Jewish pulpit.” How would Holmes or Doyle not have been aware of this Rabbi Adler?

  RABBI HERMANN ADLER

  Or was the “Hebrew rabbi” Hermann Adler (son of Nathan) as Ms. Berman posited? He served officially from 1891 to 1911, though for some years prior, he had supplemented his father’s duties as infirmities set in. Unlike his father, Hermann did not pursue his rabbinate entirely as a Talmudist. In fact, his PhD thesis was on a topic that might have piqued Holmes: “on Druidism.” Rabbi Hermann also wrote The Jews in England (1899) among other publications on Anglo-Jewry. He was witty, urbane, and socially prominent among Jews and non-Jews. At a luncheon with British Catholic cardinal Herbert Vaughan, he was asked: “Now, Dr. Adler, when may I have the pleasure of helping you to some ham?” The rabbi responded: “At Your Eminence’s wedding.” In 1888, the Jewish Standard reported that Rabbi Hermann Adler led a discus
sion of Rabbi Akiva - but this was the mishnaic scholar from 18th century Posen, not the classicist from the early part of the century. This Akiva would have interested the Anglo-Jewish community, composed as it was of so many eastern Europeans. This Rabbi Akiva could not have been the “Hebrew rabbi” of Scandal since he used a patronymic...Rabbi Akiva Eiger...he would have been listed under “E”.

  The Times published a letter from Rabbi Hermann in which he responded to the accusations that Jews were suspects in the Jack the Ripper murders. One of the murders occurred near the High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement). The idea that a Jew would transgress during these days of preparation and atonement was unlikely as many Jews were newly-arrived and tradition-bound.

  However, if anyone promoted a reform movement, it would have been Rabbi Hermann mishpocha (family). Rabbi Hermann had even supported cremation. His daughter, Henrietta Adler, age 20 in 1888, was a formidable champion of women’s rights. Like Irene Adler, she was possessed of both cleverness and “woman’s wit.” Unable to stand for election, she used the prestige of her name to rally Jewish support behind progressive candidates and ultimately became a London council member. We needn’t look to N.Y. Rabbi Samuel Adler and try to place him in this puzzle of who was the “Hebrew rabbi”.

  “Hebrew rabbi”:

  Both words - ”Hebrew” and “rabbi” - were used because the gentile public would not necessarily have been familiar with “rabbi” standing alone. They had been alternatively cast as “reverends”. References to educated or religious Jews were as Hebrews - a pious turn of phrase. The Adlers were rabbis of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Empire. Jews were referred to as “Israelites” as had been Benjamin Disraeli, or “the brethren.” In Shoscombe Old Place, Sir Robert is deeply in the hands of ....the Jews. Fear not, for Sir Robert holds off those...Jews. Jews were peddlers, brokers, travelers, money lenders and/or aliens. They were suspects in the Jack the Ripper murders. Hebrews, though antiquated, were respectable.