Jack the Ripper and the Case for Scotland Yard's Prime Suspect

by Robert House

  Simultaneously, a vocal group of immigrant Jewish socialists, mostly of Russian and Polish origin, started trying to organize workers into unions, to fight exploitation by the “masters,” whom they saw as being emblematic of capitalist exploitation in general. This was especially troubling to members of London’s established Anglo-Jewish population, who worried that any association with socialism would lead to further prejudice against the Jews in general. The year 1885 saw the first appearance of a new monthly socialist newspaper, called Arbeter Fraint (“Worker’s Friend”), printed in Yiddish. The paper would become a powerful soapbox for East End unions and workers. By June 1886, the Arbeter Fraint had been taken over by the International Workingmen’s Educational Club, a conglomerate of socialists and anarchists who waged war on capitalist oppression and the exploiting “masters” from their headquarters in an “old wooden two storey building” at 40 Berner Street. The paper attacked the Jewish religion, both by ridiculing its holidays and “superstitions,” and by endlessly criticizing the Orthodox Jews’ main representative in the East End, Dr. Hermann Adler, assistant to the chief rabbi of the British Empire. Unfortunately, such blasphemous rantings alienated large numbers of “simple” Jews who may have otherwise been sympathetic to the workers’ cause. Aaron Kozminski’s family on Greenfield Street, only a few minutes’ walk from the Berner Street club, was thus in the very heart of socialist and anarchist territory. In fact, at the south end of Greenfield Street near the intersection with Commercial Road was a “squalid-looking” coffee house “much patronized by the great bulk of the poorer East End Anarchists and Socialists who live in the district.”45 A sign in the window read (in Yiddish), “Here can be had coffee.”

  By the middle of the 1880s, the British East Enders increasingly resented what they perceived to be a Jewish invasion of their turf. Native English tailors blamed both the sweating system and the constant influx of newly arrived greeners for creating an unfair advantage for Jewish tailors and devaluing labor in the middle of a depression. Jewish workers were accused of “blacklegging” by accepting lower living standards and of undermining the unions by working as scabs. As the flood of immigration continued, Jews took over entire streets and neighborhoods, and, as Alan Palmer noted, the immigrants were additionally blamed “for pushing up rents by accepting overcrowded conditions, thereby forcing native East Enders to move out.”46

  The result was a sort of pressure cooker, which led to a backlash against Jews in general. By the mid-1880s, anti-Semitism was on the rise, and British nationalists encouraged anti-Semitic and antiforeign sentiments in the district. As early as October 1884, the Poilishe Yidl (the predecessor to the socialist journal Arbeter Fraint, also printed in Yiddish) was forecasting a change in the wind:

  Go any Sabbath afternoon to Whitechapel and stand for a few moments in a doorway near where some English workers lounge with their pipes in their mouths, and you will hear, every time a Jew passes by, the lovely calling “Bloody Jew!” Is this a token of love?

  At the same time in Brick Lane you will often see dolled up Jewish women, girls with golden rings on their fingers sitting outside in the street. Look in the eyes of the passing Englishmen and can’t you discern the look—which is already half indicative of a pogrom. . . . A pogrom in Brick Lane, in the crossroads of Commercial Road can be a more bloody and terrible affair than one in the Baltic.47

  The prediction was ominous. By February 1886, an article in the Pall Mall Gazette, which was widely considered an anti-Semitic newspaper by most Jews, warned, “Foreign Jews of no nationality whatever are becoming a pest and a menace to the poor native-born East Ender.” The article went on to say that “fifteen or twenty thousand Jewish refugees of the lowest type . . . have a greater responsibility for the distress which prevails there than probably all other causes put together.”48 Anti-Semitism became increasingly overt as the decade wore on. One typically hateful article in the Contemporary Review noted, “The foreign Jews are filthy in their lives, and present a substantial similarity to the Mongolian type of character.”49

  By 1887, unemployment had peaked, and an article in March in the Pall Mall Gazette warned, “We shall have an anti-Jewish riot in the East End quite as serious as the anti-Chinese riot in California, if we don’t look out.”50 This was a reference to the “Rock Springs massacre”—a bloody incident that had occurred in a small coal-mining town in Wyoming (not California, as the article claimed). Like the Jews in Whitechapel, the Chinese in the American West were considered “alien in blood, habits, and civilization.” The white, mostly immigrant, miners considered the importation of Chinese laborers a “system worse than slavery” and blamed the lower-paid immigrants for driving down their wages. The clash came on September 2, 1885, when 150 men armed with Winchester rifles entered Rock Springs’ Chinatown and shot several Chinese miners, then proceeded to wreak havoc on the residents of the village. At night, the white miners burned down seventy-nine Chinese camp houses. A memorial presented to the Chinese consul in New York noted that dead bodies were “thrown into the flames,” and that some of the Chinese were “burned alive in the houses.”51 All told, the massacre resulted in twenty-eight deaths and property damage of approximately $150,000. Anti-Chinese riots then spread to other areas in the West. President Grover Cleveland was appalled at the violence but thought that anti-Chinese feeling was so deeply entrenched that the immigrants would never be able to assimilate.

  In effect, the Gazette’s reference to this incident was tantamount to a threat of violence against the Jews in the East End. The situation was rapidly deteriorating. In April 1887, a meeting of residents in Mile End petitioned for the exclusion of pauper immigrants from the district. Then in May, the St. James’s Gazette suggested that the majority of the immigrants were “nihilists and anarchists of the worst type”—this was exactly the type of propaganda that London’s established Anglo-Jewish population had worried about.52 The nationalist Arnold White emerged as a mouthpiece for native Englishmen, who he claimed were being speedily displaced by foreign intruders. A letter by White published in the Times in November 1887 declared, “The time for inquiry is over. The hour for action has arrived,” and demanded whether “our own kith shall be sacrificed to an obsolete shibboleth and the bloodthirsty operation of an artificial competition.”53 By 1888, forty-three unions were officially opposed to unrestricted immigration, including the Docker’s Union, the Master Tailors’ Association, and the Shoemakers’ Association.

  As a result of these gathering forces, the government agreed to conduct an inquiry into the question of Jewish immigration, and members of a Commons Committee on Immigration were appointed by February 10, 1888.54 A separate Parliamentary committee in the House of Lords was established to examine the effects of the sweating system in tailoring and other trades.

  By early 1888, just before the Ripper murders began, Jewish sweaters in the tailoring industry were under attack from three, albeit related, directions. Anti-Semitic British nationalists and disgruntled unemployed locals were the most directly threatening enemies. Jewish socialists were likewise attacking the master sweaters in frequent bitter diatribes published in the Arbeter Fraint, in an attempt to mobilize the workers to unionize and strike. And finally, two looming government inquiries were bearing down on Jewish immigrants in general, and on Jewish sweaters specifically. On March 3, 1888, the East London Advertiser noted in an editorial, “The swarms of foreign Jews who have invaded the East London labour market, are chiefly responsible for the sweating system and the grave evils which are flowing from it—the brunt of the hardship involved (falling) with tenfold severity upon the English men and women.”55

  Around this same time, Booth’s researchers were conducting interviews with Jewish tailors, including some of Isaac Abrahams’s neighbors on Greenfield Street. In one interview, a master tailor named Mr. Goldstein of 70 Greenfield Street said that “there was not much trade,” and that “much harm had been done by newspaper men.” There was not enough work to go around
, the tailors reported, and the wholesalers took advantage of the situation by offering contracts that paid less for each item of clothing produced. The sweaters had no choice but to compete for such low-paying contracts, and as a result, prices were dropping across the board. In effect, the master tailors were struggling. In one interview, Mr. Rosen of 71 Greenfield Street noted, “There was much more competition to get work than formerly and the employers had taken advantage of this. Prices had been reduced about 10 per cent.”

  Another tailor, named Mr. Solomon, at 83 Greenfield Street, claimed that prices had fallen even further than this and added that, in his opinion, “the men were better off than the masters.”56 These interviews were conducted on March 1, 1888, just two weeks before the first meeting of the House of Lords Committee on the Sweating System.

  According to a Jewish Chronicle article by J. A. Dyche titled “A Trade Created by the Jewish Immigrants” (1898), the harsh criticism leveled at Jewish sweaters was largely unjustified. Dyche defended the sweaters, noting that “in the ladies’ mantle trade the foreign ‘sweater’ is not only a first-class workman, but also a designer and an artist in his trade.” Dyche laid the blame at the door of the wholesale manufacturers, who he said generally know “little more about the technical part of the trade than the man in the street. . . . To become a ‘manufacturer’ in this industry only a little capital is required.” In other words, the so-called manufacturers were little more than wholesale dealers of clothing entirely produced by subcontracted labor.

  “The British Christian manufacturers who exploit the Jewish ‘sweater,’ ” Dyche wrote, “can and do amass wealth; their voices are heard on public platform and in Parliament. But it is the Jewish ‘sweater’ who is dragged before the public by the sensational journalist and the public orator as a social plague.” In Dyche’s opinion, the sweater who came under such harsh scrutiny was being squeezed himself and was merely struggling to survive by responding to the pressures of the market. Yet in the court of public opinion, such theories went by the wayside. It didn’t seem to matter that the large manufacturers of the West End and in the area of St. Paul’s were apparently at least as responsible as the sweaters for exploiting the weakened labor market for their own financial gain. Dyche added, “The Christian British public throw up their hands and thank heaven they are not as bad as these foreigners. Yes:—Das ist eine alte Geschichte, Doch bleibt sie immer neu. (This is an old story, however, it remains ever new.)”57

  The social researcher Beatrice Potter (later Beatrice Webb) was one of the researchers who worked on Charles Booth’s labor surveys of the 1880s and the 1890s. Potter studied the tailoring industry and the Jewish community firsthand, walking the East End streets and visiting Jewish homes, workshops, and synagogues, and her research, interestingly enough, roughly coincided with the Ripper murders. In April 1888, Potter went undercover in a sweatshop to get an insider’s view of the operation. Dressed in shabby clothes and affecting a working-class accent, she toiled away as a trouser finisher in a hot and crowded workshop at 198 Mile End Road. In one rather humorous incident, when disgruntled workers threatened the master’s wife with calling the factory inspectors, Potter politely assured the missus, “You have nothing to fear from the factory inspector; you keep the regulations exactly.”58 So much for undercover work. By the following day, the woman was remarking that Potter was different from the other girls and should get married to a nice respectable man. On November 28, 1888, a little more than two weeks after the final and most ghastly of the Ripper’s murders, Potter recorded in her diary that she was still “Hard at work at ‘The Jewish Community,’ seeing Jews of all classes, all day long.”59

  Potter’s conclusions about sweating essentially confirmed Dyche’s view. She found that Jewish sweaters were only a small part of the problem and noted that Jewish workers were “confined to the manufacture of certain commodities, which had not been produced in the locality before.”60 This was largely in line with Morris Cohen’s assertion that the manufacture of ladies’ coats, for example, was an industry entirely created by immigrant Jews. Potter concluded that “if every foreign Jew resident in England had been sent back to his birthplace, the bulk of the sweated workers would not have been affected, whether for better or for worse.”61

  Likewise, Charles Booth, in London: A Portrait of the Poor at the Turn of the Century, claimed that the criticism of the small masters in the sweated trades was largely unfounded. He wrote:

  It is remarkable that the larger type of sweating master should have been seized upon by the public imagination as the central figure of a monstrous system. It is difficult, not to say impossible, to prove a negative—to prove that the monster sweating master of the comic papers has no existence. I can only say that I have sought diligently and have not found. If a specimen exists, he has nothing to do with the troubles we are investigating. . . . The sweating master I have found, and who is connected with the troubles under investigation, works hard, makes often but little more, and at times somewhat less, than his most skilled and best paid hands. He is seldom on bad terms, and often on very kindly terms, with those who work under him.62

  None of this mattered much. In practice, the blame fell squarely on the Jewish sweater, because he was the most visible target. Rising unemployment was coincident with Jewish immigration into the area, so it was not hard for the locals to identify the source of the problem. As William Fishman pointed out, “A ready-made scapegoat was available.”63 And as Booth noted, the attack on the sweating masters was “prompted by indignation at the hardships suffered by the poor, and seeking a victim on which to vent its anger, but at times compounded largely of lower motives.”64 These lower motives were fear, hatred, and mistrust of the alien intruder. As Reverend G. S. Rainey said in Arnold White’s racist propaganda piece The Destitute Alien in Great Britain (1892), “When visiting the poor when times were bad, I often heard the complaint, ‘It’s them Jews.’ ”65

  The House of Lords Committee on the Sweating System met for the first time on March 16, 1888. Among the members on the thirteen-person committee was the twenty-sixth Earl of Crawford, James Ludovic Lindsay, a man who will appear later in our narrative as the author of a letter to Sir Robert Anderson concerning the Ripper murders. Testimony in the committee was given by tailors, antialienists, and social researchers, including Beatrice Potter. The committee found that tailors’ wages in the 1880s were decreasing not only because of the competitive labor market, but also because of an increase in productivity—among other reasons, due to the increased use of Isaac Singer’s newly affordable sewing machine.66 Various examples of low wages were given, including “an establishment where cloaks are now made for 4s. 6d, and six or seven years-ago were paid 8s.”67 The only workers who were able to compete with Jewish tailors for the low-paying jobs were English women, who were already accustomed to being underpaid. Desperation sometimes drove workers to suicide or, more often, to crime.

  The committee also heard testimony about the working conditions in sweatshops, which were described as “deplorable in the extreme.” A Mr. Munro described a workshop as follows: “Three or four gas jets may be flaring in the room, a coke fire burning in the wretched fire-place, sinks untrapped, closets without water, and altogether the sanitary condition abominable.”68 Workers frequently slept in the shops where they worked. One witness, for example, stated, “In a double room, perhaps 9 by 15 feet, a man, his wife, and six children slept, and in the same room ten men were usually employed, so that at night eighteen persons would lie in that one room.”69 The same witness alluded to the “want of sanitary precautions and of decent and sufficient accommodation, and declared that the effect of this, combined with the inadequate wage earned, had the effect of driving girls to prostitution.” Sanitary conditions, especially associated with the bathrooms, were described as indecent. “It is easy to imagine what follows on such contamination,” the report stated.70

  Yet by far the most damning aspect of the committee’s findings concern
ed the number of hours worked per day. “The trade is governed by no rules at all,” the committee’s report stated. “The hours are anything a sweater likes to make them; each sweater has his own method of engaging and paying his workers. The question as to what is a day, or half a day, is differently interpreted by different masters. It is the usual thing for seven and a-half, eight, and nine hours to be regarded as half a day.”71 The report cited, “Evidence tends to show much evasion of the Factory Acts and overtime working of females.”72 Proper hours were in theory thirteen to fourteen hours a day, but some men were found to work for as long as eighteen to twenty-two hours at a stretch, from six in the morning until midnight or later. As Myer Wilchinski reported, “I had to get up in the morning about half past five, and we finished at night between ten and eleven.”73 One worker even testified to working forty hours in a row. There was no holiday, even on the Sabbath, and one witness testified that on the Sabbath, the curtains were simply pulled down. Employers often tried desperately to deceive factory inspectors, in order to circumvent hour limitations enforced by the Factory Act, prompting Potter to remark, “The evil cannot be uprooted by official visits paid in broad daylight; it must be dealt with by the same methods as those employed in the detection of crime.”74