The Jewish people of the East End of London were to become victims of Jack the Ripper. To fully understand this it is necessary to look at the history of Jewish settlement in this part of the capital.

Jewish people had settled in London from Roman times, but left in the 13th century after King Edward I’s edict of expulsion. Very few Jews remained, and they practiced their faith secretly until a small group of Sephardi Jews (people originally from Spain or North Africa) were identified. Oliver Cromwell allowed them to remain in England and gradually they were joined by others. In 1753 the Jewish Naturalisation Act was passed, which allowed Jewish people to openly live in England. However, there was great opposition to this bill, and it was repealed the following year. Jewish people were seen as alien and different due to their customs and clothing. They continued to live quietly, and were joined by a different group of Jews, the Ashkenazi, mainly from Amsterdam and Germany. By 1858 there were 25,000 Jews living in London. Both groups of Jews established their own synagogues –The Great Synagogue, originally built in 1690 in Aldgate and rebuilt later several times in Dukes Place, was richly decorated (Benjamin Disraeli worshipped here as a child), whereas the poorer Jews had smaller converted houses or disused Huguenot chapels in which to congregate, such as Sandys Row synagogue and Princelet Street.

As they were not welcomed by Londoners, they made their home in the East End, mainly Whitechapel and Spitalfields, close to the docks. In 1881, Tsar Alexander II was assassinated in St Petersburg. During the aftermath many Jewish people, mainly Polish Ashkenazim, were expelled from Russia during a violent pogrom; the assassination was thought, wrongly, to have been organised by the Jews. These people fled and many joined their relatives in London. Some stayed briefly before moving on to America, but others remained permanently, swelling the population to 80,000 in Britain as a whole.

This influx stretched resources to the limit. The Jewish people had traditionally looked after their own, and set up schools to help people learn a trade. In the City Press dated 23 December 1871 there is a report about a workroom for 40 girls to learn ‘fancy and plain needlework’ run by the Jewish board of Guardians. In 1732 the Jewish Free School was set up, originally in Spitalfields, for orphan boys, and was attached to the Great Synagogue. By 1822 it had to move to larger premises in Bell Lane and by the end of the 19th century had 4,000 pupils. The head teacher in 1842 was Moses Angel, and he was keen for the boys to learn English ways in order to assimilate into the local culture. Most local Jewish people spoke a mixture of Hebrew and their own home language, Yiddish, and this helped to reinforce the alien stereotype as viewed by the indigenous English population.

Charles Booth’s renowned maps and surveys of poverty in London (available online at http://booth. lse.ac.uk) estimated that by 1888 around 15,000 of the 40,000 Jews settled in the East End were ‘quite poor’ and a further 15,000 ‘moderately so’.

Until the 1834 Poor Law Act it was the responsibility of the local parish (church) to give aid to the poor; therefore the Jewish Board of Governors took this responsibility upon themselves, continuing throughout the 19th century. Jewish people continued to seek help from their peers rather than go to the workhouse, which led to an increase in animosity from the local non-Jewish population, who had no choice in times of hardship. They saw Jewish people as distant, insular and something to be feared. The more immigrants arrived and settled in Whitechapel, the more overcrowded the local ‘Gentile’ (non-Jewish) population became. This inevitably led to resentment. They saw the Jewish people as taking their jobs and homes. This was the general feeling of prejudice when Jack the Ripper struck in the autumn of 1888.

The murder of Miriam Angel in Batty Street in 1887 had also highlighted the alleged ‘criminality’ of the Jews when a fellow lodger, Israel Lipski, was convicted of the crime. ‘Lipski’ even came to be used as a term of derision or insult targeted at those of a Jewish appearance.

It was also reported after the murder of Mary Ann (‘Polly’) Nicholls, Jack the Ripper’s first canonical victim on 31 August 1888, that the police were looking for a local man in connection with the murder known as ‘Leather Apron’. The Star described him as “a Jewish slipper maker who had abandoned his trade in favour of bullying prostitutes at night”.

The Star also reported that “his name nobody knows, but all are united in the belief that he is a Jew or of Jewish parentage”.

These views helped foster the belief that ‘no Englishman could be capable of such brutal and gruesome crimes’, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, and in ignorance of the great contribution of Jewry to London’s culture and economy.

Descriptions of the murderer were often interpreted as anti-Semitic. Elizabeth Long saw a man talking to Annie Chapman outside 29 Hanbury Street shortly before her death. Long described the man as ‘a foreigner’ in her inquest testimony. George Hutchinson gave a very detailed description of a man he saw with Mary Kelly and included the words ‘Jewish appearance’.

The East London Advertiser of 15 September 1888 reports that the police were looking for a man who ‘spoke with a foreign accent’ and that they arrested a man at 9am the previous Monday in connection with the Whitechapel murders, called John Piser [sic], thought to be known as ‘Leather Apron’.

Other men arrested either spoke with an accent or had foreign names, such as Jacob Isenschmid, a butcher, Charles Ludwig, a hairdresser, and Joseph Issacs, a cigar maker, according to Paul Beggs’ The Jack the Ripper A to Z. All men were later released or incarcerated in an asylum.

Jewish men became wary of being out late at night. As September progressed, there was such a wave of anti-Semitic feeling that mobs began to attack innocent Jews on the streets. The East London Advertiser reports that these mobs would shout ‘Down with the Jews’, and the paper tried to stem the tide of negative feeling. After the ‘double event’ of 30 September some anti-Jewish graffiti was discovered written in Goulston Street, alongside a piece of apron, later to be proven as belonging to Ripper victim Catherine Eddowes. Due to the mentality of some of the non-Jewish population in the area, Sir Charles Warren – head of the Metropolitan Police at the time of the Ripper murders – ordered that the graffiti was erased immediately, a decision which has given countless Ripperolo-gists fuel for discussion ever since. Was Jack the Ripper Jewish? Possibly. However, the local Jewish people were under scrutiny from the police, the press and their neighbours at a time of heightening hysteria.

One local man, Aaron Kosminski, was named as possibly being Jack the Ripper by a senior policeman, Sir Melville Macnaghten, as well as in some notes made in a copy of Sir Robert Anderson’s biography by Donald Swanson, another policeman. No further evidence is forthcoming. Was Kosminski Jack the Ripper? He was Jewish, so in the eyes of many, that was enough. There can be no doubt that the Jews of the East End were victims of Jack the Ripper.