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baron has just posted in the Letters and Communications forum of Casebook: Jack the Ripper - Forums under the title of 1910, Mentor Article, Jewish Chronicles.
This thread is located at http://forum.casebook.org/showthread.php?t=5589
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Hello,
Does anyone know any more about this from March 1910 in the Jewish Chronicles:
"Before the Ripper crimes took place there came into my hands a book which had been sent to me by the author, whom I had known since he was a little child. The book, if I remember aright, was printed by a provincial printer and was issued anonymously. The young man, whose first effort it was, had always been a strange, weird, dreamy sort of an individual. I confess that when I received it I merely glanced through its pages and wrote the writer something complimentary. I recollect that the story the book told appeared to me then to be mere extravagancies of a highly imaginative character, and seemed to have resulted from the author having dived deeper into the "Gehenna" of modern Babylon than was good for one of his years, especially as the "Gehenna" district he chose to explore was the most sordid and filthy it was possible to find. I put the book aside and though no more of it till the Ripper crimes were setting the town in panic. Then I recollected that its author had prophesied that such crimes would take place and gave details of happenings, in local, in method and in manner, which convinced me could not be accounted to the long arm of coincidence when they actually took place.
The very streets in which the murders took place, the exact class of victim are all set down with weird accuracy. I read the book carefully, I re-read it, and the more I studied it the more did the horrible conviction grow upon me that it was possible the young man who had written it - a young Jew - had become mad and that the author of the book might be the author of the Ripper crimes. I consulted a literary friend of mine of great experience and he said it was "impossible" - I remember his repeating the word three times, each with growing emphasis - "impossible" that anyone, especially a raw youth, should so accurately have forecasted such outrages by someone else. The home of my young acquaintance was in a northern town, and enquiries I set on foot elicited the fact that while the Ripper crimes were in progress he was away from his house - in London. Enquiry at his hotel brought me the news that he invariably went out late at night, and did not return till the small hours. I am afraid I had little doubt that my "theory" about the Whitechapel crimes was correct. I am happy to think I was quite wrong. I communicated to the Scotland Yard authorities all I knew - although I was a Jew and the one I suspected was a Jew too. I sent them the book. I took care to tell them that the youth had always been strange in manner. After some days the authorities assured me there was nothing in my "theory," and that they had convinced themselves that all that was in the book was purely imaginary and coincidental! I was naturally much relieved, though to this day my suspicion, formed I am bound to say upon some apparent substance, is a really painful memory. My only complaint against Scotland Yard in the matter was that they kept the book, and I could never get it from them or - from anyone else! But I believe a copy exists in one of our public libraries."
If Scotland Yard has a copy, it may have been filed not with anything about the murders, but maybe in some general Jewish-related file. Even if the name and author of the book were jotted down, it seems as if there might be another copy in a library. Or, is this just journalistic lies?
Mike
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dag has just posted in the Letters and Communications forum of Casebook: Jack the Ripper - Forums under the title of 1910, Mentor Article, Jewish Chronicles.
This thread is located at http://forum.casebook.org/showthread.php?t=5589
Here is the message that has just been posted:
***************
Hi Baron
About a year ago I looked into the possibility (suggested by Tom Wescott) that the book mentioned by Mentor may in fact have been ‘Holy of Holies: Confessions of an Anarchist’ by Ripper suspect John Barlas. Barlas studied Marxism before going up to Oxford as a commoner, and the bulk of his political writings were published in William Morris's 'The Commonweal' magazine. The evolution of Barlas’s radical thought isn’t too well documented: On the surface he comes across (to me) more as a polemicist or an old-fashioned Chartist than as an original thinker, but it also seems clear that he was involved to some degree with anarchist and terrorist groups active in England at that time. He formed a Socialist Society in Chelmsford, and was sent up to Dundee to act as an organiser for the SDF, where he may have come under the influence of Bruce Glasier. Barlas was certainly conversant with Hebrew (although he wasn’t Jewish) and there are some provocative parallels between the life of Barlas and the biographical sketch provided by Mentor. He WAS living in London round about the time of the Ripper murders, he DID hail from the North (his family home was in Crieff in Scotland) and he DID publish 'Holy of Holies' in 1887. ‘Holy of Holies' WASpublished anonymously and by a provincial press (JH Clarke, Cheltenham), and it's also true that this publication WAS difficult to obtain even back in the 1880s. On the other hand, 'Holy of Holies' is actually a slim (48 page) volume of verse, and it was the fifth publication by Barlas rather than the first stated by Mentor. I visited the British Library to re-read this publication to see if contained covert references to the Ripper murders – but it doesn’t! It contains a few exhortatory passages but nothing remotely close to the material mentioned by Mentor. Therefore, I feel certain that 'Holy of Holies' wasn’t the publication mentioned by Mentor.
David
This thread is located at http://forum.casebook.org/showthread.php?t=5589
Here is the message that has just been posted:
***************
Hello,
Does anyone know any more about this from March 1910 in the Jewish Chronicles:
"Before the Ripper crimes took place there came into my hands a book which had been sent to me by the author, whom I had known since he was a little child. The book, if I remember aright, was printed by a provincial printer and was issued anonymously. The young man, whose first effort it was, had always been a strange, weird, dreamy sort of an individual. I confess that when I received it I merely glanced through its pages and wrote the writer something complimentary. I recollect that the story the book told appeared to me then to be mere extravagancies of a highly imaginative character, and seemed to have resulted from the author having dived deeper into the "Gehenna" of modern Babylon than was good for one of his years, especially as the "Gehenna" district he chose to explore was the most sordid and filthy it was possible to find. I put the book aside and though no more of it till the Ripper crimes were setting the town in panic. Then I recollected that its author had prophesied that such crimes would take place and gave details of happenings, in local, in method and in manner, which convinced me could not be accounted to the long arm of coincidence when they actually took place.
The very streets in which the murders took place, the exact class of victim are all set down with weird accuracy. I read the book carefully, I re-read it, and the more I studied it the more did the horrible conviction grow upon me that it was possible the young man who had written it - a young Jew - had become mad and that the author of the book might be the author of the Ripper crimes. I consulted a literary friend of mine of great experience and he said it was "impossible" - I remember his repeating the word three times, each with growing emphasis - "impossible" that anyone, especially a raw youth, should so accurately have forecasted such outrages by someone else. The home of my young acquaintance was in a northern town, and enquiries I set on foot elicited the fact that while the Ripper crimes were in progress he was away from his house - in London. Enquiry at his hotel brought me the news that he invariably went out late at night, and did not return till the small hours. I am afraid I had little doubt that my "theory" about the Whitechapel crimes was correct. I am happy to think I was quite wrong. I communicated to the Scotland Yard authorities all I knew - although I was a Jew and the one I suspected was a Jew too. I sent them the book. I took care to tell them that the youth had always been strange in manner. After some days the authorities assured me there was nothing in my "theory," and that they had convinced themselves that all that was in the book was purely imaginary and coincidental! I was naturally much relieved, though to this day my suspicion, formed I am bound to say upon some apparent substance, is a really painful memory. My only complaint against Scotland Yard in the matter was that they kept the book, and I could never get it from them or - from anyone else! But I believe a copy exists in one of our public libraries."
If Scotland Yard has a copy, it may have been filed not with anything about the murders, but maybe in some general Jewish-related file. Even if the name and author of the book were jotted down, it seems as if there might be another copy in a library. Or, is this just journalistic lies?
Mike
***************
dag has just posted in the Letters and Communications forum of Casebook: Jack the Ripper - Forums under the title of 1910, Mentor Article, Jewish Chronicles.
This thread is located at http://forum.casebook.org/showthread.php?t=5589
Here is the message that has just been posted:
***************
Hi Baron
About a year ago I looked into the possibility (suggested by Tom Wescott) that the book mentioned by Mentor may in fact have been ‘Holy of Holies: Confessions of an Anarchist’ by Ripper suspect John Barlas. Barlas studied Marxism before going up to Oxford as a commoner, and the bulk of his political writings were published in William Morris's 'The Commonweal' magazine. The evolution of Barlas’s radical thought isn’t too well documented: On the surface he comes across (to me) more as a polemicist or an old-fashioned Chartist than as an original thinker, but it also seems clear that he was involved to some degree with anarchist and terrorist groups active in England at that time. He formed a Socialist Society in Chelmsford, and was sent up to Dundee to act as an organiser for the SDF, where he may have come under the influence of Bruce Glasier. Barlas was certainly conversant with Hebrew (although he wasn’t Jewish) and there are some provocative parallels between the life of Barlas and the biographical sketch provided by Mentor. He WAS living in London round about the time of the Ripper murders, he DID hail from the North (his family home was in Crieff in Scotland) and he DID publish 'Holy of Holies' in 1887. ‘Holy of Holies' WASpublished anonymously and by a provincial press (JH Clarke, Cheltenham), and it's also true that this publication WAS difficult to obtain even back in the 1880s. On the other hand, 'Holy of Holies' is actually a slim (48 page) volume of verse, and it was the fifth publication by Barlas rather than the first stated by Mentor. I visited the British Library to re-read this publication to see if contained covert references to the Ripper murders – but it doesn’t! It contains a few exhortatory passages but nothing remotely close to the material mentioned by Mentor. Therefore, I feel certain that 'Holy of Holies' wasn’t the publication mentioned by Mentor.
David
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