Jewish Prostitution in the East End

[robhouse]

I was wondering if anyone knows of any sources that talk about Jewish Prostitution in the East End? I have only ever seen a few brief references to this topic... references to White Slavery, etc. But I have never found any more concrete sources that discuss the issue. I am aware that Jewish prostitution existed in the East End in the 1880s etc, but I do not think it was very extensive. I could be wrong.

Here are a few quotes I have found:

“The extension of the social evil to my community may be directly traced to the overstocked labor market and to the Russian persecutions continuing to this day which cause thousands of Jewish girls to arrive at these shores without any means of subsistence.” - Hermann Adler, “Report to Home Office on the problem of prostitution in the Jewish community.” December 1887.

“prostitution among Jewesses was becoming a problem” - Beatrice Potter noted this in her diary, in the mid 1880s.

In March 1885 a Jewish Ladies Society for Preventative and Rescue Work (after 1889 renamed the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women) was formed to battle Jewish prostitution, concerned that Jewish women and girls were “driven to vice through physical and mental distress.”

The Ladies Society report gave a “terrible account of the gross immoralities of the Jewish people in the East India Dock Road.” - January 1888.

"Of all forms of prostitute the Polish Jewess is the worst. They wont let you alone but follow you up & down the street & even catch hold of you. There are generally Bullies known to the Police as “Ponces” who live on their earnings. These men are more often foreigners than Englishmen and often themselves Polish Jews. It’s a curious thing about women like them the more these men knock them about the more they like them." - Inspector Carter, Notebook from Charles Booth's survey of life and labour in London, Police notebooks, Bow and Bromley. “Walk with Inspector Carter ... 1 June 1897."

There is also an article titled “Jewish Women and Jewish Prostitution in the East End of London”, by Laura Marks, Jewish Quarterly 34 (126), pp. 6-10, 1987... but I have never been able to find this anywhere. I checked the local Boston library and could not find it. I am not even clear exactly what "The Jewish Quarterly" is, since I think I found a couple different journals of similar title. Does anyone have access to this? I would love to see the text of the article.

Any info would be helpful.

Rob House

[robhouse]

I received the following response from Chris George. Still looking for more info... See below:

Jewish prostitution certainly existed because in response to William Stead's anti-White Slavery campaign and his accusation that Eastern European Jews were controlling East End brothels and sending girls and women on to work in brothels in the Americas, liberal Jews formed the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women (JAPGW). The organization was founded by Lady Battersea (Constance Rothschild Flowers) in 1885.

Battersea first learned about the desperate plight of London’s Jewish prostitutes from an English missionary in that year. Jewish prostitutes believed that only Christian missions would give them food and lodging and that no Jew would help them. Horrified, Battersea engaged many among the liberal leadership of Anglo-Jewry in the fight to rescue Jewish prostitutes.

To create the JAPGW, Battersea had to overcome the resistance of the organized Jewish community, which was reluctant to even admit there was Jewish prostitution in England. She also had to overcome English feminists’ resistance to accepting Jewish women. Battersea’s own feminism, superior class status and her membership in the royal circle helped overcome initial resistance by both Jewish and feminist opponents.

Above information extracted from http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/...lady-battersea

I have a feeling that Jewish prostitution was likely to have been better controlled in brothels by the East European men and possibly served a Jewish clientele as compared with the Gentile prostitutes who worked the streets and were the unfortunates targeted in the Ripper case.

[Roy Corduroy]

Still looking for more info...

I have a feeling that Jewish prostitution was likely to have been better controlled in brothels by the East European men...

Hi Rob, Fox and the Flies has some info on the subject.

Roy

[ChrisGeorge]

Hi all

As I pointed out to Rob, the same Jewish women's history site that has the article on Lady Battersea also has the following useful article: Nelly Las, ‘White Slavery’ in Jewish Women’s Archive, Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Archive at http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/white-slavery. There is a list of pertinent references at the end of the article.

Chris

[robhouse]

Thanks again Chris.

That article is very interesting, but I am hoping to find out more about the actual practice of prostitution in London, as opposed to "trafficking" in prostitutes to South America, New York etc, which is usually what is meant by "White Slavery" in my understanding. As far as I understand it, there were Jewish brothels in the East End...

As you said: "I have a feeling that Jewish prostitution was likely to have been better controlled in brothels by the East European men and possibly served a Jewish clientele as compared with the Gentile prostitutes who worked the streets."

I feel this may be right, but I have not seen any specific sources that really confirm it, except perhaps for that Police reference to Jewish prostitutes and "Ponces" from 1897.

I suppose I should try to check out some of the books mentioned in that article..


Rob H

[ChrisGeorge]

Hi Rob

It looks as if the book East End Gangland by James Morton has some information. See this web page: Prostitution in the Victorian East End of London on eastlondonhistory.com, where the information appears to be derived from that book.

Good luck in looking for more information on this question, Rob.

Chris

[The Good Michael]

William Fishmann's book on the East End talks about it quite a bit; about how Eastern European Jews were coerced into it. I don't have my book with me, so I can't give you pages.

Mike

[Stephen Thomas]

An interesting tangent, Rob

Somewhere I've got a book called 'The London Journal of Flora Tristan'. This French lady, an early Feminist and grandmother of Gauguin, recorded her impressions of London in the 1840s. Here's her description of the West End rookery of St. Giles....

http://www.cooper.edu/humanities/classes/coreclasses/hss3/f_tristan.html

(Interesting stuff, folks. Check it out)

In another chapter she describes a visit to the Middlesex Street Jewish market (ie Petticoat Lane) and mentions an un-named street off Middlesex Street where bare breasted Jewish prostitutes sat behind windows, visible to all.

[Chris]

Like Rob, I've got the impression that much of the literature on prostitution in the Jewish community in London at this period concentrates on the "White Slave Trade", and what there is about prostitution in London comes from one or two decades after 1888.

However, there is an exchange in the correspondence column of the Jewish Chronicle in October 1888 which shows that Jewish prostitution was a visible problem in the East End.

Apparently I'm not allowed to post the letters here, but you can see them by following these links:

12 October 1888:

http://www.cgp100.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/1888_Oct_12_6.jpg

19 October 1888:

http://www.cgp100.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/1888_Oct_19_7A.jpg

There is also this in an article from the Evening News, 6 October 1888, on this site:
"The police will tell any careful inquirer that there is "not a single Jewess among the class of unfortunates who have lately become the victims of the murderer's knife." Let not the reader infer from this that there are no Jewesses leading immoral lives. At the risk of being contradictory, I can answer that there are. But they are all more or less prosperous. Like their brethren in trade, they began with the intention of throwing the burden on others, and so well have they succeeded that they are the mistresses of establishments, the threshold of which the fiend that stalks abroad would not dare to approach."

http://www.casebook.org/press_reports/evening_news/18881006.html

In a way I think the most interesting aspect is the question of "bullies", alluded to in the account of a "Walk with Inspector Carter" in 1897 in the Booth notebooks (quoted by Rob above). Probably this is what John Pizer was accused of being, and perhaps a similar allegation underlay Macnaghten's statement about Aaron Kozminski's particular hatred of prostitutes.

In a longer article on the same theme as the one Rob refers to, Lara Marks quotes the antisemite Arnold White as characterising the Jew as "a keeper of gambling halls and disorderly houses, a procurer and a bully ... Procuring for the 'white slave' trade, and living upon the earnings of women, are now two of the regular professions of the alien Jew" [Lara Marks, 'Race, class and gender: the experience of Jewish prostitutes and other Jewish women in the East End of London at the turn of the century', in Women, Migration and Empire, ed. Joan Grant (1996), p. 38]. That was in The Standard, 30 January 1911, but it's interesting that by that time this was established as a component of the antisemitic stereotype.

And here's an interesting account on the Old Bailey website of the trial of two Jewish men for "feloniously demanding" money from two Jewish prostitutes:

http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t19050206-name-133&div=t19050206-189

[robhouse]

Hmm.. well the Lara Marks article turned out to be not very enlightening. I was hoping for more concrete facts about actual Jewish prostitution as carried on in the East End... but in the end, she talked more about the Jewish family, and the motivation behind why Jewish women went into prostitution, etc. So still, I think we are nowhere.

RH

[robhouse]

This is a sort of follow up question...

Does anyone know anything about the so-called "coffee houses" in the East End? I have seen these referred to as brothels in (I think) at least a few places. For example, according to one source:

Whitechapel alone had 128 brothels, and an additional 11 described as “coffee houses or other places where business is ostensibly carried on, but which are known to the Police as Brothels or places of accommodation for prostitutes.”

I know that there was a coffee house on the south end of Greenfield Street, which was said to be a hang out for anarchists and socialists. Also, after the discovery of Alice McKenzie's body, Supt Arnold directed several constables to inquire if any suspicious looking characters had been seen entering the local common lodging houses and coffee houses.

I am wondering if the coffee houses in general were understood to be brothels or something like that... and if not, what were they exactly?

Thanks

Rob H

[The Grave Maurice]

I am wondering if the coffee houses in general were understood to be brothels or something like that...

If that's true, it would add some colour to the fact that Elizabeth Stride and her husband ran two coffee shops in Poplar.

[robhouse]

Well, I found this rather vague reference:

"By 'houses in which prostitutes lodge', the reader must understand those in which one or two prostitutes occupy private apartments, generally with, though perhaps in rare cases without, the connivance of the proprietor. It often occurs, it must be remembered, that females of no virtue are so desirous of preserving the appearance of it before those among whom they reside that they will not introduce their paramours to their apartments; but both they and their domicile, being generally known to the police, both figure on the return. Houses to which prostitutes resort' represent night houses - the brothels devoted to casual entertainment of these women and their companions, and the coffee-shops and supper- shops which they haunt."

William Acton, Prostitution, Considered in its Moral, Social and Sanitary Aspects, 2nd edition 1870

http://www.victorianlondon.org/crime/numbersofprostitutes.htm

[Scott Nelson]

"Sam's Coffee House" in St. James Place. Is that where Eddowes went after her discharge from Bishopsgate?

[Chris]

However, there is an exchange in the correspondence column of the Jewish Chronicle in October 1888 which shows that Jewish prostitution was a visible problem in the East End.

Apparently I'm not allowed to post the letters here, but you can see them by following these links:

12 October 1888:

http://www.cgp100.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/1888_Oct_12_6.jpg

19 October 1888:
http://www.cgp100.pwp.blueyonder.co...._Oct_19_7A.jpg

Evidently this was down to a technical problem that's now been fixed, so here are the letters:

12 October 1888:


19 October 1888: