Quick Kosminski question (say that 5 times fast)

[Elamarna]

Well, this thread started off good (thanks Errata), but then went south in a hurry. Lets get back to Aaron's mental condition and the possible reasons for suspecting him.

hi Scott

yes, I admit its easy to get drawn off track, but it did start out good I agree.

just like Bridewell my apologies too.

steve

[Mayerling]

Hi Steve,

I do not have such a bias. History has it. 16 percent of the suspects on this site are described as jewish. The jewish population in England in the 1880s was not even 1 percent.

Best wishes, Pierre

Hi Pierre,

Although I am Jewish, and hate to think of the possibility of it, a Jew in the East End is far from being an unlikely candidate for being the Ripper. And most of them were far from the middle class in income. Perhaps not all paupers, but some of them were. Even Anderson, in his comments, tried to emphasize it was not a better class Jewish person, like a Rothschild or Sassoon or a Disraeli type. The emphasis on poor (in the 19th Century mind set) suggested some type of mental block to failing to improve one's lifestyle or family situation. It was rather considered a type of moral failure, so that it could be seen as a breeding ground for insidieously evil behavior like that of the Ripper's toward prostitutes he slew.

It is stereotyping - definitely. But this type concentrated on the Jews because the East End was full of Jews. In some other cities of the time other minorities would have been knocked. In Liverpool (for decades) the Irish were similarly looked at as a criminal spawning class in it's lower sectors in the city.

Jeff

[MsWeatherwax]

[QUOTE=Pierre;388600][QUOTE=MsWeatherwax;388552]

Missing material can not be used as sources.

My feelings exactly, Pierre.

You have absolutely no evidence whatsoever that AK was a suspect because he was poor, Jewish and had mental health issues. There is so much missing material that none of us can know (probably ever) the reasoning behind the Police suspicions.

Spitalfields and the East End have a massive history of Jewish immigration - those two areas in particular were very well known as Jewish neighbourhoods in the 1800's. You do not have to be a statistician to know that there is likely to be a skewed number of Jewish suspects in an area where there was a huge Jewish population.

Edit: That is not to say that there wasn't massive antisemitism at that time - there certainly was.

[Wickerman]

Well, this thread started off good (thanks Errata), but then went south in a hurry. Lets get back to Aaron's mental condition and the possible reasons for suspecting him.

If I recall from previous similar discussions, we have no clue what his mental condition was in 1888, and he was far too young to match any suspect descriptions.

Have we advanced any further from this?

[Abby Normal]

And, last but not least, nothing connects him to the murder sites.

Regards, Pierre

except the only direct evidence in the whole case against any suspect- positive ID of being with a murder victim shortly before her death.

[Joshua Rogan]

Pierre is spot on, there is a clear suspect bias displayed on this site. By my calculations, around 1% of the suspects are princes, and yet barely 0.0000178% of the population as a whole can be described as such. Therefore they are massively overrepresented as suspects. How embarrassing anti-royalist.

[Abby Normal]

Pierre is spot on, there is a clear suspect bias displayed on this site. By my calculations, around 1% of the suspects are princes, and yet barely 0.0000178% of the population as a whole can be described as such. Therefore they are massively overrepresented as suspects. How embarrassing anti-royalist.

LOL. now that's funny.