Piece of Apron and the 'Juwes'

[Monty]

Joel,

very, very doubtful.

I admire you confidence yet ask you to cite your evidence as to why its doubtful.

id say this would be far from the case in 19th century east london, for numerous reasons... not least because when they did come across these words they would be spoken rather than written, if at all. also people were not as integrated as now so its doubtful many would even have heard much of the language

I think you are doing the average English speaking Victorian East Ender a great disservice.

How do you know they 'did not come across these words'? What do you have stating they would have spoken it rather than wrote it? Even if thats true the attempt would have been phonetic.

to be blunt it would have been a different world from ours, where wed pick up words, and have easier access to various cultures and languages

.

I completely disagree with that. I have come across many situations during my research indicating that the 'native' (for want of a better word) people within that area intergrated with the immigrants, mainly via trade.

also eddowes is alledged to have worked for jews rather than with them as i understand it. i would doubt that she would have picked up much, nor had a great amount of contact or conversation with them.

For, with, its not important. The important thing is that she would have communicated and would most likely have been aware of certain yiddish phrases. I defy anyone who works with people of another culture, religion etc not to pick something up with regards to their lifestyle, religion, language etc.

The Jews may well have segregated themselves, mainly out of the fact that the British populace was pointing the finger. Im not addressing that point. Im stating that the assumption the two 'parties' kept away from each other and that the English speaking Eastender would not have know of certain yiddish phrases or words is a false assumption.


Monty

[joelhall]

very, very doubtful. id say this would be far from the case in 19th century east london, for numerous reasons... not least because when they did come across these words they would be spoken rather than written, if at all. also people were not as integrated as now so its doubtful many would even have heard much of the language.

also eddowes is alledged to have worked for jews rather than with them as i understand it. i would doubt that she would have picked up much, nor had a great amount of contact or conversation with them.

to be blunt it would have been a different world from ours, where wed pick up words, and have easier access to various cultures and languages.

'By the way, in terms of segregation, the Jews would have segregated themselves from the general population.'

this quote from chava pretty much sums it up. especially during times of mass immigration, self-segregation is used for self-preservation and defence of a culture. one defining characteristic of this is language, the most important bonding tool. im sure they would have tried to keep this their own rather than allow outsiders theyre naturally wary of to undertsand their communication. the jews of east london were, and in some parts still are, a distinct community to those surrounding them.

for example, schwartz would have given his evidence in english. they would learn the local language as a matter of course to communicate with those around them... they would speak their own language so that the english didnt know what they were saying, as people still do today. its a way of protecting one of peoples most basic wants - a sense of identity within a specific group.

[Monty]

Joel,

but my point is the english people couldnt. nor would they likely understand russian or polish.

Thats not enitirely true.

In my work I have picked up Gujarati. Didnt specifically learn it, just picked it up and I can get by...to a point.

Eddowes is alledged to have worked with Jews at some stage. If this is true Im sure she would have picked something up.

Monty

[Jon Guy]

I believe that the apron was taken by the killer as a "marker" for his message.

Both Arnold and Warren believed the writing was done to inflame the locals, which is what I think the killer was aiming to do. General mayhem.

The killer, as far as we can tell, never cut any other victims clothes before.
If he wanted to clean himself up he could have wiped his hands on Kate`s clothing.

This rather large piece of apron was specifically cut for a reason, it was then smeared with blood of the victim.

I believe it was intended as a marker.

[joelhall]

perhaps, but language barriers are more difficult to overcome. what went for the irish would surely be more so for these poles and other eastern european jews. people will naturally group together based on culture and similarities, and sometimes start to integrate (lets call it spanish holiday syndrome ). however with poor knowledge of the local language, which binds people more so than anything else, this would be even more difficult.

[Sam Flynn]

but my point is the english people couldnt.

A fair point, Joel, although it's worth remembering that the immigrant Irish - who were English speakers - also tended to clump together. These, too, were discriminated against in varying degrees by the indigenous population, largely because they were more willing to endure poor wages and conditions. That said, the mere fact that they were "foreigners" no doubt played a part irrespective of which language they spoke.

[Chava]

The immigrants would all have spoken Yiddish. True, they would have spoken it with different accents and dialects, but they would have had no more trouble understanding each other than a West Country person would have understanding a Lancashire person. As for nationality, as a Jew I know that Judaism is almost as much a nationality as it is a religion, especially in places where people were persecuted for being Jewish. So I doubt the immigrants saw themselves as Russians or Poles or Germans. They probably saw themselves as Jewish. A Jew from Minsk would have more in common with a Jew from Warsaw than he would have had with a gentile from Minsk.

I thought that it might be possible that the Ripper was setting out to implicate the Jews. The Stride murder was in a known Jewish club. Or maybe he was so incensed that he had been interrupted in his first kill by a Jewish peddler that he thought to do this on the second kill as a kind of revenge. But even if this is the case, I doubt he wrote that graffito. It's more likely, IMO, that he saw it and dropped the cloth there deliberately to draw attention to it and link it to the murders.

I had the opportunity to discuss the case with a well-known local police profiler. And even better, he really don't know much about the Ripper murders at all, so came fresh to the case. He felt strongly that this killer came prepared to carry material away from the body and so would have had something already with him for this purpose. He also believed that whatever he was using for that would be part of his ritual so he wouldn't give it up. We were talking mostly about Kelly, not this murder. But the principle remains. If he had something with him to take her organs away, he wouldn't throw it down in the street. And he wouldn't slice off a piece of apron to use that. So the cloth was likely used to wipe off sticky stuff and or blood, and was discarded after that was accomplished. If he noticed the graffito while he was escaping, he might preserve (or prasarve!) the cloth, clean himself up, hide his trophies away, and then go out and drop the cloth right by a piece of graffiti that mentions the Jews.

And since the cloth draws attention to the writing, I think it's highly possible that the writing was there beforehand, and the policeman didn't notice it until he saw the cloth lying right underneath it.

By the way, in terms of segregation, the Jews would have segregated themselves from the general population.

[joelhall]

but my point is the english people couldnt. nor would they likely understand russian or polish. we had much the same problem when i lived and worked in peterborough. it creates a level of self-regulated segregation.

[Sam Flynn]

doesnt anyone think that may have played a larger part in the social cohesion than religion? the language barrier can become quite a hurdle.

...not for those who spoke Yiddish, which practically every Jewish immigrant - from wherever in Europe they originally came - was able to do.

[joelhall]

They were overwhelmingly of Polish (or Polish/Russian¹) origin, Joel.

¹ At that time, a large part of Poland was under Russian control.

precisely

doesnt anyone think that may have played a larger part in the social cohesion than religion? the language barrier can become quite a hurdle.

[Sam Flynn]

3. much has been said of the area being jewish, but what of their nationality?

They were overwhelmingly of Polish (or Polish/Russian¹) origin, Joel.

¹ At that time, a large part of Poland was under Russian control.

[joelhall]

just food for thought (i like to help people out ). it seems these same reasonings keep spinning around and around, so heres some questions to get you thinking (as these threads create more questions than they answer)...

1. why do people insist on focusing on one word rather than the whole phrase? does it seem to have been written by an englishman?

2. does not the whole phrase sound as if its in defence of the 'juwes'?

3. much has been said of the area being jewish, but what of their nationality?

4. if this was anything to do with the freemasons (which however exciting seems to be guess work at best) why such an obvious clue?

5. why is it assumed that the word was written down correctly? would an average policeman of the time recognise, say, a polish or russian word?

6. why would a freemason write this in any case?

7. why would a 'neat schoolboy' have such a bad grasp of grammar?

8. for that matter if 'neat schoolboy' was literally taken to mean someone who still had the hand of a child, where would he learn such an obscure spelling such as 'juwes'?

9. there seem to be more questions surrounding why it was written than who wrote it and its meaning. its a curious order of words... would a fleeing killer bother to think up some riddle-like double negetive?

just a few pondering points

[Christine]

...Nineteenth century, Christine? The only place one finds this spelling used with any frequency appears to be in Middle English texts, and would have died out some four hundred years before the Whitechapel Murders.

Didn't somebody have a long list of distinguished people using "Juwes?" All were technically misspellings, but people misspell all the time. I could be confusing a Middle English list, but I don't think so.

[Sam Flynn]

On the other hand, "Juwes" for "Jews" is found all over 19th century England.

...Nineteenth century, Christine? The only place one finds this spelling used with any frequency appears to be in Middle English texts, and would have died out some four hundred years before the Whitechapel Murders.

[Christine]

Hi Michael.

I think the whole Masonic theory is silly. There's no Freemasonry ritual that would involve murdering women, and there's nothing in the Jubelo/Jubela/Jubelum story that would point to that either. Plus it appears that the whole story was obscure enough so that even if the grafitto had said "Jubela, Jubelo, and Jubelum are the men that will not be blamed for nothing" that most Masons would not have understood it anyhow. And that's not even dealing with the fact that something like "Benedict Arnold will not be blamed for anything" doesn't exactly work either. (I'm using a US idiom here. I can't think of anything better.)

However, I can't find a good source that deals with the Freemasonry story. I found one a while back, but now I can't dredge it up. Most links turn out to be religious sites on the theme of "Freemasonry is demonic" and state outright that it is proved that Jack was a Mason killing according to Masonic ritual practice.

I can only guess whether the misspelling was intentional or not. The message is so garbled that you can interpret it as a dumb joke, or a deranged anti-Semite, or a even a Jewish Ripper complaining that the prevailing anti-Semitic prejudices concerning the Ripper were misguided.