Jack the Ripper and the Case for Scotland Yard's Prime Suspect

by Robert House

  In 1987 there was another important discovery—this time simply

  a few handwritten notes that had been penciled into a copy of Anderson’s autobiography by one of his subordinates at the Yard—a man named Donald Swanson. In the book, Swanson jotted down a few brief notes about Anderson’s suspect, then turned to a blank page at the end of the volume and wrote an additional paragraph about some of the details of the inquiry. At the bottom of the page, Swanson added, “Kosminski was the suspect.”4

  The discovery of the “Swanson marginalia” was immediately recognized as an important break in the case, so to speak. To Ripper scholars, it was as if someone had suddenly turned on a light in a dark room. For not only did the marginalia put a name to the man Anderson insisted was Jack the Ripper, but this handwritten note also made it manifestly clear that Anderson’s “Polish Jew” was the same suspect referred to as Kosminski in the Macnaghten memorandum. Yet the marginalia was even more compelling because of who Swanson was—for in 1888, Chief Inspector Donald Sutherland Swanson had been the man in overall charge of the Ripper case.

  Around the time that the Swanson marginalia came to light, a Ripperologist named Martin Fido conducted a search of Victorian London asylum records in an effort to discover the full name of Kosminski, the suspect Macnaghten claimed was admitted to an asylum in March 1889. He found only one Kosminski who seemed to fit the bill—specifically, Aaron Kozminski, an immigrant Polish Jew who had been admitted to Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum in February 1891, apparently suffering from schizophrenia. This discovery, published on the heels of the Swanson marginalia, led several newspapers in 1987 to announce that the case was apparently solved after all and that Jack the Ripper was a destitute and insane hairdresser named Aaron Kozminski.

  Unfortunately, a number of well-known Ripper scholars (including Fido himself) dismissed Kozminski as a suspect almost immediately. For starters, they pointed out, almost nothing was known about Aaron Kozminski. In addition, several aspects of the Swanson marginalia and the Macnaghten memorandum were apparently inconsistent with Kozminski’s asylum record, a fact that led some researchers to wonder if Aaron was the right Kosminski. Yet an even more serious problem, ultimately, was that Aaron Kozminski simply did not seem to fit the profile of Jack the Ripper. The asylum record plainly stated that Kozminski was not dangerous to others and that he ate food out of the gutter. It just didn’t seem to add up.

  As a result, Ripper authorities declared that the case was not in fact closed. As the years went by and no new information emerged, Aaron Kozminski drifted back into the relative obscurity from whence he came, until eventually he came to be regarded as just another name on a long list of Ripper suspects. Somewhere along the line, Anderson’s “definitely ascertained fact” about the Ripper’s identity had gone by the wayside, and his statements had come to be regarded as little more than a curious and perplexing footnote in the case. Few Ripperologists now seem to consider the possibility that Anderson may have been right. Most assume that he was wrong and focus their efforts on trying to figure out why he made such an audacious claim in the first place. It has been routinely suggested, for example, that Anderson either lied outright or became clouded and confused in his memory of events.

  Is this dismissal of Scotland Yard’s top man justified? Or is it possible that Anderson was right, and that Jack the Ripper has been right under our noses for the last hundred years? To answer this question, we must take a long hard look at Anderson’s suspect, the insane hairdresser Aaron Kozminski. Of course, it would have been much easier to research a member of the British Royal family or a well-known celebrity suspect such as the artist Walter Sickert, about whom there exists a vast amount of biographical documentation. Kozminski, by contrast, was a member of the lowest class of London’s citizenry, living on the very fringes of society. Historically speaking, he remains an elusive figure, and the surviving documentation on him is sparse and riddled with apparent contradictions.

  Although a more substantial account of Kozminski’s background must have once existed in a police dossier, such a file no longer exists. In short, comparatively little is known about Kozminski, and I have been forced to make several assumptions or guesses about his life. To fill in the gaps, I will present Kozminski’s life story in its historical context, against the backdrop of those Jews who fled persecution in Russia in the 1880s and immigrated to a depressed London slum already suffering from extreme poverty and high competition for jobs. I will talk about Kozminski’s family and the tailoring trade in which they were employed. I will analyze several contemporary newspaper accounts and the memoirs of police detectives and others, which seem to implicate Kozminski in connection with the Whitechapel murders. Finally, I will use a modern theoretical approach to see whether Kozminski fits the generic profile of a serial killer as defined by the FBI and other sources.

  To begin with, we must attempt to understand the fractured and oppressive cauldron from which Aaron Kozminski emerged—in other words, nineteenth-century Poland. And perhaps fittingly, at the time of Kozminski’s birth in 1865, Poland did not even technically exist.

  Part One

  Coming to London

  1

  “Fear God and the King”

  For at least two hundred years after Jews first settled in Poland in the eleventh century, the region was a sort of haven, comparatively speaking. The Polish aristocracy regarded the Jewish population as a valuable part of the country’s economy and culture and actively protected the Jews from persecution by the Roman Catholic Church. But in the fourteenth century, the Jews were falsely blamed for causing the Black Death pandemic, and they fell victim to widespread persecution across Europe. Gradually, the tolerant atmosphere in Poland began to deteriorate. The political and economic instability of Poland only worsened matters, and by the eighteenth century, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was crumbling from within, plagued by corruption and an outmoded economy. The country was weak and vulnerable, and as a result, it became a pawn, subject to the manipulation of its powerful, vulturelike neighbors, Russia, Prussia, and Austria. In 1732, these countries signed a secret pact called Löwenwolde’s Treaty (also known as the Alliance of the Three Black Eagles), the goal of which was to undermine the stability of Poland and influence the succession to the Polish throne. The treaty was essentially nullified a few years later, but the writing was on the wall—the “Black Eagles” (especially Russia) intended to keep Poland weak. Russia’s ultimate goal in fact, was to liquidate Poland completely.

  It took only about fifty years to dismantle Poland entirely. In 1764, the Russian empress Catherine II installed her former lover on the Polish throne. Three years later she forced a constitution on Poland, weakening the state further and increasing its dependency on Russia. Poland made a brief attempt to reassert its national autonomy in the War of the Confederation of Bar, when a group of Polish nobles assembled armies to expel Russian troops from its territory. Yet within a few short years Russia had squashed the uprising, and as punishment, Catherine took direct control of the Polish government through a council made up of her envoys and ambassadors. In 1772, she further applied the rod by enacting the first of three partitions of Poland, seizing a third of Poland’s territory. A final partition twenty-three years later wiped Poland off the map completely—Russia absorbed a vast geographical area in the east; Prussia took the west, including Poland’s foreign trading ports; and Austria took a smaller region in the southwest. As a result of the partitions, the majority of Poland’s Jews fell into the hands of the Russian Empire.

  In Russia, distrust and a lack of tolerance for Jews had existed since the Middle Ages, and there was a deep-rooted anti-Semitism among the aristocracy, based largely on the idea that Jews had been responsible for the execution of the Christian messiah. Moreover, ever since the French Revolution, Russia’s czars and ruling aristocracy had been terrified that a populist uprising might take place, and the keepers of the old order perceived themselves to be under attack by a variety of r
adical “modern” theories, including democracy, nihilism, and socialism. Assuming that many of the rabble-rousers behind such theories were Jewish, the government increasingly resorted to treating the Jews as scapegoats for a wide variety of social and economic problems and encouraging anti-Semitic nationalism among the peasants, who likewise perceived the Jews to be interlopers, with a strange and exclusive culture. The peasants openly accused the Jews of exploitation, especially in the trade of alcohol, which they claimed was “sucking their vital juices.” As historian Shlomo Lambroza noted, “The official view was that Jews were a parasitic element in the Russian Empire who lived off the hard earned wages of the narod [people].”1

  Thus, when close to a million Polish Jews suddenly became absorbed into the Russian Empire, the government immediately recognized what it termed “the Jewish problem.” In “defense” of her Christian subjects, Catherine created the Pale of Settlement, a vast geographical area in western Russia where the Jews were forced to live, and the shtetls in the region soon became dangerously overcrowded with what John Doyle Klier described as “a huge, pauperized mass of unskilled or semiskilled Jewish laborers, whose economic condition steadily worsened.” On the legal front, the Russian Empire addressed the Jewish problem by imposing severe restrictions on the Jews in the Pale of Settlement and Congress Poland. What followed was “a century-long program of social engineering” and repression.2

  The reign of Czar Nicholas I from 1825 to 1855 was a particularly bleak era for Russia’s Jews. Nicholas had nailed his colors to the mast in 1816, when he wrote in his diary, “The ruin of the peasants of these provinces are the Zhyds. . . . They are everything here: merchants, contractors, saloon-keepers, mill-owners, ferry-holders, artisans. They are regular leeches, and suck these unfortunate governments to the point of exhaustion.”3 Nicholas I was a ruthless autocrat and a Slavic nationalist, who believed in the idea of one people, one language, and one religion. During his twenty-nine years as emperor, Nicholas passed a number of laws designed to assimilate Jews into Russian culture and, if possible, convert them to Christianity.

  Foremost among these laws was the dreaded Ustav Rekrutskoi Povinnosti (Statute on Conscription Duty) of 1827—essentially a draft law, by which Jewish youths and young men were forced to enlist in the Russian army for a period of twenty-five years. As noted by historian William Fishman, this was, practically speaking, a death sentence for those who received it, and “it was common for the ritual kaddish (prayer for the dead) to be pronounced on the young conscript.” The recruits often fled into the woods or to neighboring towns to avoid the service, and those who were captured were shipped to far-off army bases in eastern parts of the empire. Many doggedly refused to eat the nonkosher meals that were forced on them, and they died on the long journey from exposure to cold, epidemics, exhaustion, and starvation. As Fishman noted, “The roads to Siberia were littered with the corpses of young Jews.”4 Those who survived the trek were subjected to beatings, forced baptism, and various methods of torture designed to encourage apostasy. As the Jewish Chronicle put it, “The Russian army was a veritable Moloch for Jewish children.”5

  In 1835, Nicholas formally passed many of the government’s already existing anti-Semitic policies into law. The Jews in the Pale were henceforth barred from agriculture and, as a result, turned to earning a living as petty traders, middlemen, shopkeepers, peddlers, and artisans. They were also forbidden to employ Christian domestic servants or to build synagogues near churches and were prohibited from traveling into the Russian interior, except on temporary furlough, and only then if they wore Russian dress. Furthermore, all official documents were to be written either in Russian or in the local dialect, but “under no circumstances the Hebrew language.”6 Even as early as 1840, however, the government began to realize that it had failed to “correct” the Jews. Nicholas tried various other assimilation techniques, but all of them came to the same result. In the Kingdom of Poland, in the far western part of the empire, it was argued that Jews were multiplying so rapidly that the entire region might soon become a “Jewish country” and “the laughing-stock of the whole of Europe.”7 The prescribed remedy was to treat the Jewish population as you would the “carriers of disease,” and to segregate them in ghettos.

  By the end of the 1850s, the general feeling in government was that Russia needed to evolve into a modern industrial nation on par with those in Western Europe. Russia had been bankrupted by its loss in the Crimean War, and its economy still depended almost entirely on agriculture and the backward system of fiefdoms, in which serfs were literally property attached to the estates of nobles. All of this changed abruptly in 1861, when the new czar Alexander II signed a law emancipating the serfs, a move that was mirrored by the spirit of abolitionism and the onset of the Civil War over slavery in the United States. The emancipation marked the beginning of a major tectonic shift in Russia’s economy and social structure, which led to progressive reforms in all branches of government. As London’s Jewish Chronicle noted, it was “a piece of philanthropy never equaled in the history of man, since no single man has ever had absolute command over such a number of men.”8 Millions of former serfs moved to the cities to find work in factories. It was to be a new Russia, one founded on Western principles of freedom and justice.

  The “Czar Liberator” likewise enacted several progressive reforms related to the “Jewish question.” Alexander lifted some of the oppressive restrictions on Jews in the Pale, and certain Jews (doctors, merchants, possessors of higher education, skilled artisans) were even allowed to settle outside the Pale. The improved conditions did not last long, though. In 1863–1864, the January Uprising in favor of Polish independence led to more than 150 battles across Congress Poland. Yet the revolt, which had considerable support from the Jewish community, was quickly suppressed, and in retaliation the Russian army mercilessly wreaked havoc on the conquered areas with such extreme violence that its actions were condemned across Europe.9 Tens of thousands of Polish men and women were exiled to Siberia, and more than one hundred rebels were hanged for their “crimes” against Russia. Many of the Jews who had participated in the uprising escaped to London. The uprising forced the Russian government to reconsider the benefits of progressive reform and turn back to stricter ways.

  By the 1870s, anti-Semitism was again on the rise. In 1871, tensions erupted when major anti-Jewish riots broke out during religious festivities in Odessa, and “for three days a horde of Greeks and Russians, undisturbed by police or troops, roamed the city burning, looting and beating up Jews.”10 According to Russian newspaper reports, the riots were caused by “religious antipathy” and Jewish exploitation of the Russian people. As the Saint Petersburg News put it, “Where the Jews have the mass of the population in their hands, they are able to build a many-sided instrument for their exploitation and the people there every minute feel themselves under an unbearable yoke, with which the serfdom of the past cannot even compare.”11 The riots resulted in two deaths and more than a thousand Jewish homes and businesses being damaged and/or looted.

  Equally troubling was the reappearance of the “blood libel” myth, which is essentially a form of anti-Jewish propaganda that held that Jews murdered Christian children as part of their rituals. Variations of the myth started to crop up as early the fifth century. One notable example was the story of Simon of Trent, a two-year-old child who was said to have been murdered by Jews during Passover week in 1475 in Trent, Italy. According to legend, the child was kidnapped and then brutally slaughtered by several Jews. While one strangled the child with a handkerchief, the others cut flesh from the boy’s neck and collected his blood in a bowl. The conspirators then cut pieces of flesh from the boy’s arms and legs, punctured him with needles, and threw his body into the river. A number of Jewish men were arrested for the crime and ultimately confessed after “a series of interrogations that involved liberal use of judicial torture.”12 It is now impossible to know what really happened or who killed the boy, but the myth took o
n a life of its own and was used to spread anti-Semitic propaganda for centuries afterward.

  Although Alexander I had outlawed the blood libel myth in Russia in 1817, the law was never fully enforced. Accusations reemerged during the reign of Nicholas I, who declared, “Among the Jews there probably exist fanatics who consider Christian blood necessary for their rites.”13 In 1878, when Aaron Kozminski was twelve or thirteen years old, references to the blood libel myth began to resurface in anti-Semitic Russian newspapers such as Novoye Vremya.

  By the 1880s, high competition for jobs, exacerbated by crop failures in 1880 and 1881, had led to widespread famine and unemployment in the southwestern regions of Russia, and large numbers of peasants were roaming from town to town looking for work.14 The government was becoming increasingly worried about rising unrest among the peasants, capitalism and industry loomed as threats to the traditional social structure, and many of the educated sons of the landed aristocracy turned to dangerous revolutionary theories such as socialism and nihilism that were being espoused by leftist intellectuals. As usual, the government blamed the Jews for the unrest in the land. In a memorandum to the czar, General Nicholas Ignatiev, later the minister of the interior and a member of the anti-Semitic Sacred League, wrote, “Every honest voice is silenced by the shouts of Jews and Poles who insist that one must listen only to the ‘intelligent’ class, and that Russian demands must be rejected as backward and unenlightened.”15