by Robert House
Unmarried women were also in the labor market, working to supplement the income of families that were supported tenuously by underemployed and poorly paid men who worked as casual laborers. Some women had jobs that were characterized by seasonal or intermittent employment, in which they toiled away in dreary shops for long hours to earn “starvation wages” under the supervision of a middleman, or “sweater.” The novelist Margaret Harkness described the girls who applied for such factory work as follows:
A more miserable set of girls it would be difficult to find anywhere. They had only just escaped the Board School, but many of them had faces wise with wickedness, and eyes out of which all traces of maidenhood had vanished. . . . “[T]he universal adjective” fell from their lips as a term of endearment, whilst the foulest names were given to girls they did not like, also blows and kicks by way of emphasis.10
In July 1888, a strike by young women working at the Bryant and May’s match factory in Bow drew the public’s attention to the wretched conditions for female workers in the East End. The women were appallingly underpaid, and their plight received the support of various local unions. After two weeks, the factory’s management gave in and agreed to higher wages and some improvement in working conditions. Yet despite such “bright spots,” there was a vast labor surplus compared to the available number of women’s jobs, and hundreds of applicants often competed for the same job. As writer Helen Ware suggested, an unemployed woman on her own had to choose between “starvation, the workhouse, or the streets”—in other words, prostitution.11
Prostitution was one trade, at least, that was booming in the East End. An 1868 survey revealed that there were 623 prostitutes of a “low” class “infesting” the neighborhoods of H Division (Whitechapel). 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.” K Division (Stepney, including Mile End) was even worse—it had some 932 prostitutes in total and a staggering 350 brothels.12 By 1881, London police were sending nearly 6,000 women to trial for the crime each year, and in 1887, the Lancet medical journal estimated, incredibly, that there were more than 80,000 prostitutes in London, 3 percent of the total population of 2,360,000.13
The “low prostitutes” of the East End (commonly referred to as unfortunates) survived on the very fringes of society, spending their sad and drunken lives in doss houses and on the streets. They solicited their clients in pubs or on the streets and typically serviced them outdoors, standing against a wall in some dark alley or courtyard. Most were alcoholics living a hand-to-mouth existence, turning tricks so they could afford to buy food and gin and pay for a bed to sleep in. Many women worked as only occasional prostitutes, whenever desperation drove them to it. As Charles Booth noted, “There are in each class some who take to the life occasionally when circumstances compel: tailoresses or dressmakers, for example, who return to their trade in busy times; girls from low neighborhoods who eke out a living in this way; or poor women, neglected wives, or widows, under pressure of poverty.”14
As late as the 1880s, many reformers still ignored the obvious connection between poverty and prostitution and instead believed that prostitution was a result of moral weakness, which was generally associated with the perceived immorality of the lower classes. The East End was seen as a breeding ground for incest, prostitution, and other forms of degenerate sexual behavior, and it was thought that overcrowded living conditions, in which entire families often lived in a single room and family members often slept in the same bed, “made the cultivation of chastity impracticable.”15 Social institutions were established to combat the scourge of prostitution and to encourage “civilized domestic values” in the East End by rewarding the so-called deserving poor. But civilized domestic values were, broadly speaking, too expensive for the district. Marriage and respectability were often out of the question, as a fireman in Jack London’s People of the Abyss explained:
I’ll tell you wot I’d get on four poun’ ten—a missus rowin’, kids squallin’, no coal t’ make the kettle sing, an’ the kettle up the spout, that’s wot I’d get. Enough t’ make a bloke bloomin’ well glad to be back t’ sea. A missus! Wot for? T’ make you mis’rable? Kids? Jest take my counsel, matey, an’ don’t ’ave ’em. Look at me! I can ’ave my beer w’en I like, an’ no blessed missus an’ kids a-cryin’ for bread.16
Prostitution existed in the Jewish community as well. In Russia’s Pale of Settlement, Jewish prostitution in the cities had been a problem since at least the 1870s. In Warsaw by 1872, 17 percent of registered prostitutes were Jewish, and in Vilna in 1873, a full 50 percent of prostitutes were Jewish.17 By 1889, a survey would find that Jews ran 203 of the 289 registered brothels in the Pale of Settlement.18 To an extent, the practice carried over to London’s East End, and by the mid-1880s, as the social researcher Beatrice Potter noted in her diary, “Prostitution among Jewesses was becoming a problem.”19 As Dr. Hermann Adler, chief rabbi of the British Empire, explained to the Home Office,
It is an admitted fact that in former years, one rarely, if ever, heard of an unchaste Hebrew maiden in this country. I grieve to be obliged to say that this happy state of things no longer exists. 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.20
As everywhere, the social evil of prostitution was an outcropping of poverty and hopelessness, to which young Jewish women were not immune.
In March 1885, a Jewish Ladies Society for Preventative and Rescue Work (after 1889, it was renamed the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women [JAPGW]) was formed to battle Jewish prostitution. The organization opened a refuge in Mile End called Charcroft House, where fallen women were prescribed healthy doses of laundry work and prayer. They were taught how to read and cook, and were otherwise prepared for a life of housekeeping, as either a wife or a domestic servant. Members of the JAPGW’s Gentlemen’s Committees went to the docks to protect unwary girls from procurers for the “white slave trade”—essentially, an international trade in prostitutes, who were largely “recruited” from Eastern Europe. The fact that Jews were among the foremost participants in white slavery was a great embarrassment to the established Anglo-Jewish community. The trade was largely run from London, and prostitutes (often Jewish) were shipped off to work in British colonies or other distant lands, from whence they were usually never heard of again.
In January 1888, the Ladies Society report gave a “terrible account of the gross immoralities of the Jewish people in the East India Dock Road.”21 In October of that same year, in the midst of the Ripper murders, a letter printed in the Jewish Chronicle from a Michael Zeffertt noted, “The amount of immorality daily growing among the women is a blot upon our community at large.” Still, in the overall scheme of things, Jewish involvement in prostitution in the East End was comparatively minimal—or, at least, primarily confined to work indoors, in brothels. The vast majority of the area’s street prostitutes were British natives.
Overcrowding in the East End was another problem. Between 1871 and 1901, the number of houses in Whitechapel had dropped from 8,264 to 5,735, even though the population rose by about four percent.22 The overcrowding led to an increase in the cost of rent, worsening things still further.23 Often an entire family would live in one room, sharing beds or sleeping on the floor. In a widely publicized article titled “The Bitter Cry of Outcast London,” the Reverend Andrew Mearns wrote, “Every room in these rotten and reeking tenements houses a family, often two. In one cellar a sanitary inspector reports finding a father, mother, three children, and four pigs!”24 And as Jack London described in People of the Abyss, “Not only was one room deemed sufficient for a poor man and his family, but I learned that many families, occupying single
rooms, had so much space to spare as to be able to take in a lodger or two.”25
Unemployed vagrants could find a night’s sleep in the casual ward of the local workhouse, but space was limited. First-comers would receive a bed in exchange for doing a certain amount of hard labor, and the rest were turned away. Those who had a bit of money could stay in one of the East End’s many common lodging houses (or doss houses). Others didn’t have a bed at all, and they slept on the streets, under bridges and archways, or anywhere else they could. As Mearns wrote, “Hundreds cannot even scrape together the two pence required to secure them the privilege of resting in those sweltering common sleeping rooms, and so they huddle together upon the stairs and landings, where it is no uncommon thing to find six or eight in the early morning.”26 A bleak portrayal of the hardships faced by the homeless was given in a memoir published anonymously in 1885 by someone who referred to himself only as “One of Them.” The author recounted his memories of sleeping in the niches of Blackfriars Bridge, where on one occasion he counted 215 homeless people sheltering from a cold, driving rain.
Various charities were established to address the problems of overcrowding and homelessness in the East End, but these were often either mismanaged or entirely insufficient in the face of the overwhelming destitution of the area. As London wrote, “The quarters of the Salvation Army in various parts of London are nightly besieged by hosts of the unemployed and the hungry for whom neither shelter nor the means of sustenance can be provided.”27 In October 1883, Queen Victoria herself penned a letter to the prime minister, William Gladstone, expressing her distress on reading about “the deplorable condition of the houses of the poor.”28 A report of the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes in 1884 determined, according to author Alan Palmer, that too much “was left to charity: too little imposed by firm paternalistic central government.” Critics condemned the report as “state socialism.”29
As much as anything, the Jack the Ripper murders would focus the world’s attention on the horrific living conditions and the crime that had long existed in the East End. One year after the murders, Police Superintendent Thomas Arnold of H Division (Whitechapel) admitted, “There can be no doubt whatever that vice in its worst forms exists in Whitechapel.”30 His statement was in response to a scathing letter in the Times by the Reverend Samuel Barnett, who complained of “houses in which men and women live as beasts, where crime is protected, and where children or country people are led on to ruin.”31 Barnett pointed to the cheap lodgings where prostitutes lived with men who “partially if not wholly subsist on their wretched earnings”—in other words, pimps—and added that the district frequently had “rows in which stabbing is common” and “fights between women stripped to the waist, of which boys and children are spectators.” He concluded that reform would be possible only “when public opinion will condemn as offenders those who directly or indirectly live on the profits of vice.”
Theft and robbery were also rampant, as noted by Dr. Jacqueline Banerjee of King’s College, London:
Mugging, with its associated violence, was rife. A hanky dipped in chloroform might be used to subdue someone before robbing him, or a man’s hat might be tipped over his face to facilitate the crime (this was called “bonneting”). Another ruse was to lure men down to the riverside by using prostitutes as decoys. The dupes would then be beaten up and robbed out of sight of passers-by.32
The police must have felt overwhelmed in such a vicious environment, and Superintendent Arnold apparently thought the police of H Division were unfairly blamed for their inability to enforce law and order in the wake of the Ripper murders. He admitted that brawling and fighting did take place but “not nearly to such an extent as might be expected and is generally believed by persons non resident in the district.” Arnold concluded that the only remedy was to clear out the lodging houses and replace them with “improved dwellings with better supervision.”33 Police Commissioner James Monro disagreed with this, pointing to a larger problem. “Behind the whole question lies the larger matter of street prostitution generally,” Monro said, “and until that is taken up and regulated (objectionable as this may appear to a public which confuses between liberty and licence) the mere multiplying of comfortable lodging houses will not have any appreciable effect in diminishing the number of and evils resulting from a class who do not want comfortable lodging houses, and the scene of whose operations is on the street.”34
Monro’s statement touched on an important problem, which would become all too apparent during the Ripper murders—specifically, that the prostitutes’ own methods played right into the hands of the killer. As Inspector Henry Moore later said, “It is not as if he had to wait for his chance; they make the chance for him.”35 The prostitutes of the East End typically conducted their business in dark and deserted courtyards and alleys where they could service their clients without being seen by anyone, least of all by the police. Such locations were ideal for illicit sex, but they were also ideal for murder. As Monro wrote in a May 1889 letter to the Home Office, “The only wonder is that [the Ripper’s] operations have been so restricted. There is no lack of victims ready to his hand, for scores of these unfortunate women may be seen any night muddled with drink in the streets & alleys, perfectly reckless as to their safety, and only anxious to meet with anyone who will help them in plying their miserable trade.”36 The prostitutes of Whitechapel were in a rather hopeless position, because they had to work to survive, and large numbers of them continued to work out of desperation, even while they knew a killer was on the prowl. When Inspector Moore tried to frighten the prostitutes off the streets, they would laugh and say, “I ain’t afraid of him. It’s the Ripper or the bridge with me. What’s the odds?”37
4
Jewish Tailors in the East End
Aron Mordke Kozminski was born in Kodawa (pronounced kwo-dava), a small village to the east of a bend in the Warta River, about midway between Poznan and Warsaw. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this region was passed back and forth between countries as the booty of war and conquest, until 1865, the year of Kozminski’s birth, when Congress Poland was officially absorbed into Russia. The village was then located in the westernmost part of the Pale of Settlement, just thirty miles from the Prussian border. (Ten miles to the west of Kodawa is the village of Kolo—oddly enough, the hometown of another Jack the Ripper suspect, Severin Klosowski, later known as George Chapman.)
There had been a Jewish presence in Kodawa since the fifteenth century. Then in 1547, the Jewish residents were chased out of town after a blood libel accusation against some Jews for the supposed ritual murder of two Christian children.1 Jews would not return until the early 1800s, when they began to resettle in a quarter of the village called Dziadowice. By 1862, there were 621 Jews in Kodawa, slightly less than 25 percent of the total population of the town.
Aron’s father, Abram Josef Kozminski, was a tailor from the village of Grzegorzew, seven miles southwest of Kodawa. (The exact year of Abram’s birth is unknown and is based on estimates of his age from later documents.) At the age of twenty-two, Abram married Golda Lubnowski, a twenty-three-year-old woman from Kodawa, who was the daughter of a butcher named Wolek and his wife, Ruchel.2 The couple then lived in Grzegorzew for a brief period before moving to Kodawa around 1845. During the next twenty years, Abram and Golda had a total of seven children. Pessa, their first daughter, was born in December 1845 but died before reaching three years of age. A second daughter, Hinde, was born in November 1848; then a son, Iciek (later called Isaac), was born in 1851. A third daughter, Malke (later called Matilda), was born in 1854; Blimbe, another daughter, was born in 1857; then another son, Wolek (later called Woolf), was born in 1860. Aron Mordke Kozminski, the youngest child, was born on September 11, 1865, by which time Golda was almost forty-five years old.3
In 1867, two years after Aaron’s birth, the Russian government revoked Kodawa’s municipal charter, probably as a punishment for the town’s
support of the January Uprising. This caused a sort of economic crisis in the village—no longer officially a town, Kodawa “became a quiet place without further development,” enlivened only by “a few fairs each year and a big religious celebration of the Virgin Mary.”4 In 1871, Aaron’s oldest brother, Iciek, then twenty years old, was the first member of the family to leave Russia for England. The reason for Iciek’s departure is not known, but it is likely that he left simply to escape the crushing poverty and hopelessness that were endemic in the Pale. When Aaron Kozminski’s father, Abram, died three years later, he left “after himself a widowed wife Golda and three children.” This statement, recorded on Abram’s death certificate, apparently means that he left three dependent children living at home, in all likelihood, Blima (age sixteen), Wolek (age fourteen), and Aron (age eight). The cause of Abram’s death is not known.5
Aaron Kozminski was born in the village of Kodawa in the westernmost part of Russia’s Pale of Settlement. The decade of the 1870s, when Aaron was an adolescent and a young teenager, witnessed a rise in anti-Semitism in Russia. Woolf, Betsy, and Aaron left Russia shortly after the outbreak of pogroms in the spring of 1881.
Apart from the bare facts outlined previously, very little is known about the Kozminski family’s life in Poland. An undated entry in Kodawa’s Book of Residents lists the six Kozminski siblings as “petty bourgeois” and “unmarried.”6 The three boys, Isaac, Woolf, and Aaron, are described as tailors, and the means of support for the three daughters, Hinde, Malke, and Blima, is given as “with brother,” which suggests the entry was made after Abram’s death. Because it was common for Jewish children in the Pale to work at a young age, it should come as no surprise that Aaron Kozminski was employed as a tailor when he was only around ten years old or even younger. Still, the Kozminskis were probably in a rather difficult situation, financially speaking. Because Isaac had already moved to England by the time of Abram’s death, the eldest “brother” responsible for supporting the family must have been Wolek Kozminski, who was then only fourteen years old.
