Eight Weeks in the Summer of Victoria's Jubilee

by Bob Biderman

  Maggie asked him questions about this and that. She listened to what he said with interest. And Z, for his part, liked to talk. He enjoyed the art of conversation – for art it is – and could hold forth knowledgeably on a multitude of subjects. But she noted in him a sense of distance and, if not disdain, suspicion. That sense of him – his apparent lack of interest in her as a fellow writer – caused her some discomfort. For, in fact, she knew him as an author – she had met him once before at a party at her cousin Beatrice’s flat, though she was certain he hadn’t remembered even though she had complimented him on a story which she had read in a magazine that had just recently come out. And even though he didn’t see her as a colleague, she wished she could speak with him about the profession and the craft. She felt that her male half, John, wouldn’t have had that difficulty and she wished she could have metamorphosed into him completely, at least for a while, so the gap between the genders could be bridged.

  But there she had him wrong. It wasn’t her as a woman that he found difficult, it was her as an East End interloper – one of the many barging in those days with their pencils and clipboards taking notes and collecting figures, like wild, exotic butterflies, for their statistics, as if that could ever give them a true sense of what was going on there. In his mind, they treated the East End like one of their colonial dominions, and the people like coolies or kaffirs who needed to be civilised before being given the privilege of offering themselves into the service of the Empire as fresh and pliant meat for exploitation.

  And when they complained about the sweatshops run by greedy Jews who oppressed their own brethren, spouting out hackneyed rhetoric that sounded so very righteous, had they really thought it through? Yes, it was a brutal system without doubt. But was it as brutal as the factory where people were just replaceable units of labour to be hired or cast out at the will of some faceless financier who never left his country house except to go boozing at his club? The sweatshops in the East End were, in the main, small, family enterprises run by people who lived not much differently from the workers they employed. They spoke the same language, ate the same food and worshipped the same god. What’s more, they taught the inexperienced and uneducated newcomers a trade – something the reformers for all their moaning and maligning did not.

  But he had her wrong as well. She wanted to see the world from the eyes of the characters she met in the streets of Whitechapel. If only they would allow her to do so.

  CHAPTER 7

  THEY HAD BEEN conversing for a while before she brought the matter up. She felt he was the person to speak with about it, but she wasn’t quite sure how the subject should be broached. However, being a straightforward woman who avoided any scent of pretence, she decided to boldly be direct. And so she asked him the question that was on her mind – whether he knew anything about what had come to be known as the Whitechapel murder case and the young man Lipski who was accused of that terrible crime. She had gone to Batty Street on that day, she told him, following the crowd of people who were drawn there so mysteriously. Something was in the air, something strong and powerful that took her over and, yes, was thrilling but at the same time very frightening. The world seemed suddenly askew, off kilter, and she felt a moment of terror when she found herself in the centre of the mob, swept up in blind emotion. She struggled with herself to regain that sense of detachment so important for her to see the event through the eyes of a journalist, through the lens of a writer, but the crowd was faceless and devouring and she couldn’t escape the fact that she was part of it – that, try as she might, she couldn’t detach herself from the essence of the beast, which itself was an organism, and being within it she, herself, had become simply an appendage. But later, when she had a chance to recollect, she realised that there had been a difference in the people – the native East Enders and the Jews – who were part of that mass and yet somehow separate. The native East Enders were braying for blood, they were pumped up and visceral, you could smell their juices like the sharp, acrid stink of animals in heat and you could see the glint of unleashed frenzy in their faces. The anger of the Jews, on the other hand, was muted by a primal sense of fear. Perhaps they realised that if the others had been thrown a Jew just then, any Jew, and told he was the culprit, they would have happily ripped him apart – because he was a Jew as well as a suspected murderer.

  Then the next day – and this is what concerned her – she started to hear the rumours, the ominous talk in the street, about the Jews being at it again and that this wasn’t just any murder, but a ritual killing sanctioned by secret powers; that it was done to obtain the blood of an unborn child for the practice of some strange, demonic ritual – a grotesque and chilling notion but one which they believed quite strongly. But there was no truth in it, no truth at all… was there?

  Z looked at her closely before he spoke, studying her expression. She wasn’t unattractive he thought. She had a heart as well as a mind – he could clearly see that. But – justified or not – the suspicion entered his head that perhaps she was asking him for confirmation and the idea that someone like her could even countenance the notion of that dogged canard disturbed him. For this was the most terrible lie that maintained a tenacious grip upon the febrile minds of European peasantry and was so well exploited by those who wished to use it, for purposes of their own, as a spark to set the fires of accusation blazing. It was an especially powerful tool in the arsenal of the politically corrupt because it connected to those primeval fears that reached back into the dark expanse of ancient nights, echoing once more that cry of guilt, that basic charge of juddenhaze: the dreaded and most reprehensible deceit of the Blood Libel. And like the terrible Hydra of many heads, each one severed would be restored. It might take years or even centuries, but grow back it did, uglier than ever before. So ingrained in the psyche of primitive Christianity, so convoluted grew those roots in the subconscious soil of nightmares and netherworlds, nothing could completely extirpate it. Like the trunk of an ancient dark, demonic tree, it ran too deep into the ground, submerging cancerous tentacles into impenetrable soil, dank and diseased, always spreading its pustule seeds over newly fertile ground. But that these charges should emerge in his beloved England, that someone as sensible as her should ever dare to moot them, no matter how innocently, was especially troublesome. For these concerns, these fears, were not just another form of Jewish paranoia. They had a history spanning back to the dark medieval nights and continuing forward so close that Z could almost touch it.

  In the third year of Victoria’s reign something happened in Damascus that sent a seismic shockwave through the newly assimilated Jewish communities in Europe – which by then had only been accorded civil liberties for less than fifty years. News slowly filtering out of that region – once the pride of the Ottomans whose 500 year empire had fallen into terminal disarray – announced the arrest of several Syrian Jews who had been accused of murdering a Capuchin priest and using his blood as part of their rites in celebration of Passover. Though Blood Libel accusations had been common in Europe during the Middle Ages, this was the first recorded case in the Moslem world – though soon there was found to be a Machiavellian hand at work and, most shockingly of all (especially for those who began their evening prayers by giving thanks to Napoleon for their liberation) the hand was of a Gallic origin.

  France, at the time, was trying to exert its influence in Syria, competing with the other European states to gain a Middle Eastern foothold, and seeing the newly politicised Catholics as their natural allies, they used the case, quite cynically, to what they suspected might be their advantage. England, however, having strong economic ties with the Jewish community there, supported negotiations with the Pasha of Egypt – the new titular leader of Syria – to sign a declaration absolving the Jews of that monstrous charge. And though the recently emancipated Jewish communities in Europe felt a renewed sense of confidence after burying those dreadful allegations (Thiers, the prime minister of France, wa
s brought down partly because of this affair), there was still a lingering fear that the ghost might have been laid to rest but it was bound to reappear, perhaps at a time when they were much more vulnerable.

  Perhaps he was being too sensitive. Perhaps she hadn’t meant it like that. She had said it was a disturbing thought and she was trying to put it to rest, wasn’t she? But ‘Jew’ was a word that had a multiplicity of meanings and thousands of years of historical resonance. And then there was an off-hand reference she had made – and she had meant it well – about how the Jews were able to lift themselves out of poverty, with the help of their wealthy brethren, and move on while others in the East End ghetto seemed to have resigned themselves to a life of misery and deprivation.

  Statements like that only made him feel the tremendous chasm that separated him from someone even like her, someone who had taken risks that few women took with their lives, who had chosen to live among the poor and destitute and had given up the comforts of a quiet country life in order to pursue her mission. Even with all that he sensed a certain smugness, a kind of natural superiority acquired at birth as the right of any English Christian. It was something she couldn’t see, could never see, he suspected, but it was there and was probably there, to some degree or other, in everyone of True English Blood who was born into the greatest empire the world had ever known and had never questioned the raw and savage hand that gained it.

  Yet Z himself was torn between two worlds – the one of the Jubilee and the one of the ghetto. That he was English, there was no doubt. He spoke the language of the Queen and could write it with the flair and fluency that few others could master. He enjoyed the company of a wide network of friends from many backgrounds and classes, most of whom were Christian. And he had even toyed with the idea of creating a new Judeo-Christian liturgy which would take the ancient moral law and update it to modern times and the changing cultures born of the social melting pot.

  But he was also a Jew whose parents came from Eastern Europe. He was the first generation to be educated into English customs and English ways – through the demands of the Board of Guardians supported by a network of schools and synagogues dedicated to the course of rapid assimilation. And Z, who went through that process, became as English as his antecedents had become German or French. Yet in his heart there existed another realm and another life that was attached to a curious lineage, one which was historical and metaphorical and sometimes more real and meaningful than the one he led in England. And to that extent at least, his Englishness was simply a useful façade – though he never, ever would have admitted it.

  What was curious, though he had become quite used to it, was that Maggie didn’t see him as a Jew, particularly. Certainly not one of those she referred to as the mysterious others who seemed to have special powers that she both feared and admired. It wasn’t that he didn’t look Jewish, whatever that meant. His features were similar to certain immigrants from the Russian pale (though some thought they seemed closer to what they called ‘negroid’). He didn’t wear ‘Jewish clothes’ though the garments he wore were somewhat strange. It was, of course, his voice, his educated form of speech and his demeanour which could be as English as he wanted it to be – depending on who he was conversing with or what he needed.

  Z was, therefore, an intermediary: a bi-cultural interpreter who could swim easily between two oceans. And, as such, Maggie saw him as neither fish nor fowl but a creature all its own. He wasn’t of the stereotypical mould and even though she tried not to look at life with blinkered eyes, her thoughts and language had been shaped by the stories of her own antecedents.

  When he finally responded to her remark it came in the form of a challenge – a way, he thought, of turning things around and making what seemed to be just another flippant statement carry the weight of its implications. For if the Jews had their protectors ensconced in the citadels of power, why was it that millions under threat of annihilation were so desperate to find a welcoming harbour? Why hadn’t the wealthy of their tribe done more to help them than simply making token gestures? Could it be that these wealthy Jews – the Rothschilds, the Mocattas – would rather see them starve than encourage them on for fear of sending the wrong signal to the others who were anxiously waiting in the wings of Russified Poland? If history had taught the Jewish people one thing alone, he concluded, it was that the ordinary Jews, the masses, could depend on no one but themselves to help them – just like the ordinary Christian.

  Lipski, he told her, was an example of this. His guilt had yet to be established, though the circumstantial evidence seemed firmly against him. But guilty or innocent, the Jewish establishment would rather let him hang than raise a finger to protect him, because, in the end, they were more concerned about their own place and position rather than the fate of some poor, Eastern European immigrant.

  Maggie listened to him speak in fascination. She was in awe of his emotive powers, struck by his vulnerability and confused by his misinterpretation of what actually was going on inside her head. But Maggie was not someone easily intimidated and she would say what she had to say regardless of the consequences. So she took a deep breath and asked him the most obvious question that followed from his comment: if it were true that the Jewish establishment wasn’t interested in protecting Lipski, where was all the money for his legal defence coming from?

  CHAPTER 8

  WHERE WAS THE money coming from? It was a good question, thought Z. And Maggie wasn’t the only one who asked it. Even Mordecai could see it was a question that needed looking into – though quietly and discretely. If Lipski had found himself a good lawyer, who was paying for it? The young man hadn’t a shilling to his name. Nor, as far as anyone knew, did he have any relatives or friends who were much better off than he was. And judging from the reaction on the street, given the rope and the opportunity, most people would have been happy to hang him themselves.

  So in whose interest was it that Lipski be well represented? If Mordecai was any indication of how the established Jews were feeling – as he often was – then this case would be quickly dispensed with, disappearing into the dustbin of history before anyone had time to notice. For, Z suspected, the last thing the Guardians wanted was a grandstanding lawyer splashing the trial into the headlines and promoting the idea that if it wasn’t one Jew who killed the pregnant angel then it must have been two.

  Certainly there was more here than met the eye. And Z, who had been pondering the materials he had collected on the case for several days now, had come to realise that this was a story far more complex than he had first thought – complex and troubling. Several things bothered him about it and primary among them was the lack of a credible motive. Why would a quiet young man with no past history of violence, who everyone said was gentle and well-behaved, who was engaged to a proper young woman (one who supported his plea of innocence unswervingly), who was just starting to move up in the world – why would someone like that go into a penniless woman’s room in the middle of the day knowing full well others were in the house just a few feet away on the opposite side of the paper-thin wall? Why on earth would he pour acid down her throat, pour some down his own and then crawl under her bed and wait to either die or be found? On the other hand, it was claimed that the bedroom door was locked from the inside. And at that time of day Batty Street was busy enough that two large men could hardly climb out the second storey window without having been observed. It was the paradoxical nature of the case that Z found intriguing; one which generated a multitude of questions – and the closer he looked, the more he saw.

  Among his own circle of friends, one in particular found this case of interest – though more as a conundrum than a question of justice. His name was Doyle, a young doctor living in Southsea at the time who came into London on occasion to visit the offices of Strand Magazine where his investigative crime stories using the diagnostic techniques he had studied while a medical student in Edinburgh were being enthusiasti
cally published. He was one of the rising young stars of the new literary world descending on London then – someone Z’s friend, Jerome, wanted desperately to bring on board the magazine venture he had planned (which with a little luck and much sweat and tears would soon get off the ground – or so he told Doyle during their occasional meetings in Soho). It was at one of those informal planning sessions that Z, who was also part of that motley circle, had given him a brief run-down of the case and Doyle had told him, first, never to take police reports at face value because they were so sloppy and rushed and all too often were motivated by political expediency; secondly, to take accounts of witnesses with a grain of salt since they weren’t trained observers and were exceedingly vulnerable to suggestion – especially by those they saw in authority; and thirdly, never to trust the locks on the doors of East End houses.

  But it was Jerome who was to provide the most assistance. For Jerome, who at that time could hardly make ends meet through his literary enterprises, was still lingering on the fringes of the legal trade in order to bring in a few steady shillings.

  The Factories of the Law, Z thought, were so different from the noisy pursuits of the artisan’s shop with its constant din of people and machine, scrapping, hammering, pounding pliant matter into something marketable. In the legal trade there is quiet and peace, save for the scratching of pens which belie the nature of their intent, buried deep beneath the mounds of paper, which blandly registers in ink the consignment of some poor soul to the fires of Hell.