During the spate of murders and attacks Jewish community leaders noticed that the violence occurred on dates significant in the Hebrew calendar. For instance, the first attack on a prostitute that year, when Emma Smith was left for dead at the corner of Wentworth Street and Osborn Street, took place not only on Easter Monday, 3 April 1888, but on the last day of Passover, a Jewish festival rich in associations with slaughter. Jewish leaders hoped that this wasn’t a replay of the medieval blood libels in which Jews were accused of ritualistically killing Christians to reenact Christ’s Passion and of using the victims’ blood to make the unleavened bread eaten during Passover.
The next attack came on 7 August. The body of Martha Tabram, another prostitute, was discovered on the landing of flats at George Yard Buildings on Aldgate’s Gunthorpe Street. She had been stabbed thirty-nine times. Suspicion fell on the Jews, convenient scapegoats, as religious leaders noted that the murder had occurred at the start of the Jewish month of Elul, a time of contrition and repentance in the Jewish calendar. Two more prostitutes were killed on dates significant to Jews over the next few months, including Annie Chapman, who was murdered on 8 September 1888, only a few hours after the ending of the Jewish New Year, the Jewish ‘Day of Judgment’.
Some Jewish leaders feared that the slayings might be the work of a deranged Jew enacting some arcane chronological biblical ritual to rid the East End of sin. The community braced itself for another murder on 15 September. For this day was not only the Jewish Sabbath but the Day of Atonement, the most important date in the Jewish calendar, when worshippers beg forgiveness for all their sins. In biblical times the high priest conducted a special Temple ceremony on the Day of Atonement to clean the shrine, slaying a bull and two goats as a special offering. Perhaps there would be a human slaying this time?
Meanwhile, locals poured over the latest edition of the East London Observer. The paper contained a bizarre letter on the murders sprinkled with biblical references to ‘Pharisees’, ‘the marriage feast of the Lord’ and ‘the Kingdom of Heaven’, suggesting setting up a national fund to find ‘honourable employment for some of the daughters of Eve [prostitutes], which would greatly lessen immorality’. It was signed ‘Josephus’. He was a first-century Jewish historian and scholar who, during the war against the Romans, hid in a cave near the fortress of Jotapata with forty others. With dwindling supplies, they realised few could escape, so they drew lots to determine the order of their demise. Whoever drew the first lot was to be killed by the drawer of the second, who in turn would be killed by the drawer of the third, and so on. Only the last one would survive. Josephus was lucky enough to draw one of the last lots. However, he and the penultimate participant chose not to complete their pact but to surrender to the Romans. Many suspected that Josephus had ‘fixed’ the lots, sending scores to their deaths, a view reinforced when he swiftly moved from the Jewish priesthood to the role of adviser to the Roman emperors Vespasian, Titus and Domitian.
No murder occurred on 15 September 1888. But perhaps the Ripper had been interrupted before he could commit a fresh atrocity? At the start of the Jewish holy day Aldgate police arrested a slightly built shabbily dressed Jewish man, Edward McKenna, of 15 Brick Lane, who had been seen acting suspiciously in the neighbourhood. He had come out of the Tower Subway and asked the attendant: ‘Have you caught any of the Whitechapel murderers yet?’ He then produced a foot-long knife with a curved blade and jeered, ‘This will do for them’ before running away. A search of McKenna’s pockets at Commercial Street police station yielded what the newspaper described as an ‘extraordinary accumulation of articles’. It included a heap of rags, two women’s purses and a small leather strap, but no evidence that he might have been responsible for the still unsolved murders.
At the end of the month came the strangest Jewish connection yet. On 30 September the Ripper killed two women, Liz Stride and Catharine Eddowes. Part of Eddowes’s white apron was torn during the attack and dropped, presumably by the Ripper, outside Wentworth Model Buildings on Goulston Street. A policeman found it in the early hours of the morning and looking up saw a strange piece of graffiti which read:
‘The Juwes are not the men That will be Blamed for nothing’
Fearful of a pogrom, the officer wiped the message – without photographing it – before it could be spotted by the early-morning market traders. Word spread that the graffiti had fingered the Jews, but the word was spelt ‘Juwes’ as in the Masonic legend of the Three Juwes.
The Three Juwes – Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum – were apprentices involved with the building of Solomon’s Temple. They murdered Hiram Abiff, the Temple architect, in the year 959 BC after he refused to reveal to them the deepest secrets of the Torah. When Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum were found they were in turn put to death, their throats cut from ear to ear, ‘their breasts torn open’, and their entrails thrown over the shoulder. All the five ‘canonical’ Ripper victims were mutilated in this manner.
EMANUEL SWEDENBORG’S BURIAL SITE, Swedenborg Gardens, St George’s
Swedenborg Gardens, a now desolate spot in an unlovely part of the East End, was once home to a Swedish church that contained Emanuel Swedenborg’s tomb. Swedenborg was a Swedish mystic and one of the eighteenth-century’s greatest theologians, who believed that the spirit of the dead rose from the body and assumed a different physical shape in another world.
When the church was demolished in 1908 his corpse was taken to Sweden so that it could be placed in a marble sarcophagus in Uppsala Cathedral. By that time the skull was missing. It had been removed by a Swedish sailor who hoped to sell it as a relic. The skull was later recovered and returned to London, but was then lost again while being exhibited with other skulls in a phrenological collection. In a bizarre mix-up the wrong skull was later returned to Swedenborg’s body while the genuine one went on sale in an antique shop and was auctioned at Sotheby’s in London in 1978 for £2,500.
HOLY TRINITY MINORIES, Minories, Aldgate
Edmund Crouchback, Earl of Lancaster and brother of Edward I, established the Abbey of the Grace of the Blessed Virgin Mary and St Francis to the north of St Katharine’s in 1293 for women belonging to the Franciscan Order. The institution soon had a string of names: the Covenant of the Order of St Clare, the Little Sisters, Sorores Minores, the House of Minoresses without Aldgate and Holy Trinity Minories, the latter name surviving in that of the modern-day street that connects Aldgate and Tower Hill.
From the privacy of their rooms the sisters had clear views of the executions on the Tower Hill gallows. They also enjoyed special privileges, for the abbey’s status as a Papal Peculiar rendered it beyond the powers of the Bishop of London. But Minories turned out to be even beyond the powers of the Bishop of Rome, for most of the inhabitants were wiped out during a plague in 1515.
By this time the nunnery, despite the sisters’ original vow of poverty, had become the richest religious house in England. Fifteen years later the Archbishop of Canterbury brought an end to the sisters’ pledge of chastity, declaring that ‘no person may make a vowe or promyse to lyve chaste and single; And that none is bounde to keep any suche vowes, but rather to breke them’. Henry VIII dissolved the nunnery soon after and the buildings were used as an armoury and workhouse until demolition in 1810.
→ Glastonbury Abbey, p. 255
JAMME MASJID MOSQUE, 59 Brick Lane, Spitalfields
The only building outside the Holy Land to have housed the world’s three major monotheistic faiths – Christianity, Judaism and Islam – was built in 1742 as a Huguenot chapel, the Neuve Eglise. It was one of a number of local places where John Wesley, founder of Methodism, hosted the earliest Methodist services, in 1755. Later it became a Methodist chapel and was also the headquarters of the Christian Evangelical Society for promoting Christianity among Jews, a body which opened a school in Bethnal Green and whose governors offered to pay the fees of any Jew that wished to be Christianised.
In 1892 the Brick Lane building reopened as the Spitalfields Great Synagogue. It was now run by the Jewish sect Machzikei Hadas V’Shomrei Shabbas (‘strengtheners