Warren’s speculations remind me of nothing so much as Ebenezer Scrooge when presented with the reality of Marley’s Ghost. ‘You may be a bit of undigested beef,’ he hazards, ‘a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato.’ Like Scrooge, Warren dared not acknowledge what was staring him in the face.
Attempts to explain away the writing on the wall have become the stimulus for some amusing invention. Anyone who thinks Warren’s ‘riot’ was a trifle fanciful should stand by for the contribution of Ripperologist Mr Martin Fido:
I postulate (quite speculatively) that a Gentile customer bought something that proved NBG, and the Jewish vendor refused to take it back. (The Wentworth Street old and cheap shoe market was on the street just outside the model dwellings, which were almost entirely occupied by Jews.) On taking back (say) a pair of unwearably uncomfortable shoes, the buyer is met with some bland refusal to accept responsibility (‘Well, they fitted you this morning, my friend!’), and chalks up his angry anti-Semitic comment ‘The Jews won’t take responsibility for anything’ on a nearby wall.18
And having made himself quite clear, he then throws his portion of Catherine Eddowes’ bloody apron under it.
Citing imaginary shoes in preference to an established piece of apron isn’t useful. Neither is it useful to attempt to change the quote. Such fantasy in preference to reality is also popular in Masonic quarters, whose explanations can often be juxtaposed with Ripperology without drawing breath.
Where the two become one and the same, we’re presented with what I call ‘Freemasology’. For a classic example of this, enter Bro Dennis Stocks, who quotes Mr Martin Fido – or is it the other way around? ‘It is highly likely,’ surmises Bro Stocks, ‘that the writing was simply and hastily scrawled by a disgruntled customer who had less than satisfactory service from one of the numerous Jewish craftsmen in the area and wrote his frustrations on the wall that the Jews won’t take responsibility for anything, especially, presumably bad workmanship.’19
It would require earth in place of a brain to buy into this. By proffering it, both Mr Fido and Bro Stocks are reducing the mental capacity of the City detectives to that of apes. Is that what they’d have us believe? That seasoned coppers living and working in East London didn’t know the difference between evidence in a murder case and a bit of scribble about aching feet?
The City Police boundary went down the middle of Whitechapel, at what is now called Petticoat Lane. Was local knowledge so vastly different on opposite pavements – tight shoes at one side of the thoroughfare, and a murderer’s calling card at the other? Smith isn’t going to send for a camera, and Warren isn’t going to get into a thirty-five-minute tizz, over a pair of fucking shoes.
I’m afraid there’s a bloody great hole in the lifeboat, and I conclude that Mr Fido is either pulling our leg, or is bewitched by some arcane consideration he declines to share.
Warren’s lunacy caused outrage that threatened to enmesh the entire Metropolitan Police. To try to diminish what he did is in fact to demean oneself. It isn’t the City Police who are the monkeys. Plus, as is clear to anyone who bothers to know anything about it (excepting Mr Fido and Bro Stocks), the Ripper didn’t write ‘Jews’. He wrote ‘Juwes’.
‘It’s a mystery,’ writes Ripperologist Mr Paul Begg, ‘why anyone ever thought that “Juwes” was a Masonic word.’20
If Mr Begg was here – and he’d sincerely be welcome – I’d like to ask him what his credentials are for broadcasting so flamboyant a certainty. ‘Juwes,’ he writes, ‘is supposed to be the collective name for Jubela, Jubelo, and Jubelum … they featured in British Masonic rituals until 1814, but they were dropped during the major revision of the ritual between 1814 and 1816.’
N(o) t(hey) w(ere) n(ot), and Mr Begg is misinformed, reiterating almost word for word the misinformation put about by Bro McLeod. To accept it is to buy into a deception, fatal to any hope of understanding the writing on the wall. ‘By 1888,’ continues Mr Begg, again resonant of McLeod, ‘it is doubtful if many British Masons would have even known their names.’
This pushes beyond the word ‘fib’.
The names Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum can in fact be found in any late-nineteenth-century Masonic encyclopedia. We need reach no further than for a volume authored by Warren’s pal and fellow founder of the Quatuor Coronati, Bro Reverend A.F.A. Woodford. In 1878 Woodford edited Kenning’s Cyclopaedia of Freemasonry, and here’s what one of the epoch’s foremost Masonic scholars has to say about the Three Jewish Assassins:
JUBELA, JUBELO, JUBELUM: Words familiar to Masonic students, but about which little can now be said distinctly … in our opinion they are a play on words. (p.368)21
Thus, despite protestations of extinction in 1814, they were in reality ‘words familiar to Masonic students’ in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
‘They are a play on words,’ writes Woodford, and they most graphically became one at Goulston Street. ‘Juwes’ is nothing more complex than an infantile sobriquet for Ju(bela), Ju(belo) and Ju(belum) – or if you want to make an ‘in-house’ Masonic joke of it, ‘Juwes’.
But Mr Begg has no sympathy for such exotic sources as Woodford, and argues it away like Bro Warren. ‘Juwes,’ he insists, ‘is not and has never been a Masonic word, nor has “Juwes” or any word approximating it ever appeared in British, Continental or American Masonic rituals.’22 I(t) i(s) a M(ystery), etc., etc.
Mr Philip Sugden agrees with Mr Begg’s ‘mystery’ angle, citing him as ‘one of the most dependable students of the case’. I have to disagree. You can’t have it both ways, demonstrate confusion and claim authority.
Of course ‘Juwes’ isn’t a Masonic word. It isn’t a word at all. But it is a play on words, like ‘Krazy Kat’. ‘Sponk’ isn’t a word either, but was anyone in the Metropolitan Police innocent of what it meant? With reference to HRH Queen Victoria, a correspondent signing himself ‘Jack the Ripper’ wrote ‘I shot sponk up her arse.’ Does anyone imagine he didn’t know how to spell ‘spunk’? The word is used like a toy, intentionally deformed to increase its potency, heightening an already adequate and shocking insult.
‘Juwes’ comes from the same brain; and incidentally, it wasn’t written for the average sightseer who might happen to be taking a constitutional around Whitechapel in the dead of night. It was written with a specific man in mind, a Masonic historian, and the very man who got out of bed for it. His nickname was ‘Jerusalem Warren’, and in my view he is part of the same funny pun.
Let us just remind ourselves of Warren’s ineptitude in the matter of weird words and arcane hieroglyphics in respect of Bro McLeod’s dismissal of his expertise. The following is part of a letter he wrote to the PEF, dated 18 June 1875:
I would call attention to the manner in which many modern Arabic words may differ from Hebrew or Aramaic, just as do modern Spanish words from the Latin. Thus we have in Latin and Spanish respectively:– Porcus, puerco; Bono, bueno; Bos, Beuy; Capillus, Capillulus, Cabelluelo, Cornu, cuerno; Ternpus, tiempo: And we have in Hebrew and Arabic:– Socho, Shuweikeh; Saphir, Sawafu, etc. Following on this track we obtain from Luweireh, Loreh; Dawaimeh, Dumeh; Suweimeh, Sumeh; Kawassimeh, Kassimeh; Hawara, Hara; etc. No doubt there are many known differences in European languages which may be found also to apply to Hebrew and Arabic. I have to suggest that a few simple rules on this subject might be arrived at which would aid the explorer in rapidly making a tentative examination of any Arabic word in order to test its likeness to Hebrew or Canaanitish.23
I suggest that ‘a few simple rules’ on Jack the Ripper might also be arrived at. Assistant Commissioner