Warren knew everything there was to know about the teasing etymology of ‘Juwes’, Assassins and Ruffians. He knew the half-dozen variations for the name of Hiram, including Chirum, Chiram and Churani, in Samuel, Kings and Chronicles respectively. He knew the name Jehovah, Ye’hovah or Iehuvah, and could read any one of them in Hebrew. There was no question under heaven that Warren didn’t understand the significance of the word ‘Juwes’, and to suggest otherwise presupposes intellectual challenge from a potato.
‘Respectable historians,’ opines Masonic scholar Bro Hamill, ‘have always taken the “Juwes” inscription to be an expression of anti-semitism prevalent in the East End of London in the 1880s and 1890s.’25
How disrespectful is that? Does Bro Hamill really mean that anyone who has the temerity to question Freemasonry in respect of Jack the bloody Ripper is not respectable? Exactly who are these ‘respectable historians’? And on whose terms does he define ‘respectable’? Is Edward, Prince of Wales exempt from criticism over his multiple adulteries because he was a Freemason? Does Freemasonry make cheating inside a marriage respectable? Was Prince Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence, respectable when risking life imprisonment for buggering about with that idiot Euston at a harem of Post Office boys? And what about the conniver who most ludicrously nominated him as Jack the Ripper’s assistant, Worshipful Master Bro Thomas Stowell CBE. Oh dear, oh dear, how disrespectful was that?
Reality can be offensive, but springing to your feet and waving your rectitude about won’t change it. All cults, all creeds, all religions have their murderers (King Solomon murdered his brother). I’m sorry if this history offends, but carving a woman from her genitals to her throat is not a ‘respectable activity’, and I regret to say that a Freemason is no more exempt from committing such a crime than is any other man.
Mr Sugden says, ‘Only by shameless selection of evidence can the Masonic theory be invested with apparent credibility’26 – whereas, to the contrary, I believe it is only by shameless manipulation that it can be dismissed. Mr Sugden and Bro Hamill are flogging a substantial untruth, and an Everest of evidence doesn’t accommodate such shameless distortion.
As far as Masonry is concerned (and for that matter the gang-thinking of Ripperology), you can have as many suspects as you like: masturbators, womb-collectors, medical students, doctors, slaughtermen, Irishmen, sailors, cowboys, and no end of Jews. But what you can’t have is the most egregious Israelites of them all. After the Clarence/Sickert inoculation, it isn’t permitted to consider the ‘Mystic Trio’, infamous among Freemasons for their shouldered entrails and throats cut across.
Nothing is more important than this Masonic taunting of Bro Warren at Goulston Street. The mocking on the wall is the sum of the whole of Jack the Ripper, a key to his psyche – and, by the insanity of his reaction, Bro Sir Charles Warren’s too.
Here’s what Warren (and some other hand) put together as his 6 November report. I bother here only with the first couple of sentences: ‘On the 30th September on hearing of the Berners [sic] Street murder after visiting Commercial Road station I arrived at Leman Street station shortly before 5 a.m. and ascertained from Superintendent Arnold all that was known relative to the two murders. The most pressing question at that moment was some writing on the wall at Goulston Street evidently written with the intention of inflaming the public mind against the Jews.’27
Now, I don’t know about anyone else, but if my intention was to inflame the public against the Jews, I think I could have chosen somewhere more provoking than a pitch-black doorway in the middle of the night. Perhaps under a street lamp? Plus, where did this phantom inflamer get his piece of apron, a technicality Warren declines to address anywhere in his preposterous essay. Like Arnold, he doesn’t mention it at all: ‘The most pressing question at that moment was some writing on the wall at Goulston Street’.
This ‘most pressing question’ is most curiously expunged from Mr Sugden’s version of Warren’s report. He reproduces it as ‘I … went down to Goulston Street … before going to the scene of the murder.’28
Why Mr Sugden should take it upon himself to censor Warren is of course his prerogative – he may write what he likes, as do I – so long as we both avoid ‘shameless selection’. I don’t know what his intentions are, but by fiddling about with this sentence, he defuses the urgency associated with the writing on the wall, which by Warren’s own admission was ‘the most pressing question’.
This ‘most pressing question’ becomes mind-boggling in context. Less than a mile away are two murdered women, and it’s likely that the man who killed them isn’t much further off. Is not he the most pressing question? What instruction did the Commissioner issue in respect of his apprehension? Where was the urgent call for his top detectives and ancillary support?
For a stupefied Freemason like Warren, a guardian of the ‘Mystic Tie’, the wall was indeed ‘the most pressing question’, which, with the subsequent assistance of Ripperology, he successfully managed to present as merely a bit of racist scribble.
But Warren knew rather different. Another Masonic historian and expert practitioner, an American scholar by the name of Albert Pike, wrote about Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum some twenty years before anyone had heard of Goulston Street. His book, published in 1872, is called Morals and Dogma, and is a classic of Masonic erudition. In respect of the homicidal trio Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum, he wrote: ‘That in the name of each murderer are the two names of the good and evil Deities of the Hebrews, for Yu-Bel is but Yehi-bal or Yeho-bal, and that the three final syllables of the names, a, o, um (Life-giving, Life-preserving, Life-destroying), are represented by the mystic character, Y.’29
The mystic ‘Y’ is explained in simple terms by a contemporary Masonic academic, Dr B. Fisher, in whose book (as in Morals and Dogma) the Three Assassins Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum are referred to in their original form, as Yubela, Yubelo and Yubelum, spelt with the mystic Hebrew ‘Y’.30 Albert Mackey’s Lexicon of Freemasonry (1855) underlines the convention: ‘In all these names the J is to be pronounced as in Y.’
Warren, of course, was hip to such occult minutiae, and so was Jack the Ripper. Three days after writing his funny little ‘Juwes’ message at Goulston Street, he posted a letter to Bro Warren, on the envelope of which he changed the ‘J’ in his trade-name to ‘Y’, creating ‘Yack Ripper’.
Thus we have Yubela, Yubelo, Yubelum and Yack. Postmarked 4 October 1888, this envelope is important because it reveals knowledge of the writing on the wall almost a week before the press got wind of it. The earliest significant mention of anything untoward at Goulston Street began to leak about 8 October – this, by way of example, from the Pall Mall Gazette:
A startling fact has just come to light. After killing Catherine Eddowes in Mitre Square, the murderer is now known to have walked to Goulston Street, where he threw away the piece of the deceased woman’s apron on which he had wiped his hands and knife. Within a few feet of this spot he had written upon the wall, ‘The Jews shall not be blamed for nothing.’ Most unfortunately one of the police officers gave orders for this writing to be immediately sponged out, probably with a view to stifling morbid curiosity it would have aroused.31
No mention of riot or the destruction of buildings, not even an eyebrow raised in the direction of