Outcast Rippers
The Whitechapel killings awoke fears of the predatory immigrant
Between August and November 1888, five women were murdered and mutilated in the warren of streets that made up Whitechapel in London’s East End, some with their throats cut, faces slashed and organs removed.
Even from a distance of 130 years, the bare facts of the Jack the Ripper killings make for unsettling reading. But for the residents of the Victorian capital, the case was far more visceral. In their midst was a criminal, or group of criminals, capable of committing the most gruesome of crimes. The question at the front, centre and back of Londoners’ minds was: who was responsible? And the answers they came up with give us an insight into popular fears at the time and for subsequent generations.
Given the sheer brutality of the crimes, it was perhaps inevitable that many Britons concluded that they must be the work of an evil that had entered Victorian society from the outside. This meant that a number of marginal figures from London’s ethnic minorities found themselves in the frame.
Both Michael Ostrog, a Russian, and Aaron Kosminski, a Polish Jew, were cited as suspects in a contemporary memorandum penned by the Metropolitan Police chief constable Melville Macnaghten. Ostrog had lived a precarious life as a thief and confidence trickster before winding up in the south of England in 1888, where his latest appearance in court was notable for him displaying signs of insanity.
Aaron Kosminski was also described as insane – and as a misogynist – and had been confined to an asylum. He strongly resembled a man seen near Mitre Square, the scene of one of the murders – that of Catherine Eddowes – on 30 September 1888.
Kosminski wasn’t the only Jew to arouse suspicions. Jacob Levy was also placed by witnesses at Mitre Square and was apparently seen with Eddowes on the night she died. When it was revealed that Levy was a Spitalfields butcher, skilled in the ritual slaughter of animals, his fate as a Ripper suspect was sealed.
Suspicions that one of Ostrog, Kosminski or Levy was the culprit may well have been justified. But there’s little doubt that the men were also victims of a wave of prejudice that had been precipitated by the influx of thousands of Eastern Europeans into London in the early 1880s, fleeing persecution in their native lands. Their arrival brought to the surface widespread fears of the predatory ‘outsider’, a stereotype that the police – and even government officials – found hard to resist.
When it came out that Levy was a butcher, skilled in the slaughter of animals, his fate as a suspect was sealed