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Old January 1st, 2009 #5
alex revision
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In 1915 the Turkish government finally decided to clean up the thriving prostitution business. Osman Bedri Bey, the prefect of police rounded up 176 suspects of whom all but a handful were Jewish. Hungarian and Rumanian Jews predominated in the Turkish sex slave trade along with the Odessan Jews. Two the most famous Hungarian Jews were Julie and Anton Hirshfeld, whom Bristow labels "probably the most prosecuted couple in the annals of white slavery". The Romanian city of Galatz on the Danube river served as one of the principal launching points for the Constantinople traffic. There was even an Argentinian link through the infamous David Felken. The road from Constantinople led further East. In Alexandria in Egypt police statistics in 1903 showed that "between 70 and 80 per cent of the prostitutes in tolerated houses there were Jewish women from Galicia, Bukovina, and Romania". A certain number of Jewish prostitutes followed the British Raj into India following the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. The Jewish prostitutes also followed the American military into the Philippines following the Spanish-American War of 1898. According to an interesting statement of the celebrated Rabbi Stephen Wise in 1902:

"According to the statement of my informant, a large number of Jewish women in Manila are to be found in the ranks of prostitution ... at one time the number reached 200, but ... now the number is less than 100, thanks to the measures of the American Government. These women are mainly of Galician, Russian or Rumanian birth. It is almost too shaking to put to paper, but according to Mr. Rubenstein, the statement of a man that he is a Jew is followed invariably by the question 'Have you any nice women to sell ?' ..."

From London the infamous Joe Silver moved to South Africa and established a thriving prostitution business.

These facts and many others conclusively establish the existence of a thriving, international and interconnected Jewish sex slave trade. What was the Jewish response to this horrible business? PROSTITUTION AND PREJUDICE makes very clear that Jews of the day were at least as concerned about the use anti-Semites were making of the issue as they were about the sex slave trade itself. For instance, Der Israelit, the German orthodox newspaper wrote the following against the Jewish liberals who insisted on airing the problem:

"First they commit a folly ... second they commit a chillul-hashem against God. Third their communities confront them with the words, 'You've given our enemies a sword to smite us with'."

The Jewish fight against white slavery, such as it was, consisted mainly of organising societies for the protection of women and children, establishing international coordination and exchange of information, watching docks and ports for suspicious characters and holding international conferences. This activity took place mainly in England and Germany. One early such society was founded in 1896 and named the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women. (Interestingly, several members of the Jewish Board of Deputies who were later to become prominent in the fight against the Balfour Declaration, such as David Aleksander, were involved in this work.)

In Germany, relations between the Jewish and non-Jewish members of these anti-white slavery leagues were less than cordial. German Jews were taking the heat for the Ostjuden and their activities. Bertha Pappenheim, the famous German-Jewish feminist, complained about this popular attitude long and bitterly.

Edward Bristow admits that despite laudable efforts by more enlightened western Jews the sex slave problem gradually faded because of considerations extraneous to organized attempts to fight the evil. The slowing down of the great Jewish migrations out of Czarist Russia, the equalizing of sex ratios in frontier parts of the world, the growth ofupward mobility all played a far greater role in eventually reducing the sex slave trade than all official and coordinated efforts.

PROSTITUTION AND PREJUDICE: The Jewish Fight Against White Slavery 1870-1939, is a thoroughly researched and documented study of a problem of major importance. But as the very title of the volume indicates, it is written from an inherently flawed and self-serving perspective. Bristow argues that Jews were the "good guys," even as he abundantly proves that they were not. Throughout his study prevails the attitude that it was and still is illegitimate for anti-Semites to make use of the sex slavery issue. In Bristow's own words (referring to the political effect of Jewish anti-white slavery activism):

"Did the work do anything to deny the issue to the anti-Semites ? After the war the argument that trafficking in Christian women was inherent in Jewish genes was resorted to even more insistently than before. In the relatively innocent years before 1914 one can understand how Montefiore, Maretsky, Pappenheim, and the others could place hope in a reasoned response. Their 'rationalist fallacy' was a product of their times. As difficult as the situation was, they had no way of knowing what was to come."

PROSTITUTION AND PREJUDICE makes no attempt to examine possible causes for Jewish predominance in the prostitution racket beyond the misery and suffering of the Pale of Settlement. Thus, there is no Israel Shahak-style examination of the Talmudic passages which teach that all non-Jewesses are whores or that the Jew may do with the non-Jewess what he will.

Nor is there any discussion of the general Talmudic injunctions to cheat, steal from or lie to non-Jews. These principles, followed literally in the real world, may have had much more to do with why Eastern European Jews played such a large role in the worldwide sex slave trade than general social conditions.

Bristow ends his account on a sour note by noting the political capital the Nazis made of the issue. He says nothing about the massive sex slave trade in kidnapped Ukrainian girls being shipped to Israeli brothels which is flourishing right now. As he says in his concluding paragraph "defending the good name of the Jews" is a worthy endeavour, whatever the facts might be.