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Old January 24th, 2017 #14
Karl Radl
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Default Jewish Ritual Murder and Jack the Ripper

Jewish Ritual Murder and Jack the Ripper


The subject of Jewish Ritual Murder - or the Blood Libel as it is often pejoratively called by its critics – is one that is close to my heart. Since it was the study of it and my scepticism towards the hand-waving and weird claims of the ‘jews would never have done that’ camp was the original impetus for beginning my study of jews and Judaism.

I would thus be remiss if I didn’t mention the occasional references that have suggested that tales of Jewish Ritual Murder may have influenced or been the motive for Jack the Ripper’s killing spree. (1)

This was certainly believed to be a possibility at the time of original Ripper killings since no less than ‘The Times’ newspaper suggested that this was indeed a plausible motivation (and in a sense solution) that lay behind them. (2) However it also true to say that anti-Semites themselves have not historically put much credence in the claim that the Jack the Ripper murders were a revival of Jewish Ritual Murder in England. (3)

Possibly the best attempt to argue this case has been made by Robert House in ‘Ripperologist’ in 2005. In ‘Aaron Kosminski Reconsidered’ he writes as follows:

‘By the time Aaron was an adolescent, there was widespread anti-Semitism in Russia. Influential newspapers forgot their Jewish sympathies, and anti-Semitic literature appeared, containing both intellectual and obscene content. Anti-Semitism also began to gain a semblance of intellectual respectability as a result of the new ‘scientific’ anti-Semitism of western, mostly German, origin.

In 1878, when Aaron was 13 or 14 years old, the myth of the ‘Blood Libel,’ outlawed by Alexander I, was revived in Kutais in anti-Semitic newspapers like Novoye Vremya. Based in part on the ritual murder of the child Simon of Trent and others, this myth held that the Jews participated in the ritual murder of Christian children, using their blood to appease the wrath of God. Specifically, the blood libel myth held that that ‘Jews had kidnapped a Christian child, tied him to a cross, stabbed his head to simulate Jesus’ crown of thorns, killed him, drained his body of blood and mixed the blood into Passover matzohs.’ If a Christian child was found murdered near Easter or Passover, there was a good chance that local Jews would be blamed. Into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, at least two dozen ritual murder trials took place in Central and Eastern Europe.’ (4)

This is fine as far as it goes, but I note with pointed interest that the ‘blood libel’ – which is incidentally a pejorative propaganda term used to delegitimise free and open discussion of allegations of jewish ritual murder – that what he is citing here is the fully fledged ritual murder accusation as a point of comparison. (5)

House cites as his primary examples the ritual murders of Saint Simon of Trent and Saint Andreas of Rinn. He claims that in the case of Saint Simon of Trent; the jews sliced pieces of Simon’s flesh off and ate them in addition to mixing his blood with their Pesach matzo so they could consume it. (6)
However I cannot find any reference to anything of the kind in the literature of the subject. (7) The perpetrators eating the flesh of the victim in a case of jewish ritual murder is almost unheard of.

The charge of host desecration is similar and would have been viewed as such at the time of the trials at Rinn and Trent. Unfortunately for House of course, as with jewish ritual murder, the charge that it was and is a ‘libel’ is absurd as Horowitz has demonstrated. (8)

House’s argument that Kosminski ‘carried this the blood libel over’ from Eastern Europe and acted it out in London (9) is thus unfounded, because jewish ritual murder involves the torture of the victim in imitation of the suffering of Christ (the crown of thorns, whipping/flaying, the wounds in his hands and feet and the wound in his side) and the collection of blood to be eaten with matzo on Pesach.

None of the Ripper killings bear any likeliness whatsoever to this description, but House’s suggestion that Kosminski could have been working to kill Christian women of the ‘underclass’ could certainly be true.

After all non-jewish women seeking to have sexual intercourse with jews – and it is worth remembering that all Jack the Ripper’s victims were non-jewish prostitutes in a heavily jewish part of London – would be viewed pejoratively as traditional dangerous foes of the jewish community (i.e. as shiksas) and would thus Kosminski could have killed them for that reason, but that is something best discussed elsewhere.

It is sufficient to say here that the Jack the Ripper murders were without doubt not cases of jewish ritual murder, because the evidence does not support this claim.


References


(1) For example: https://antizionistleague.com/2014/1...murder-proven/
(2) Judith Flanders, 2011, ‘The Invention of Murder’, 1st Edition, Harper Collins: London, p. 442
(3) Arnold Leese, 1938, ‘My Irrelevant Defence’, 1st Edition, The IFL Printing Company: London, p. 55
(4) Robert House, 2005, ‘Aaron Kosminski Reconsidered’, Ripperologist, No. 58 (http://www.casebook.org/dissertations/rip-koshouse.html)
(5) Darren O’Brien, 2011, ‘The Pinnacle of Hatred: The Blood Libel and the Jews’, 1st Edition, The Hebrew University Magnes Press: Jerusalem, pp. 63-65
(6) House, Op. Cit.
(7) Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia, 1992, ‘Trent 1475: Stories of a Ritual Murder Trial’, 1st Edition, Yale University Press: New Haven, pp. 46-47; 62-68
(8) Cf. Elliot Horowitz, 2007, ‘Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence’, 1st Edition, Princeton University Press: Princeton
(9) House, Op. Cit.

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This was originally published at the following address: http://bit.ly/2jYcgD3
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