Martyrs and Mystics. Ed Glinert

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СКАЧАТЬ the deserter Adam de Valaincourt, who was sentenced to eat meat with the dogs for a whole year, to fast four days each week, and to appear naked every Monday at the high altar, where the priest would publicly reprimand him.

      → Rosslyn Chapel, p. 274

       TEMPLE OF MITHRAS, 11 Queen Victoria Street

      A Roman temple 60 foot long and 26 foot wide built by the Walbrook stream and dedicated to the light god, Mithras, was discovered in 1954 when the ground was dug up for the construction of an office block. The worship of Mithras, which began in Persia in the first century BC and was open only to men, was carried out in caves, Mithraea, one of which was excavated in London near the site now occupied by Mansion House. The artefacts are housed in the Museum of London.

      The East End

      The East End has long been the most impoverished part of London, where residents have often turned to religion to ease their predicament. In medieval times the land bordering the East End and the City of London was marked with a line of monasteries, priories and nunneries – Holy Trinity Priory Aldgate, St Katharine’s, Minories and Eastminster – all of which vanished with the dissolution of the religious houses in the mid-sixteenth century.

      The Bubonic Plague that hit this part of London especially hard in 1665 was seen by locals as a religious punishment foretold by a comet which had passed over the capital the previous December to signify that God was unhappy with London’s behaviour. During the Plague clerics explained that it was the punishment outlined in the Old Testament Book of Chronicles in which the Lord smote ‘the people, children, wives and all goods [causing] great sickness by disease’. Plague victims often didn’t wait to die but threw themselves into pits like the one in St Botolph’s churchyard, Aldgate, as noted by Daniel Defoe in his Journal of the Plague Year.

      At the height of the epidemic a Stepney man, Solomon Eagle, one of a group of Quakers known for holding fasting matches with Anglican priests and stripping in churchyards to prove their true piety, strode through the area naked, a pan of burning charcoal on his head, proclaiming awful Bible-inspired warnings. Another man paced the streets of Whitechapel crying out like Jonah: ‘Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown!’, likening London to the immoral city threatened with destruction in the Book of Jonah. A man wearing nothing other than a pair of underpants wrapped around his head was seen throughout the East End wailing: ‘O! the Great and the Dreadful God!’ Outside a house in Mile End a crowd gathered as a woman pointed to the sky, claiming she could see a white angel brandishing a fiery sword, warning those who could not see the vision that God’s anger had been aroused and that ‘dreadful judgments were approaching’.

      For centuries the East End was the place where refugees fleeing religious persecution arrived in London, disembarking from boats that moored near the Tower. In the seventeenth century Huguenots (French Protestants) escaping a Catholic backlash settled in the East End’s Spitalfields and soon seamlessly assimilated into the local community. In the early nineteenth century Irish (mostly Catholics) turned up in large numbers and, after facing initial hostility, took root in parts of the East End near the Thames, where they eventually assumed control of who worked at the docks. Later that century came a large number of Jews fleeing the pogroms of eastern Europe. They met hostility not just from gentiles but from the Jewish establishment which had partly anglicised itself to win acceptance and was now embarrassed by the influx of chassidic Jews dressed in ritual garb and speaking Yiddish.

      Gradually during the twentieth century the Jews moved away from the East End, where now barely a synagogue remains. Since the 1970s the area has become increasingly colonised by immigrants from the Indian subcontinent, mostly Muslims from Bangladesh, who have changed the religious face of the area.

      Jacob the Ripper?

      When a number of East End prostitutes were murdered in 1888 by an unknown assailant, who later claimed to be ‘Jack the Ripper’, blame fell on the Jews who had begun to move into the area in large numbers that decade. No gentile could have perpetrated so awful a crime, many locals mused, ignoring the fact that only two Jews had been hanged for murder since the return of the Jews to England in the 1650s. Even the police blamed the Jews. Sir Robert Anderson, the assistant commissioner of police at the time of the murders, once claimed that they had been ‘certain that the murderer was a low-class foreign Jew. It is a remarkable fact that people of that class in the East End will not give up one of their number to Gentile Justice.’ Or as the Jewish commentator Chaim Bermant put it in the 1960s: ‘If Jack the Ripper was a Jew, then one can be fairly certain that his fellows would have kept quiet about it, for the simple reason that the whole community could have been held culpable for his deeds.’

      During the spate of murders and attacks Jewish community leaders noticed that the violence occurred on dates significant in the Hebrew calendar. For instance, the first attack on a prostitute that year, when Emma Smith was left for dead at the corner of Wentworth Street and Osborn Street, took place not only on Easter Monday, 3 April 1888, but on the last day of Passover, a Jewish festival rich in associations with slaughter. Jewish leaders hoped that this wasn’t a replay of the medieval blood libels in which Jews were accused of ritualistically killing Christians to reenact Christ’s Passion and of using the victims’ blood to make the unleavened bread eaten during Passover.

      The next attack came on 7 August. The body of Martha Tabram, another prostitute, was discovered on the landing of flats at George Yard Buildings on Aldgate’s Gunthorpe Street. She had been stabbed thirty-nine times. Suspicion fell on the Jews, convenient scapegoats, as religious leaders noted that the murder had occurred at the start of the Jewish month of Elul, a time of contrition and repentance in the Jewish calendar. Two more prostitutes were killed on dates significant to Jews over the next few months, including Annie Chapman, who was murdered on 8 September 1888, only a few hours after the ending of the Jewish New Year, the Jewish ‘Day of Judgment’.

      Some Jewish leaders feared that the slayings might be the work of a deranged Jew enacting some arcane chronological biblical ritual to rid the East End of sin. The community braced itself for another murder on 15 September. For this day was not only the Jewish Sabbath but the Day of Atonement, the most important date in the Jewish calendar, when worshippers beg forgiveness for all their sins. In biblical times the high priest conducted a special Temple ceremony on the Day of Atonement to clean the shrine, slaying a bull and two goats as a special offering. Perhaps there would be a human slaying this time?

      Meanwhile, locals poured over the latest edition of the East London Observer. The paper contained a bizarre letter on the murders sprinkled with biblical references to ‘Pharisees’, ‘the marriage feast of the Lord’ and ‘the Kingdom of Heaven’, suggesting setting up a national fund to find ‘honourable employment for some of the daughters of Eve [prostitutes], which would greatly lessen immorality’. It was signed ‘Josephus’. He was a first-century Jewish historian and scholar who, during the war against the Romans, hid in a cave near the fortress of Jotapata with forty others. With dwindling supplies, they realised few could escape, so they drew lots to determine the order of their demise. Whoever drew the first lot was to be killed by the drawer of the second, who in turn would be killed by the drawer of the third, and so on. Only the last one would survive. Josephus was lucky enough to draw one of the last lots. However, he and the penultimate participant chose not to complete their pact but to surrender to the Romans. Many suspected that Josephus had ‘fixed’ the lots, sending scores to their deaths, a view reinforced when he swiftly moved from the Jewish priesthood to the role of adviser to the Roman emperors Vespasian, Titus and Domitian.

      No murder occurred on 15 September 1888. But perhaps the Ripper had been interrupted before he could commit a fresh atrocity? At the start of the Jewish holy day Aldgate police arrested a slightly built shabbily dressed Jewish man, Edward McKenna, of 15 Brick Lane, who had been seen acting suspiciously in СКАЧАТЬ