Martyrs and Mystics. Ed Glinert

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СКАЧАТЬ murderers yet?’ He then produced a foot-long knife with a curved blade and jeered, ‘This will do for them’ before running away. A search of McKenna’s pockets at Commercial Street police station yielded what the newspaper described as an ‘extraordinary accumulation of articles’. It included a heap of rags, two women’s purses and a small leather strap, but no evidence that he might have been responsible for the still unsolved murders.

      At the end of the month came the strangest Jewish connection yet. On 30 September the Ripper killed two women, Liz Stride and Catharine Eddowes. Part of Eddowes’s white apron was torn during the attack and dropped, presumably by the Ripper, outside Wentworth Model Buildings on Goulston Street. A policeman found it in the early hours of the morning and looking up saw a strange piece of graffiti which read:

       ‘The Juwes are not the men That will be Blamed for nothing’

      Fearful of a pogrom, the officer wiped the message – without photographing it – before it could be spotted by the early-morning market traders. Word spread that the graffiti had fingered the Jews, but the word was spelt ‘Juwes’ as in the Masonic legend of the Three Juwes.

      The Three Juwes – Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum – were apprentices involved with the building of Solomon’s Temple. They murdered Hiram Abiff, the Temple architect, in the year 959 BC after he refused to reveal to them the deepest secrets of the Torah. When Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum were found they were in turn put to death, their throats cut from ear to ear, ‘their breasts torn open’, and their entrails thrown over the shoulder. All the five ‘canonical’ Ripper victims were mutilated in this manner.

       EMANUEL SWEDENBORG’S BURIAL SITE, Swedenborg Gardens, St George’s

      Swedenborg Gardens, a now desolate spot in an unlovely part of the East End, was once home to a Swedish church that contained Emanuel Swedenborg’s tomb. Swedenborg was a Swedish mystic and one of the eighteenth-century’s greatest theologians, who believed that the spirit of the dead rose from the body and assumed a different physical shape in another world.

      When the church was demolished in 1908 his corpse was taken to Sweden so that it could be placed in a marble sarcophagus in Uppsala Cathedral. By that time the skull was missing. It had been removed by a Swedish sailor who hoped to sell it as a relic. The skull was later recovered and returned to London, but was then lost again while being exhibited with other skulls in a phrenological collection. In a bizarre mix-up the wrong skull was later returned to Swedenborg’s body while the genuine one went on sale in an antique shop and was auctioned at Sotheby’s in London in 1978 for £2,500.

       HOLY TRINITY MINORIES, Minories, Aldgate

      Edmund Crouchback, Earl of Lancaster and brother of Edward I, established the Abbey of the Grace of the Blessed Virgin Mary and St Francis to the north of St Katharine’s in 1293 for women belonging to the Franciscan Order. The institution soon had a string of names: the Covenant of the Order of St Clare, the Little Sisters, Sorores Minores, the House of Minoresses without Aldgate and Holy Trinity Minories, the latter name surviving in that of the modern-day street that connects Aldgate and Tower Hill.

      From the privacy of their rooms the sisters had clear views of the executions on the Tower Hill gallows. They also enjoyed special privileges, for the abbey’s status as a Papal Peculiar rendered it beyond the powers of the Bishop of London. But Minories turned out to be even beyond the powers of the Bishop of Rome, for most of the inhabitants were wiped out during a plague in 1515.

      By this time the nunnery, despite the sisters’ original vow of poverty, had become the richest religious house in England. Fifteen years later the Archbishop of Canterbury brought an end to the sisters’ pledge of chastity, declaring that ‘no person may make a vowe or promyse to lyve chaste and single; And that none is bounde to keep any suche vowes, but rather to breke them’. Henry VIII dissolved the nunnery soon after and the buildings were used as an armoury and workhouse until demolition in 1810.

      → Glastonbury Abbey, p. 255

       JAMME MASJID MOSQUE, 59 Brick Lane, Spitalfields

      The only building outside the Holy Land to have housed the world’s three major monotheistic faiths – Christianity, Judaism and Islam – was built in 1742 as a Huguenot chapel, the Neuve Eglise. It was one of a number of local places where John Wesley, founder of Methodism, hosted the earliest Methodist services, in 1755. Later it became a Methodist chapel and was also the headquarters of the Christian Evangelical Society for promoting Christianity among Jews, a body which opened a school in Bethnal Green and whose governors offered to pay the fees of any Jew that wished to be Christianised.

      In 1892 the Brick Lane building reopened as the Spitalfields Great Synagogue. It was now run by the Jewish sect Machzikei Hadas V’Shomrei Shabbas (‘strengtheners of the law and guardians of the Sabbath’). So extreme were they in their worship of the Sabbath, followers even refused to carry handkerchiefs on the day of rest, tying them around their waists instead, and for vital tasks that needed doing on that day they would employ a flunkey known by the quasi-insulting Yiddish term ‘Shobbos Goy’, who could not be directly ordered but had to guess the nature of his or her tasks by suggestions and inferences.

      Ironically, the Machzikei found harassment not so much from gentiles but from non-religious Jews. In 1904 on the Day of Atonement, a day of fasting when a Jew must do no manual work, worshippers taking a break from the service were pelted with bacon sandwiches hurled by members of a Jewish anarchist group driving a food van up and down the street outside. The orthodox Jews in turn pelted the anarchists with stones and broken bottles. The synagogue closed in 1965 and in 1976 was converted into a mosque.

       PRITHI CURRY HOUSE, 126 Brick Lane, Spitalfields

      The Lord Maitreya, a Bodhisattva or enlightened being intent on saving souls, was expected to appear at this curry house – of all places – on 31 July 1985. Adverts had been printed in the papers for the previous few months explaining that as Christians await the return of Christ, Muslims the Imam Mahdi, Hindus a reincarnation of Krishna, and the Jews the Messiah, those knowledgeable in mysticism would recognise that all those names refer to the same being – the Lord Maitreya – who manifested himself 2,000 years ago in Palestine by overshadowing his disciple Jesus.

      Behind the event was the artist Benjamin Crème. When asked how the public would recognise the Maitreya, he responded: ‘When Lord Maitreya appears, it will be as different beings to different people. He will appear as a man to a man, as a woman to a woman. He will appear as a white to a white, as a black to a black, as an Indian to an Indian.’

      Crème invited a number of Fleet Street journalists to meet the Maitreya at what was then the Clifton curry house that July day. The journalists waiting for the Maitreya drank lager after lager to pass the time, but no Maitreya appeared. They left, disappointed and drunk. ‘Once again, I am afraid God did not show,’ read the Guardian.

      • No. 126 already had an interesting religious history. Here just over 200 years previously the silk weaver Samuel Best, a pauper who lived on bread, cheese and gin tinctured with rhubarb, had announced himself as a prophet, chosen to lead the children of Israel back to Jerusalem.

       ST GEORGE-IN-THE-EAST, Cannon Street Road, St George’s

      This Nicholas Hawksmoor church by Cable Street was the setting for the ‘No Popery’ riots of 1859 and 1860. Trouble broke out after parishioners discovered that the vicar, Bryan King, had co-founded a secret brotherhood for priests, the Society of the Holy Cross. So angry were they at King for indulging СКАЧАТЬ