My work on the late Victorian origins of the London Metropolitan Police Special Branch (The Origins of the Vigilant State, 1987) obviously familiarised me with the ‘Whitechapel Murders’, but not to any great depth, as ‘Jack the Ripper’ was the responsibility of the City police force, and not of the Met. Last night BBC2 carried a programme (I think it was a repeat) ‘reopening’ the case, by using more modern forensic procedures, and fronted by Emilia Fox of Silent Witness fame. It was interesting, but hardly ground-breaking in its conclusion that the ‘Ripper’ was one Aaron Kosminsky, an East European immigrant who lived in the area of the murders at the time. He’s been the main suspect for a while.

What surprised me was that no mention was made – unless I missed it – of Kosminsky’s identity not only as a recent Polish immigrant, but as a Jewish one; a fact that was supposed to be relevant at the time. Not, as you might think,  because of his race directly, but because the police authorities of the day feared that knowledge that he was Jewish might unleash violent anti-semitic riots in that part of London: the poorest part of the city, and already the focus of racist prejudice, directed against the recent flood of immigrants fleeing there from anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia and Poland. Evidence of this – again not mentioned in the programme – was that when graffiti attributing the murders to ‘the Jews’ appeared on the walls of the East End, the City police commissioner ordered that they be erased. This may have protected Kosminsky; and misdirected the popular suspicion into other areas, which included a member of the Royal Family, a visiting American, and a famous artist. These proved to be far more attractive targets for the sensationalist ‘yellow press’ of the day.

I’m still puzzled, however, why the programme made no mention of this. Could it be that ‘anti-semitism’ is such a delicate subject now, and so thoroughly ‘weaponised’, especially by the current Israeli government, that even the mention of a suspected Jewish dimension to a notorious 135-year old crime would have stained the BBC with this appalling prejudice. Or me, now I’ve brought it up again.

[Sorry again for the long silence. More medical issues, But I’m working on my promised recollections of my young days on the far edges of the Public school world, which I’ll post when I’ve finished them.]