Martyrs and Mystics

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 the neighbourhood. He had come out of the Tower Subway and asked the attendant: ‘Have you caught any of the Whitechapel 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 in Romish practices, they pelted the altar with bread and butter, and orange peel, brought in barking dogs to disrupt services, seized the choir stalls, tore down the altar cross and spat on and kicked the clergy. They even urinated on the pews.

The mob would have thrown the Revd King into the docks had his friends not made a cordon across a bridge, enabling him to get to the Mission House safely. The church was forced to close and allowed to reopen only when King promised not to wear ceremonial vestments during Mass. Even when services began again there were often as many as fifty police officers stationed in the wings ready in case of trouble.

→ Riots at St Giles Cathedral, p. 262

SALVATION ARMY BIRTHPLACE, outside the Blind Beggar pub, 337 Whitechapel Road, Whitechapel

One evening in June 1865 William Booth, a tall, fierce-looking revivalist preacher sporting a long black beard down to his chest, heard two missionaries preaching at an open-air meeting outside the Blind Beggar pub. When they invited any Christian bystander to join them, Booth exclaimed: ‘There is heaven in East London for everyone who will stop to think and look to Christ as a personal saviour.’ He told them of the love of God in offering salvation through Jesus Christ in such clear terms that they invited him to take charge of a special mission tent they were holding nearby.

This was the beginning of what became the Salvation Army. Within a year Booth’s mission had more than sixty converts and he was returning home ‘night after night haggard with fatigue’, as his wife Catherine later explained, ‘his clothes torn and bloody, bandages swathing his head where a stone had struck’.