From Constable To Commissioner * Major Henry Smith

[Howard Brown]

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/ssd?id=mdp.39015030677150

[Scott Nelson]

Smith's recollections about interviewing the witness (Lawende?) make interesting reading. I believe he was privy to, if not the organizer, of the Seaside Home Identification proceeding.

[Paul]

Smith's recollections about interviewing the witness (Lawende?) make interesting reading. I believe he was privy to, if not the organizer, of the Seaside Home Identification proceeding.

If he organised or was otherwise privy to it, why would he then have apparently feigned ignorance of and otherwise had a go at Anderson for claiming the suspect was Jack the Ripper? He'd have known who Anderson was talking about and known that Anderson wasn't blaming the Jewish community as a whole. He need only have said he knew who Anderson was talking about and didn't agree with the evidence.

[Sam Flynn]

The opening of the Preface tells you all you need to know about Smith, really:

In July of last year I was talking in the Junior Carlton Club with one of the Metropolitan Police Magistrates, second to none in knowledge of his work. The talk was professional, prolonged, post-prandial, and much to our mutual edification. "Why don't you write your reminiscences?" he asked. "There is no man living with your experience."

An entertaining read, but beware of the puff and bluster.

[Cris Malone]

I read this in my younger days after first being introduced to part of it by Cullen's book. The description of his go at Jack in the night of the double murder was riveting to a young and impressionable mind. Oh, the blissful, imaginative ingnorance of youth.

Don't know if all I've learned since makes things much better though .

[Scott Nelson]

If he organised or was otherwise privy to it, why would he then have apparently feigned ignorance of and otherwise had a go at Anderson for claiming the suspect was Jack the Ripper? He'd have known who Anderson was talking about and known that Anderson wasn't blaming the Jewish community as a whole. He need only have said he knew who Anderson was talking about and didn't agree with the evidence.

Because I don't think he believed Anderson's suspect was the Ripper. But Smith was obliged to arrange an identification proceeding anyway, knowing the outcome would amount to nothing. Essentially Smith told his readers he didn't agree with Anderson's evidence.

[Scott Nelson]

Oh, and Smith's primary diatribe again Anderson was his perceived anti-Semitism. But Anderson didn't state anti-Seimtic views.

[Chris Phillips]

Oh, and Smith's primary diatribe again Anderson was his perceived anti-Semitism. But Anderson didn't state anti-Seimtic views.

I know people are often unfairly accused of various forms of prejudice because others read more into their statements than is really there, and I know Anderson wasn't prejudiced against Jews in general and had Jewish friends.

But his argument in "The Lighter Side" is that the killer had to be a "low-class Polish Jew" because the police had concluded he was being shielded by the people he lived with, and "it is a remarkable fact that people of that class ["low-class Polish Jews"] in the East End will not give up one of their number to Gentile justice". And the logic of that requires that only "low-class Polish Jews" in the East End behaved like that. He is characterising a whole group of people as willing to be accessories even to a series of murders like the Ripper's, without any hint of exceptions. He even explicitly says that his belief was based on "race, not religion".

[Gary Barnett]

I know people are often unfairly accused of various forms of prejudice because others read more into their statements than is really there, and I know Anderson wasn't prejudiced against Jews in general and had Jewish friends.

But his argument in "The Lighter Side" is that the killer had to be a "low-class Polish Jew" because the police had concluded he was being shielded by the people he lived with, and "it is a remarkable fact that people of that class ["low-class Polish Jews"] in the East End will not give up one of their number to Gentile justice". And the logic of that requires that only "low-class Polish Jews" in the East End behaved like that. He is characterising a whole group of people as willing to be accessories even to a series of murders like the Ripper's, without any hint of exceptions. He even explicitly says that his belief was based on "race, not religion".

Why ‘only’?

Do you imagine he believed that Irish catholics or ‘Lascars’ or Chinese would gladly grass on their fellows?

[Chris Phillips]

Why ‘only’?

Do you imagine he believed that Irish catholics or ‘Lascars’ or Chinese would gladly grass on their fellows?

Because that's what the logic of his argument requires - if he also believed Irish Catholics would not "give up one of their number", then he couldn't have worked out that the killer was a "low- class Polish Jew". By his logic, the killer might as well have been an Irish Catholic.

[Howard Brown]

It might be worth recalling what QC Montagu Williams wrote in one of his books ( Leaves of A Life or Later Leaves) about his experiences as a local magistrate.
He stated that the majority of cases that came before him in court were petty squabbles between one Jew and another. I think there's an article on the site that I posted
years ago which touches on his experiences. Undoubtedly, most of the Jewish claimants and Jewish plaintiffs were of the lower economic class ( 'low class Jews') considering his jurisdiction.

Scott isn't wrong (IMO) when he states Anderson wasn't anti-Semitic. Anderson was an elitist who considered 'low class Irish' or 'low class English' both unlikely to roll over on one of their own.
This is a fallacy since many cases are 'solved' by the police based almost entirely on one member of an ethnic group giving the police information about a fellow member of the same ethnic group.

When Anderson says his belief was based on "race, not religion"., I feel this really meant his belief was more on the class ( economic ) rather than their ethnic background of the group he was referring to. Besides, 'lower class Jew, Polish, or Eskimo ' aren't races but a definition of the economic status of people in the society in which they live.

[Steve Blomer]

The point you are missing Chris, is that Mesirah strictly forbad the handing over of Jewish people to gentile law.

Now while this was largely ignored by the established and to a degree anglisiced older, Jewish community; it was certainly a law that the newer arrivals from the East practiced, not surprisingly given the use of police in the east in those pogroms.

The question would he have made the same claim about another grouping is completely irrelevant, if that group did not have a similar law to Mesirah.


Steve

[Chris Phillips]

The point you are missing Chris, is that Mesirah strictly forbad the handing over of Jewish people to gentile law.

Now while this was largely ignored by the established and to a degree anglisiced older, Jewish community; it was certainly a law that the newer arrivals from the East practiced, not surprisingly given the use of police in the east in those pogroms.

The question would he have made the same claim about another grouping is completely irrelevant, if that group did not have a similar law to Mesirah.


Steve

That would be easier to argue if Anderson hadn't gone out of his way to make it explicitly clear he wasn't talking about a question of religion.

[Steve Blomer]

Well I would argue that he was talking about a group within a religion, the newer, on the whole poorer arrivals from the East.

That the established Jewish community had abandoned Mesirah, argues that his comment was while aimed at a sub section of the Jewish community, not the whole and that that the sub section practiced certain religious practices, that were not practice by the whole community.

They were I would argue considered a lower , unwanted class, by a vast number of the established Jewish community itself.


Steve

[Chris Phillips]

When Anderson says his belief was based on "race, not religion"., I feel this really meant his belief was more on the class ( economic ) rather than their ethnic background of the group he was referring to. Besides, 'lower class Jew, Polish, or Eskimo ' aren't races but a definition of the economic status of people in the society in which they live.

That part of Anderson's account wasn't in the earlier Blackwood's Magazine version of his memoirs, and no doubt it was added in the book version as a result of criticisms of what he had written about "low-class Jews" - particularly from Leopold Greenberg, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, writing under the pseudonym "Mentor". Specifically, Greenberg had complained about "the wholly erroneous and ridiculous "theory" that Jews would shield a raving murderer because he was a Jew, rather than yield him up to "Gentile justice,""
[see transcript at Casebook]

Anderson responded, first in an interview published in the Globe on 7 March 1910, in which he explained which Jews he had been talking about:
"what is true of Christians is equally true of Jews- that there are some people who have lapsed from all that is good and proper. We have “lapsed masses” among Christians. We cannot talk of “lapsed masses’ among Jews, but there are cliques of them in the East-end, and it is a notorious fact that there is a stratum of Jews who will not give up their people."
[Ultimate Sourcebook, p. 693]

In a letter to the Jewish Chronicle published on 11 March 1910 Anderson added:
"We have in London a stratum of the population uninfluenced by religious or even social restraints. And in this stratum Jews are to be found as well as Gentiles."
[see transcript at Casebook]

These comments rather sidestep the issue of why he had singled out "low-class Jews" rather than low-class Gentiles. But they seems quite inconsistent with the idea that he believed the "low-class Jews" would have shielded one of their number specifically for religious reasons.