In 1887, London celebrated Queen Victoria’s 50th Jubilee. In 1888, the impoverished East End — home to as many as 100,000 Jews — exploded in “the Autumn of Terror,” personified by England’s first famous serial killer, Jack the Ripper.
The lengthy list of alleged Ripper suspects ranges from a member of the royal family to Polish-Jewish immigrant and barber Aaron Kosminski. Arthur Conan Doyle, the inventor of Sherlock Holmes, reportedly suspected a woman could have been responsible.
The most prominent Jewish suspect, Kosminski, stabbed a woman, probably his sister, and was admitted to a lunatic asylum in 1891, three years after the murder of the Ripper’s fifth victim. One problem is that police officials who fingered him as a “prime suspect” were prejudiced against Jews.
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