DID THE RIPPER WRITE IN CHALK SAYING HE WAS A JEW?

In 1888, the most infamous murders of all time took place in London’s East End. Five prostitutes, destitute women who knew of no other way to survive, were slaughtered and mutilated by a supposedly unknown killer who bears the nickname Jack the Ripper.

The evidence points heavily to Jewish immigrant Aaron Kosminski as the killer.

Goulston Street Graffiti

The Ripper savaged Elizabeth Stride’s throat with his signature deep violent cut and then not long later that same night he killed Catherine Eddowes at Mitre Square. The Ripper was seen by three men with Catherine Eddowes just a few steps away from where she was found murdered minutes later. He cut off a piece of her apron and took organs away with him. Later the empty piece of apron was found in Goulston Street with a chalked message blaming the Jews above it.
 
Why did the Ripper cut off a piece of the apron?

It is believed it was to wipe the knife and his hands.

The Ripper may or may not have used the rag to clean the knife.  The cleaning is not important.

If he had to clean his knife then why not just swipe it across her clothing? Why didn't he just leave the knife there?  The streets were very risky and what if a policeman, perhaps in plain clothes, searched him?  What did he clean it on the other times? 

Why didn’t he take the whole apron? It really looks like he took a piece because he wanted to ensure that later it would have been matched up to the apron.

He took a piece of the apron as if he was not prepared to kill and had nothing to clean himself with.  But he had to have been prepared.  Why did he need a cloth now when he took organs away from Annie Chapman just by putting them in his own clothes?  Maybe he took the piece to put organs in or wipe his hands. It would not be very effective for carrying organs or wiping.  Whatever, neither of these things was the real reason or the only reason. He had planned to dump it at Goulston Street all along and not only that but in a spot where it would be found.  He needed to be sure the police could match it to the murder victim.

There was a standpipe where the killer could have washed his hands.  It was close to where the apron piece was found, very close.  But there is no record of the cloth being wet.  If he washed his hands it was not there.
 
The graffiti at Wentworth Buildings, Goulston Street was the work of the Ripper for it was not seen until the piece of Catherine Eddowes’ apron appeared there. He left the apron piece there to make sure people knew he wrote the message. The writing was tiny and put on a black doorjamb (page 90, 91, Jack the Ripper’s Black Magic Rituals). It was first discovered not long after the killing of Catherine Eddowes by PC Long who found the apron piece first and then the graffiti above it.  If it had been there for a while it would not have been readable and the Jews who lived in the building would have washed it off promptly.

Some suppose that the graffiti was not written by the Ripper but was there before.  There are no witnesses to this.  And the police wiping the message away would imply they thought it was written by the Ripper.  It indicates they had no evidence that it was there before his visit.
 
Some have suggested that since PC Long found the apron piece elsewhere and planted it below the graffiti or wrote it himself in order to make himself look amazing. That speculation is worthless.  It is based on the thought that when Long past the spot earlier after the Stride murder he should have seen the graffiti and the apron piece then?  But why would they matter then?  He didn't know yet of the Stride murder. 

Major Henry Smith said that half the apron was missing which means the apron piece could have been very big.  That was why it was noticeable.  It was meant to be noticeable and that was because of the message above it.  It needed attention.

The Goulston Street apron piece was said to be found folded. You would wonder why the policeman paid so much attention to the rag for it could not be the first time that bloody dirty rags were dumped.

The coincidence between the writing being found above the discarded apron piece would have to point to the Ripper being the writer.

Superintendent Arnold transcribed it as— “The Juews are not [deleted] the men that will not be blamed for nothing.”

That is fine but PC Long,  Sir Charles Warren and DC Halse told us what was written there. They saw it. But their accounts differ a little.
 
The text can be seen from these images from those who saw the graffiti and examined it.
 
PC Long wrote the message down as follows:

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Charles Warren accepted this version as correct and the layout is very important.

Warren saw the actual writing.  He made the difficult decision to have it erased and no doubt was sure to imprint what it looked like in his memory. He was aware that this imprint might be a clue and solve the mystery of the killer.

It reads: The Jewes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.

And spelled Jewes not Juwes.  PC Long - The Jews are the men that will not be blamed for nothing. Later on he claimed it was “The Juews, are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.” That does not matter - what matters is the misspelling by the graffiti writer and why he could not or would not spell it.

DC Halse wrote it down too but gave us the a different version of how the writing was laid out on the wall.

Notice how the handwriting in both cases doesn’t differ too much.

Halse however has it as

The Juwes are

not the men that will be blamed for

nothing

which is different from Long’s. Long has the not in a different place.  But as Long studied the writing more than Halse did we can conclude that Long gave us the right position for the not.

Long made a note in his notebook that it was Juwes not Jewes.  So Long contradicts himself.  The fact that Long thought Juwes was Jewes means not that he didn’t look at it every well but only that he made a mistake anybody could have made.

DC Halse seems to have tried to preserve the layout for us because he stated that the writing was in three lines. And besides why else would he have started writing near the middle of the page?

Perhaps significantly we see the cross. The writing is laid out like a cross. This was an extraordinary thing for the Ripper to do when he was writing on bricks.  Why does the killer put the lines in that way? It is like he writes poetry.
 
They have not the capitalisations as they were. The version as follows is what should be accepted.
 
The Juwes are The men that Will not be Blamed for nothing

What does it mean?  A writer with bad grammar would mean that the Jews will not be blamed for anything.  Go with the popular usage.
 
Notice also the strange capitalisations. The Juwes may be a spelling error. Notice the poor grammar. This was the way the graffitist would write normally.

It is interesting that the bad grammar reminds us of how Ripper suspect Aaron Kosminski spoke in 1889, "I goes by the name of Abrahams sometimes, because Kosmunski is hard to spell."  But most men in London at the time would have used words poorly.  It shows as well that Aaron had enough English to talk to prostitutes and maybe he could have been the Ripper and that he was not a complete basket case.  He also said with regard to an unmuzzled dog he had, "I cannot pay; the dog belongs to Jacobs; it is not mine." 

The graffiti commands the reader not to blame and is defiant as if the killer is supremely confident.  Serial killers are famous for commanding and being arrogant.  The message rings authentic.  It does not really have any purpose apart from the fact that Stride died in a Jewish context.  The yard where she was killed was the property of Jewish Socialists and there were complains of men with poor character frequenting it.  Lipski an insult against Jews was uttered at the scene of the crime and that it was Jews who saw the Ripper with Eddowes and acted like they had seen one of their own.  It has a context therefore it is really the Ripper's work. 

It is possible the Ripper feared that the Stride murder would not be linked to him as he only got cutting her throat and needed to assert in some way that he did it.  He was a Jew and was not innocent of the crime so he was not to blame for nothing.  The apron piece and the message were about linking the two murders together.

Some wonder that as John Pizer a Jew was blamed at that time if the message was trying to implicate him.  Was it written by somebody who thought Pizer was to blame or could get blamed?  If the answer is yes then it would have to be the latter.  It would be too much to believe that a message blamihalng John Pizer that was not written by the Ripper should appear above an apron piece that the Ripper had just handled!
 
It is not true that the message means that the Jews will not stand for being blamed. The two negatives is a feature of popular speech. It means that the Jews will be blamed for something and should be. What the Ripper could have meant by Jewish men being to blame is that their religion in the scriptures commands that prostitutes be cruelly slain and that they are to blame for his actions for he is a Jew. He was not suggesting that a group of Jewish men were going around killing prostitutes. He was not suggesting that the Jews were as much to blame as he when they were protecting him from the police. Why? What about the Jewish women? And there is no reason for the Ripper to think that Jews were protecting him. If they suspected him they could stop him without resorting to Gentile justice.
 
It was possible that he wanted to put the blame on the Jews who lived in Wentworth Buildings because it would send the police off on a wild goose chase so that he wouldn’t be suspected. This is the answer to those who claim that a Jew wouldn’t have written such a message so the Ripper could not have been a Jew.
 
The writing was very small – it had to be squeezed onto a doorjamb. A vandal would have written somewhere better and more prominent and written in bigger and more conspicuous letters. In case there would be any doubt, the cloth was placed below it then to make sure it would be seen and linked with the Ripper. The graffiti was too small to be even called graffiti.  It was not meant to be easily seen or to rouse the community against the Jews.  Jack wrote it.
 
The Ripper did not write the message while fleeing back to his lair. The Ripper may have gone back to his lair and started thinking about how he had been seen at Mitre Square by three men at least and how the police could appear at his front door any minute. He decided to fabricate evidence that he had fled in another direction. So he decided to return to the streets with the apron piece and also write the message.  The Ripper must have gone to his lair after killing Eddowes returned to the streets to leave this message. The one hour and nineteen minutes delay between the murder and the finding of the message shows this. Eddowes was dead by 1.45 am and when PC Long passed the wall where the message later appeared with the apron piece below it at 2.20 am he saw nothing. When he returned about 2.55, to his shock he discovered the items then. The view that he had been careless when he went past at 2.20 and failed to see them is unnecessary. If we begin questioning testimony for no reason we can end up anywhere. Overcrowding was Whitechapel’s other name. The houses and tenements were so packed with people that people were out all night. Had Long been wrong or lying somebody would have been able to say so. The Ripper as well had to be mindful of the fact that a lot of people were out on the streets all night.
 
Did the killer have a key to some premises in Goulston Street to clean himself up so that he could leave the rag to misdirect police away from his home direction? Without the bloodstains the police would have paid no attention to him. Our suspect may have had a butcher’s shop to wash at in Goulston Street. He was once dragged up before the law for stealing meat from his workplace 58 Goulston Street. The killer wouldn’t dare carry the rag too far. It was dirty and smelly. He knew the police would be searching men on the street. If the knives were taken to a butcher’s shop nothing would be thought of them. Something would be thought if they happened to be found in a doss house where privacy was difficult or at home.
 
The killer looked dressed – he didn’t look like a worker when he was seen with Eddowes.  He didn't look like a man on the job who might be carrying chalk. So it is possible that he went back home or to his butcher’s shop to get chalk to write the message at Goulston Street.
 
It took a short time to write the message.  What if the Ripper had been seen in the doorway by residents? Why choose this place and not somewhere safer along the street? Why not some place where he could write the message bigger? Was the Ripper confident that if he had been identified by Jews living in the building that they would not testify against him? Yes - the Jews didn’t believe in giving one of their own over to Gentile justice.
 
Would a Jew spell Jew wrong? No. In the police transcript Juwes is written like it was Juives with no dot above the i. Did the police miss the dot? Juives is French for Jews. It may have been a mistake made by the killer in the dark. He meant to write an e but it appeared like a u but then we would have Jewes. We must remember that if it is a real spelling error, that to believe somebody living in the East End and reading the papers could nevertheless spell Jew wrong is no more difficult to believe than that a Jew could spell Jew wrong. He spelt the word nothing right so it is hardly likely that he could misspell Jews.
 
If it was Juives then the killer wrote the message. Nobody else would change the spelling of Jews. A Dutch Jew like our suspect would be more likely than a Polish Jew to know of Juives. Why did the killer write Juives then? To give the misleading impression that he was a Jew who also spoke French. Our suspect didn’t speak French. The real killer was unlikely to hint that he spoke French if he did speak French. That would narrow things down too much for the police. In any case, the killer planned a lot of things carefully in advance.
 
Only a Jew would be interested in scrawling down the French spelling of Jews.
 
A possibility is, the killer was a Jew. He wanted to boast of it. But he deliberately spelt it incorrectly to make it seem that he wasn’t a Jew reasoning that detectives would think a Jew wouldn’t misspell Jews. The killer had been seen that night by five potential witnesses. He wasn’t likely to have thought he couldn’t or shouldn’t even bother trying to hide the fact that he was a Jew. So he decided then to put out a little misdirection about what kind of Jew he was. The killer then probably did write Juives.

Halse claimed that the graffitt was not there when he checked the buildings that morning meaning it appeared about the time the apron piece was dumped there.

He made very sure of that.
 
Concerning the writing he was insistent that, “It looked fresh, and if it had been done long before it would have been rubbed out by the people passing. I did not notice whether there was any powdered chalk on the ground, though I did look about to see if a knife could be found. There were three lines of writing in a good schoolboy’s round hand. The size of the capital letters would be about 3/4 in, and the other letters were in proportion. The writing was on the black bricks, which formed a kind of dado, the bricks above being white”.
 
So it must have looked so fresh that they actually looked for chalk dust. Chalk dust can blow away easily which shows that when they looked for it they were sure it was more than fresh. When one looks at new chalked writing very closely one can see a lot of dust composing the writing that is just about adhering to the surface. In a very short time these come loose especially when there is a breeze.
 
If you believe the allegation of some that the writing was seen to be slightly erased then the following is what you must ask.

Did the Ripper brush against it by going into the buildings?

The Ripper put the apron piece in that doorway to lay the blame on the Jews in the building for his crime for he knew he had been recognised as a Jew at the scene of the Eddowes crime and he wanted to create a false lead for the police. The Ripper took a change of heart – an attack of guilt maybe for trying to get one of his own people suspected - and most probably tried to erase it but was disturbed and made off. When the writing was fuzzy but legible despite being so small it shows that the Ripper half-heartedly tried to erase it.

The writing was not there long for even a few days would have meant people brushing against it until it was all gone.   And the building was a habitation of Jews who would soon have washed it off. The Ripper wrote it and changed his mind and wished to erase it. If so then that tells us that the killer was indeed a Jew.
 
If the Ripper didn’t write the message, then someone who saw him plant the apron piece there did.   This is very unlikely and far-fetched.  In those times, nobody expected the police to be that good.

The argument that the piece of the apron was not mentioned as missing by those who found the body seems significant but may not be.  Professionalism was not 100% in those days. The notion that some hoaxer cut it off and planted it at Goulston Street is too unlikely. It was DC Daniel Halse who commented on it missing and that was at the mortuary.  Some think Eddowes was not even wearing her apron but had it in her pocket.  If they are right then the killer did not take the apron out to cut a piece off it and dump it at Goulston Street.  That would be too much work in dark conditions with the danger of capture.  Somebody did.

The killer of Annie Chapman placed a piece of muslin, a small toothed comb and a paper case containing a pocket comb placed in some kind of arrangement (page 161, Portrait of a Killer). He took time to do this. The arrangement was placed at Chapman’s feet (page 21, The Crimes of Jack the Ripper) and shows shows a sick sense of mystery-mongering humour. He might indeed have written some of the Ripper letters. It shows that his mind was so odd during his mania that he suggestion that he couldn’t have written the Goulston Street message is flawed.

Sir Henry Smith writes

He makes a mistake with the wording.  It is not Commercial Road but Commercial Street.

On Street, Whitechapel, is a broad thoroughfare running parallel with the Commercial Road, just one-third of a mile from the square, and in that street in the door one of the model workmen’s dwellings erected by Peabody, he [Halse] saw a light, and halting, found a constable of the Metropolitan Force looking at the missing piece of apron.  It was folded up, and immediately above, written in chalk were the words, “The Jews are the men that won’t be blamed for nothing.”

He expressed extreme regret over this text being erased.  The apron piece being folded is an interesting detail.

Sir Henry met a man who had a ticket-of-leave and some connection to a house in Hoxton a few days later who promised information about the murders but never delivered it.  "The man confronting me could not have been more than five feet two or three inches in height. He was stoutly built, black-bearded and of an ugly and forbidding countenance."  The man sounds a lot like John Pizer who was reportedly seen with Nichols a couple of hours before her murder.  Pizer was 5 foot 4.  Was this man seen with Nichols rather than Pizer?  What did he know? 

FINALLY

It is hard to avoid the feeling that there is something ostentatious about the mispelling of Jews.  A real Jew who wanted to blame other Jews would do that to make it look like it was an illiterate Gentile.  Or if he felt - correctly - that the Jewish community would now be under the spotlight he wanted to misdirect them to the WRONG section of that community.

There is no evidence at all that the graffiti was there before the apron piece was put there by the Ripper.  We would have been told if there were any evidence.  In those tense times, with the Jewish Ripper accusation floating around, the graffiti would have been washed off long before. It was fresh.  It was in a Jewish building.  It was really the killer's work. He had a penchant for showing off as you can learn from the other crime scenes.  Other evidence showed the message was right, the Jewish men protected the killer. Read Robert Anderson's findings.

The rag was filthy with blood and body waste.  Did the Ripper clean his knife with it in Goulston Street?  Certainly not.  He cleaned the knife immediately after the murder.  You don’t put a dirty knife away inside your clothes to clean it later with a rag. Moreover, if he didn’t want to contaminate his person with the organs, he wrapped them up in the apron cut-off. He had taken the apron piece both because he wanted to put organs in it and also because he planned to leave a message and he wanted the police to know he wrote the message by dumping the apron piece below it. So he must have gone back to his lair to take the organs out and then he took the apron piece out with him to go to Goulston Street. This indicates that the witnesses who saw him with Eddowes and who saw a reasonably well-dressed man did in fact see the Ripper.  

If the Ripper put the apron piece there then he wrote the message to alert the police to it.  If the Ripper was writing the message and accidentally dropped the apron piece then he was not far from his home or lair.  The message could be read in the light of the fact that the Jews would not hand a Jew over to Gentile justice.  So its meaning in that light would be, "The Jews are the men to be blamed for protecting me".