Antisemitism and Brothel Prostitution

"Nu, what can a poor Jew do in times like this?"
Jewish procurer in Iama

Something that "intensely alarmed" the Jewish community in Russia and Europe was the way Jewish brothelkeepers and procurers kept turning up in accounts of brothel prostitution.^[60] This brings us to another aspect of Russia's concern over "white slavery"—how a focus on forced prostitution reinforced the deep strains of antisemitism in Russian society. In fact, the London physician who first coined the term "white slavery" to refer to prostitution in 1839 did so with explicit reference to Jewish involvement in this "infernal traffic."^[61]

Jews did not dominate the trade of prostitution in Europe, but they were visible enough in procuring and brothelkeeping—particularly within the Pale of Settlement—to reinforce negative stereotypes. To antisemites in Russia, such activities only confirmed their impression of Jews as clever exploiters of the trusting Russian people. To them, it was not surprising that a "dreadful kike" (strashnyi zhid ) ran a brothel in Sevastopol' or a Moscow gang known as the "Maccabees" tricked inno-

[60] Baron Aleksandr Gintsburg used these words to describe how Jews felt about Jewish participation in the "trade in women." See Gintsburg, "O mezhdunarodnoi evreiskoi konferentsii v Londone po voprosu o bor'be s torgovlei zhenshchin," Trudy s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami, vol. 2, p. 424.

[61] Michael Ryan, Philosophy of Marriage (London, 1839), p. 14, quoted in Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice, p. 35.

cent women into prostitution by running phony advertisements for domestic servants and nannies.^[62] In Kuprin's Iama, surely the best-known novel about Russian brothels, the "flesh traders" also had Jewish surnames. One, an observant Jew known by the pseudonym "Horizon" (Gorizont ), faithfully supported his old mother in Odessa and observed the Sabbath, but had no compunctions over marrying fifteen girls to sell them into brothels.^[63]

The villains in stories about the trade in women that were reported in Russian newspapers and journals often turned out to be Jews as well.^[64] A Moscow paper recounted in 1909 how Jews ran an organization in Warsaw known by the name of Ludwig (Liudvig) that ostensibly hired girls to work at food counters, but in reality sent them to "private rooms" to entertain guests. One young woman exposed the operation when her "guest" helped her to escape.^[65] Another Jewish "trader" named Sherman was caught transporting three young women in a train station in Podol'sk province. Although Sherman had promised them good jobs in Odessa, it turned out that they were en route to brothels in a more remote seaport.^[66]

Russian officialdom did its share in perpetuating the association between Jews and the business of prostitution. As early as the 1840s, when the Medical Department of the MVD solicited opinions from provincial governors on prostitution in the areas under their jurisdiction, Jews were identified as the main purveyors of this trade in western Russia.^[67] At the 1899 London Congress on the White Slave Traffic, State Secretary and former Minister of Education Andrei Saburov told his distinguished international audience about Jewish men who sold their wives in Turkey, only to return to Russia with a passport stamped "Wife remaining abroad" or "Divorced" to find new victims.^[68] When another tsarist official reviewed the history of regulation before the 1910 Congress for the Struggle against the Trade in Women, he stated that Jews dominated as "owners and agents" (predprinimateli i komissionery ) in the

[62] M. G——, Vzgliad professora Tarnovskago, p. 42; Okorokov, Vozvrashchenie k chestnomu trudu, pp. 14–17.

[63] Kuprin, Iama, pp. 104–21.

[64] The antisemitic press is described in Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice, p. 45.

[65] Moskovskii listok, no. 145 (June 26, 1909): 7–8.

[66] Novosti dnia, no. 1643 (February 1888), in Belyia rabyni, pp. 8–9. See also S.-Peterburgskiia vedomosti, no. 341 (December 13, 1902), for report about Jews involved in sending women to international brothels.

[67] Borovitinov, "Publichnye doma," p. 343.

[68] Congress on the White Slave Traffic, p. 26.

"trade of the female body."^[69] The governor of Kherson province despaired of his inability to control clandestine vice in urban hotels because the proprietors were "predominantly Jews." Their "inherent dodginess and skill" (v silu prisushchei im izvorotlivosti i snorovki ) enabled them "to sidestep the law."^[70]

Matters in the fourth precinct of Odessa's district court seemed to bear out such inflammatory accusations. A 1902 report to the minister of justice from Odessa's public procurator detailed half a dozen recent investigations, all of which involved complaints from Jews about other Jews who had tricked their female relatives into leaving Russia for brothels in Argentina, Egypt, Siam (Thailand), China, India, and the Philippines. The court had been frustrated in its attempts to prosecute, partly because the laws on the international trade in women were so difficult to enforce, but also because witnesses supplied conflicting stories. Most significantly, when the "victims" were contacted they often reported that they had left home willingly. In one case, a mother did not identify her daughter Shendl as missing until the money that had been sent home to Odessa for four years had stopped coming.^[71]

In 1909, when deputies of the State Duma considered a bill to restrict the trade in women, they debated the role of Jews in brothel prostitution. For one Berezovskii, a representative from Volynskaia province, the proposed law provided a welcome opportunity to re-examine the "Jewish question" and "finally cure this horrible ulcer which is eating away at Russia and, according to the prophecy of Dostoevsky, reducing her to ruin." Berezovskii asserted that the "overwhelming majority" of individuals involved in the trade of prostitution belonged to the "Judaic tribe" (k iudeiskomu plemenni ). When a fellow deputy shouted out "That's a lie!" Berezovskii (to "applause from the Right") retorted that "no kind of open or secret Jew-lovers" (iudofily ) could prove otherwise.^[72]

In Prostitution and Prejudice, Edward Bristow described famous Jewish courtesans like Sendele Blueffstein of St. Petersburg, who earned money in the second half of the nineteenth century both as a broth-

[69] Borovitinov, "Publichnye doma," p. 343.

[70] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 1730, letter to MVD of December 19, 1911.

[71] TsGIA, Ministerstvo iustitsii, f. 1405, op. 542, d. 1303, report of November 28, 1902.

[72] Gosudarstvennaia Duma, tretii sozyv, pp. 896–97. By the census count in 1889, five of the six madams in Berezovskii's home province were Jewish. See Dubrovskii, Statistika Rossiiskoi Imperii, p. 12.

elkeeper and as an agent of the tsarist police. In Warsaw, a Jewish gangster named Shilem Letzki organized a synagogue for his underworld colleagues of prostitutes, brothelkeepers, pimps, and thieves. The tsarist secret police let "King Shilem I," as he was known, conduct business freely, partly because he was an enemy of the Jewish socialist organization, the Bund.^[73]

How accurate was the general impression of brothel prostitution as a uniquely Jewish trade? To be sure, Jews worked in prostitution disproportionately to their numbers in the population, with the percentages of Jewish madams far exceeding the percentages of Jewish brothel prostitutes, and both outnumbering the proportion of Jews in Russia's population. According to an 1897 census, Jews composed only 4 percent of the population in the entire Russian empire (including Poland, with its nearly five million Jews).^[74] In 1889, Jews made up 7 percent of the prostitutes registered in the empire's brothels (570 of 7,840 women) and 6 percent of its odinochki (631 of 9,763). In contrast, a full 24 percent of the madams were Jewish (297 of 1,214. women). In 1889, in Minsk, Bessarabia, Kherson, and Tavrichesk provinces, Jewish brothelkeepers reached percentages of 64 (7 of 11 women), 79 (15 of 19 women), 83 (30 of 36 women), and 92 (22 of 24 women) respectively.^[75] Within the Pale of Settlement as a whole, Jewish women ran a full 70 percent of the brothels.^[76] Jewish brothelkeepers were not in the majority overall, but their numbers were significant enough to raise eyebrows.^[77] Though Jews clearly did not dominate brothel prostitution numerically, their disproportionate status, their visibility, and the public's readiness to think badly of them left Jews extremely vulnerable to the image of brothelkeepers as rapacious Jews who profited off the bodies of young Russian women.

Some of the confusion derived from the public's misunderstanding

[73] Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice, pp. 14, 20–21, 24, 60–61.

[74] In the Pale of Settlement, 11 percent of the population were Jews. Salo W. Baron, The Russian Jew under Tsars and Soviets, 2d ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1976), p. 63.

[75] The percentages of Jews rise when counted by nationality: 27 percent of madams were Jews by nationality. Likewise, in Minsk, the percentage increases to 82 percent; in Kherson, to 89 percent; in Tavrichesk, to 96 percent. Dubrovskii, Statistika Rossiiskoi Imperii, pp. xiii, 12–14, 20, 24.

[76] Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice, p. 55.

[77] Bristow cites police and anti-vice crusaders in Berlin, Hamburg, and London as having found 37 percent of 578 known traffickers to be Jewish. He suspects, however, that this is a low figure since many Jews disguised their Jewish identity. Ibid., p. 52.

of statistics regarding the large numbers of Russian prostitutes abroad. According to data collected by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the years 1900 to 1904, among 1,650 registered prostitutes in Buenos Aires, a full 18 percent (293) were Russian. Numbers like these could fuel fears of "white slavery" indeed. Yet in 1905, Petr Oboznenko pointed out that every one of the "Russians" was, in fact, a Russian-born Jew. Rather than falling into some terrible web of international deceit, these women had simply traveled to Argentina with their families under the inducement of Baron Hirsch, who sponsored Jewish agricultural colonies for immigrants. When the heavy agricultural work required of these brand new "farmers" proved beyond them, the women turned to prostitution for the usual reasons. Soon, Oboznenko wrote sarcastically, "white slaves" should be appearing in Uganda; it was after all slated as the promised land for many Zionists.^[78]

In a speech to the 1910 Congress against the Trade in Women, Baron Aleksandr Gintsburg suggested that the participation of Jews in the trade in women was "inversely proportional to their legal and social position."^[79] When Kuprin's Horizon met a military general on a train, he presented himself as part traveling salesman, part broker. Horizon was not far from the truth about Jewish involvement in the trade of prostitution when he said, "Nu, what can a poor Jew do in times like this?"^[80] Edward Bristow perceptively calls white slavery "the sexualization of blood libel." Just as it was believed that Jews required the blood of Christian virgins to make their Passover matzoh, it was easy to accept that Jews gleefully lured naïve gentile girls into brothels and other dens of debauchery. Brothelkeeping, writes Bristow, was an economic necessity in an empire where most professions were closed to Jews. Antisemitism may not have directly caused the trade in women, but it certainly "distorted the Jewish economy and impoverished the people."^[81]

Gratsianov singled out the Jews not only as prostitution's chief third parties in western Russia and Poland, but as the ones most adept at

[78] Oboznenko, "Obshchestvennaia initsiativa," pp. 1675–76. Bristow has also pointed out that Jewish go-betweens dealt mostly with Jewish women. Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice, p. 47.

[79] Gintsburg, "O mezhdunarodnoi evreiskoi konferentsii," p. 424.

[80] Kuprin, Iama, p. 106.

[81] Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice, pp. 46, 85.

dodging sanitary commission rules.^[82] Letters he reproduced, however, provide other, more useful insights into Jews and the business of prostitution. In Mitav, someone named A. I. Simon answered the letter of a woman who had asked to return to Simon's brothel and promised to bring along an 18-year-old "pretty young lady" (khoroshen'kaia baryshnia ). Simon was willing to take them both, so long as they had no outstanding debts. If they lacked the fare for railway tickets, "then send your things C.O.D." Another woman, one in a family of four sisters who ran brothels in Minsk, Kovno, Odessa, and Bobruisk, told a prostitute named Rokhlia that she was welcome, but not for the 15 rubles Rokhlia had requested in payment.^[83] Given the high number of Jews in Minsk, not surprisingly, the principals in these letters are obviously of Jewish ancestry. But the letters tell us more than that—they suggest that brothel prostitution was by necessity a close and personalized activity that often extended to large families. Though the trade in women was serious business, it clearly had its human elements as well.

The Jews who engaged in the business of prostitution resembled the women who chose prostitution as the most sensible employment option among the few that were available to them. Coercion and fraud played a role in some instances, but the individuals who traded in women mostly just facilitated the progress of what they looked upon as legitimate business transactions. Alain Corbin has dubbed these activities a logical extension of brothel prostitution itself, with its imperative to find new women to satisfy the customers.^[84] Most middlemen and brothelkeepers were not the evil "slave traders" that made the news; rather, they were men and women who ran the brothels, moved women between brothels and cities so that "fresh merchandise" was available to the customers, found new recruits, negotiated agreements, and kept up a circle of contacts. Jewish involvement in the trade of prostitution was an artifact of an antisemitic system that extended quotas to Jews in higher education and the professions, and excluded Jews from owning land. Ironically, this had the consequence of confirming the antisemites in their conviction that Jews were by nature traffickers in flesh and stigmatizing the business of prostitution as a Jewish pursuit.

[82] Gratsianov, "K voprosu o belykh nevol'nitsakh," pp. 5, 15, 17, 26–27.

[83] Ibid., pp. 12–13.

[84] Corbin, Women for Hire, p. 280.