“Ten Thousand Bigamists in New York”: The Criminalization of Jewish Immigrants Using White Slavery Panics
By Mia Brett
The late 19th century and early 20th century saw a huge influx of Jewish immigrants settling in New York City. Eastern European Yiddish speaking immigrants fled the Pale Settlements due to violent pogroms and punitive decrees after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881.[1] This rise in immigration created a backlash of nativism and criminalization. In particular, anti-Jewish bigotry in New York City’s criminal justice system began to take the form of large-scale stereotypical assumptions as police, judges, prosecutors, and investigators became more familiar with Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland. Jews were blamed for and associated with specific crimes such as bigamy, white slavery, and pickpocketing. As more Eastern European Yiddish-speaking Jews immigrated to the United States, societal familiarity grew, but they continued to be scapegoated for crimes to serve nativist bigotry.[2]
“Morality” crimes such as prostitution and bigamy were used to indict the character of an entire Eastern European immigrant group. In particular, “white slavery” served to criminalize immigrant others, especially Jews, police interracial relationships, and racialize those who engaged in certain crimes. “White slavery” charges articulated a dichotomy of a pure, white, Christian victim and a criminal racial other, commonly a Jewish immigrant, as the supposed evil procurer. Therefore, criminal courtrooms became sites of implicit legal discrimination through a reliance on anti-Jewish stereotypes and influence from an anti-Semitic press. The disproportional focus on Jewish immigrants for certain crimes by police and newspapers contributed to cultural exclusion and a denial of full citizenship privileges and immunities into the 20th century.[3]
In 1897, police commissioner Frank Moss published The American Metropolis, which argued that “criminal instincts… are so often found naturally in the Russian and Polish Jews.”[4] When Professor Felix Adler spoke to the Eldridge Street Synagogue to protest vice, he quoted the Chief of Police, William Devery, as saying to him, “Do you know who is responsible for the bad moral condition of the city? It’s just you Jews.”[5] These prejudices did not lessen over the next few years. In 1908, Police Commissioner Theodore Bingham wrote an article called “Foreign Criminals in New York” published in The North American Review to ask for more resources for police. In it he wrote that, “the Jews, while constituting one-fourth the population of Greater New York, supply half its criminals.”[6] Bingham claimed Jews were particularly adept at pickpocketing. “Tho all crime is their province,” journalist Francis J. Oppenheim opined, “pocket picking is the one to which they seem to take to most naturally. Indeed, pickpockets of other nationalities are beginning to recognize the superiority of the Russian Hebrew in that gentle art.”[7] The Jewish community viewed this claim as an attack and presented counter statistics to show that rather than being responsible for half the crime of New York, they were only responsible for 16.4%.[8]
Most prosecuted Jewish crimes were property crimes or “morality” crimes, such as bigamy and prostitution. Bigamy was a somewhat commonly charged crime for Jewish immigrants because there was confusion with the need for a civil divorce as well as a rabbinical one. In an article about the Jewish community in New York featured in Century Illustrated Magazine in 1892, significant attention was paid to explaining the process of ecclesiastical divorces versus civil divorces. The piece indicted “Slavonic” rabbis for supposedly taking advantage of “ignorant adherents” by granting a religious divorce without explaining the need for a civil divorce, which led to people remarrying and committing bigamy. Apparently, a grand jury, in an indictment of a Polish Jew for bigamy, recommended that the legislature enact a prohibition against ecclesiastical divorces until a civil divorce had been obtained.[9]
In 1905 The New York Daily Tribune ran an article entitled “Ten Thousand Bigamists in New York Today,” claiming the East Side of New York City, where a large proportion of Jewish immigrants lived, was overrun with bigamists.[10] The author blamed the problem of bigamy on “the foreign character of the inhabitants of this quarter,” and the fact that “Divorce is not the solemn separation achieved after due legal process, but the fiat of a rabbi.” The article further asserted that 90 percent of the apparent 10,000 bigamists have committed this crime due to ignorance, having only fulfilled the religious requirements of obtaining a rabbinical “get” without obtaining a civil divorce.[11] The article placed the blame on the rabbi and the Jewish matchmaker, therefore indicting the larger community and culture instead of an individual criminal.
While bigamy was likely an issue due to legal misunderstandings over divorce requirements, it was still portrayed as a moral failing and perverse sexual crime. The focus on Jewish bigamists made it easy to blame Jews for other morality crimes like white slavery and prostitution.[12] The white slavery scare was used to fuel nativist anti-immigrant fervor, the policing of ethnic boundaries, and the criminalization of interracial relationships. In 1907, lawmakers in New York City responded by passing section 2460 of the New York Penal Code to outlaw “compulsory prostitution” (which went into effect in 1910). The language was directed at pimps or procurers by making a person guilty of a felony if they received money from a woman engaged in prostitution.[13] The law coincided with the passage of the federal Mann Act, otherwise known as the White Slave Traffic Act. The Mann Act made it a felony to transport a woman or girl across state lines “for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.”[14] The federal law was often used to police ethnic and racial boundaries rather than protect women from being trafficked. It often targeted interracial relationships and consensual couples.[15] Since the language in the law included transporting women for any “immoral purpose,” people engaged in consensual unmarried sex were also prosecuted.[16]
Cover of Ernest Bell. Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls: or, War on the White Slave Trade. (Chicago: G. S. Ball, 1910)
In his book, Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls, anti-white slavery reformer Ernest Bell wrote about the main perpetrators of white slavery and how to combat them. He spent a lot of time in his book indicting multiple groups of immigrants, particularly Italians and Russians, but argued that “It is absolute fact that corrupt Jews are now the backbone of the loathsome traffic in New York and Chicago.”[17] He blamed the politics of Tammany Hall in New York City for shielding these supposed immigrant criminals, using blatantly anti-Semitic language by describing a Jewish women as a “sinful Jewess” and a Jewish man as a “young Jew parasite.”[18] Published in 1910, Bell’s book was widely read and influential by selling more than 400,000 copies.[19]
Bell relied on anti-Semitic police commissioner, General Bingham and muckraker George Kibbe Turner, to support his anti-Jewish arguments about crime. He quoted an article from McClure’s Magazine written by Turner to justify his blame for the rise in white slavery in New York City on Tammany Hall and immigration. He quoted Turner as saying:
Out of the Bowery and Red Light districts have come the new development in New York politics the great voting power of the organized criminals. It was a notable development not only for New York, but for the country at large. And no part of it was more noteworthy than the appearance of the Jewish dealer in women, a product of New York politics, who has vitiated, more than any other single agency, the moral life of the great cities of America in the past ten years.[20]
Turner wrote another article for McClure’s Magazine entitled “Daughters of the Poor,” in which he claimed to write a history of the rise in the white slavery trade in New York City.[21] Turner’s language invoked a large-scale organization devoted to recruiting and trafficking women (a particular fear that led to the Mann Act). According to Turner, there was a “third great flush of immigration consisting of Austrian, Russian, and Hungarian Jews” coming to New York around 1885, which included a large number of criminals. Tuner claimed these criminals realized after immigrating that “the sale of women” could be an extremely profitable business because there were many police who were bought by Tammany Hall who also controlled politicians.[22]
"The Slaves of the Jews" drawn by J.A. Wales (a known anti-Semitic cartoonist) published in Judge magazine in 1882
Turner also made a number of claims about Jewish culture that asserted Jewish women were particularly vulnerable to becoming prostitutes. In “Daughter of the Poor,” Turner posited that because education was so important to immigrant Jews, daughters were “sacrificed” by being forced to work so that sons could continue in school. He saw this treatment of Jewish women as exploitation, where family considered women “money making machines,” which in turn set the stage for them becoming prostitutes.[23] Furthermore, Turner suggested that “The acute horror among the Jews of the state of being an old maid makes swindling of Jewish women under promise of marriage especially easy.”[24] In other words, seducing a woman by promising to marry her and then forcing her into prostitution was one way women were apparently caught up in white slavery. The most common white slavery narratives emphasized the purity and innocence of the woman forced into prostitution, often showing her as being abducted by the evil procurer.[25] However, rather than being abducted into white slavery, Turner described young Jewish women as being desperate for a life or career outside the ones they were living. To Turner and other reformers, Jewish women were incapable of being the typical white slavery victim because of their culture and lack of virtue.
Though Turner’s articles were quoted by reformers like Ernest Bell and widely read, many questioned the veracity of the claims he made. For example, Turner cited activity he saw at dance halls to support his accusations about immigrant purveyors of white slavery, but his guide to the East Side, Thomas Long, secretary of the Dancing Masters’ Protective Association of Greater New York, disputed Turner’s account of what he claimed to witness. Long claimed that Turner mistook the people’s poor clothes and “lack of knowledge of social norms as an indication that they were immoral.”[26] According to Long the worst they saw on their tour was men dancing without their collars and coats. Turner assumed something nefarious in the actions of the immigrants at the dance halls rather than understanding that assimilation took time. His reaction was similar to the cultural misunderstandings in the reactions to Jewish immigrants accidentally committing bigotry by not realizing a civil divorce was necessary.
In 1910, a New York grand jury investigated the claim in Turner’s article that there was widespread white slavery out of New York.[27] Turner stood by his article when he testified, where he claimed that the grand jury’s findings agreed with him.[28] However, The New York Times reported that the grand jury found little evidence of any real organized white slavery trade and that the judge said the “City’s fair name has been slandered by muckraking writers.”[29] The grand jury instead recommended a commission to study the claims of widespread white slavery in detail. John D. Rockefeller then formed the Bureau of Social Hygiene and it’s first report, entitled “Commercialized Prostitution in New York City,” came out in 1913. The report stated that there were around 15,000 prostitutes in New York City and that the majority of the “owners” in the business were foreign born, but there was no mention of the specific nationalities of these men. Ultimately, the report did not support Turner’s claims of an organized Jewish white slavery operation.[30]
Artist’s rendering of Belle Moore (the defendant) and the two alleged “white slaves” (Alice Milton and Belle Woods). “Miller Tells in Court How Girls Are Sold,” The New York World, April 19, 1910: 1. Photo courtesy of Brian Donovan.
The 1910 grand jury investigation also included testimony about one of the most notorious arrests under the white slavery law. Belle Moore and Harry Levinson were arrested after an undercover investigation conducted by George Miller. An important aspect of Miller’s testimony was the ethnicity not only of Moore and Levinson, but also of the prostitutes he pretended to buy. Belle Moore was a light-skinned “mulatto” woman, her partner, Alec Anderson, was black, and Harry Levinson was Jewish. Levinson eventually plead guilty, but Belle Moore went on to be tried in one of the first real trials as part of this grand jury’s white slavery investigation. Moore’s race garnered a lot of attention in the press, where she was sometimes described as the “negress.”[31] The narrative around the specter of white slavery required that the perpetrators be racialized while the victims be pure, white, Christian girls. It was particularly important to the prosecution, therefore, that Belle Moore was a mixed-race woman and that Harry Levinson was Jewish. Both press coverage of the case and testimony during the trial emphasized these facts. The white slavery laws, then, were focused on policing interracial sexual relations and sexual purity of white women.
During the grand jury, Miller testified that a woman he used to go undercover with him, Frankie Fuller, refused the Jewish girls brought by Belle Moore as options.[32] During Moore’s trial, Miller testified that he specified to Moore what kind of girls he was looking to buy. “I don’t want colored girls; I want white girls”[33] George Miller went undercover as part of a white slavery investigation to charge people under the new “compulsory prostitution” law. Based on his testimony its clear the race of both the “slavers” and the prostitutes were important to the indictment. Moore was found guilty despite there being no evidence that she trafficked in “white slaves” or engaged in compulsory prostitution. The testimony only proved that she was a madam for willing prostitutes.[34] As previously noted, the white slavery laws were used to police interracial sexual relations and white women’s sexual purity, Jewish women acting as prostitutes did not satisfy the narrative as they weren’t believed to have Christian virtue to lose or sexual purity to protect.
McClure’s Magazine used the arrest of Levinson, Moore, and Anderson to support the claims previously made by Turner. They even claimed the undercover investigation was the result of Turner’s “Daughters of the Poor.” Despite the many criticisms of Turner’s earlier article, the magazine argued that the history of the (implicitly Jewish) sex trade migrating from Europe and growing in New York, outlined in “Daughters of the Poor,” was important information to the investigation and the resultant grand jury and trials.
The grand jury found no evidence of large scale organizations, but McClure’s continued to argue that there were two main white slavery organizations of importance, one Jewish and one French.[35] A later article, entitled “Five White Slave Trade Investigations,” went further in directly connecting the white slavery scare to the influx of immigrants and urging even more intervention from the Federal Immigration Commission. According to the article, “The importation and harboring of alien women and girls for immoral purposes and the practice of prostitution by them—the so called ‘white slave traffic’—is the most pitiful and revolting phase of the immigration question.” The article again fear mongered about “Jews scattered throughout the United States” who “prey on young girls” through the deceit of “love-making and pretense of marriage” in order to ruin them and force them into prostitution. Additionally, the article invoked an anti-Semitic narrative of Jewish political control to explain why these charges were difficult to prove due to police and political corruption. Ultimately, McClure’s used the white slavery investigation and grand jury to stoke anti-immigration and anti-Semitic fears throughout the city.[36]
Muckrakers like George Kibber Turner wrote exposés of white slavery detailing the vulnerability of poor Jewish girls to prostitution and vice investigations sprung grand juries, but little attention or resources were actually paid to assisting women who found themselves in these situations. Instead, white slavery prosecutions of Jewish immigrants allowed the courts and the press to use concern over crime and young women to mask bigotry and anti-immigrant sentiment. The outsized focus on Jewish and immigrant men committing bigamy and forced prostitution mirrored the racist narratives around the Mann Act and white slavery in general. The use of white slavery prosecutions to racialize and criminalize the community at large served anti-Semitic prejudices that resulted in cultural exclusion. This cultural exclusion made it impossible to access fair trials and full citizenship rights for Jewish immigrants in New York City in the early 20th century.
Mia Brett is a PhD candidate in American legal history at SUNY Stony Brook. She is currently finishing her dissertation entitled "The Murdered Jewess: Jewish Immigration and the Problem of Citizenship in the Courtroom in Late Nineteenth Century New York."
[1] There is a historiographical discussion about the overreliance on 1881 as a clear demarcation between the earlier wave of Central European (German) Jewish immigrants and the later wave of immigrants from further East. See Hasia Diner, A Time For Gathering: The Second Migration, 1820 – 1880. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). My upcoming dissertation on the trial of Pesach Rubenstein in 1876 will address this issue.
[2]Gil Ribak, "“The Jew Usually Left Those Crimes to Esau”: The Jewish Responses to Accusations about Jewish Criminality in New York, 1908–1913," AJS Review 38, no. 1 (2014)
[3] My work discusses the implicit denial of rights to refer to facially neutral laws that have discriminatory impacts due to an inability to guarantee access to those outside the assumed white, male, Protestant, able-bodied citizen.
[4] Gil Ribak “’The Jew Usually Left Those Crimes to Esau’”: The Jewish Responses to Accusations about Jewish Criminality in New York, 1908–1913.” AJS Review, 38, pp 1-28 (2014).
[5] “Anti-Vice Mass Meeting: East Side Responds to Appeal of Prof. Adler and Others. Hisses for Chief Delivery His Alleged Charge That Jews Foster Immorality Bitterly Resented-Plans for Action Outlined.” (New York Times, April 23, 1900).
[6] “The Jews and General Bingham.” (New York Times, September 16, 1908).
[7] Francis J Oppenheimer, “Jewish Criminality” (The Independent ... Devoted to the Consideration of Politics, Social and Economic Tendencies. Sep 17, 1908). 65.
[8] “The Jews and General Bingham.” Additionally, as a response to General Bingham’s claims, Francis Oppenheimer published an article in The Independent with facts to fully refute the former’s narrative. According to Oppenheimer, 14.5% of indictments and 16.14% of convictions were for Jewish defendants in New York City in 1907. Oppenheimer, “Jewish Criminality.”
[9] Richard Wheatley. “The Jews in New York.” (Century Illustrated Magazine, Feb, 1892), 512-513.
[10] “Ten Thousand Bigamists in New York Today.” (The New York Daily Tribune; Sept 17, 1905).
[11] A “get” or “gett” is a religious Jewish divorce document.
[12] Mara Keire argued that Jews were blamed for white slavery in large part because progressive reformers used language of evil capitalist monopolies when arguing against white slavery which fit into a common anti-Semitic narrative of the evil capitalist Jew. See “The Vice Trust: A Reinterpretation of the White Slavery Scare in the United States, 1907 – 1917.” Journal of Social History, Vol. 35, No.1 (Autumn 2001), pg., 5-41.
[13] Penal Law, §2460, subd. 8. Provision enacted by chapter 618 of the Laws of 1910. (The New York Supplement, West Publishing Company, 1914).
[14] The White-Slave Traffic Act or the Mann Act. 36 Stat. 825 (Pub. Law 61-277). 18 U.S.C. §§2421-2424
[15] The most famous example was the prosecution of heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson. Johnson first was arrested for traveling with an alleged prostitute, Lucille Cameron, but they soon married and the case fell apart. However, less than a month later Johnson was arrested for traveling with another alleged white prostitute named Belle Schreiber who agreed to testify against him. There was no real evidence that Johnson participated in white slavery but his history with white women caused him to be targeted.
[16] Brian Donovan and Tori Barnes-Brus. “Narratives of Sexual Consent and Coercion: Forced Prostitution Trials in Progressive-Era New York City.” Law & Social Inquiry, Vol. 36, No. 3 (Summer 2011), pp. 597-619. Pg. 601-602.
[17] Ernest Bell. Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls: or, War on the White Slave Trade.” (Chicago: G. S. Ball, 1910), 188.
[18] Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls, pg., 428.
[19] Brian Donovan and Tori Barnes-Brus. “Narratives of Sexual Consent and Coercion: Forced Prostitution Trials in Progressive-Era New York City.” Law & Social Inquiry, Vol. 36, No. 3 (Summer 2011), pp. 597-619, 604.
[20] Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls, pg., 187-188.
[21] George Kibbe Turner. “Daughters of the Poor: A Plain Story of the Development of New York City As A Leading Center of the White Slavery Trade of the World, Under Tammany Hall.” (McClure’s Magazine Nov, 1909), 45-62
[22] “Daughters of the Poor,” pg., 47.
[23] “Daughters of the Poor,” pg., 55.
[24] “Daughters of the Poor,” Pg., 56.
[25] Brian Donovan and Tori Barnes-Brus. “Narratives of Sexual Consent and Coercion: Forced Prostitution Trials in Progressive-Era New York City.” Law & Social Inquiry, Vol. 36, No. 3 (Summer 2011), pp. 597-619. Pg. 600.
[26] "White Slave Story False, Says Guide: Man Who Showed Turner Through East Side Dance Halls Attacks His Veracity, Tells What They Saw Magazine Writer Reiterates His Charges And Gives Some Authorities He Based Them On.” (New York Times, Oct 28, 1909).
[27] “General Investigation as to the Existence in the County of New York of an organized traffic in women for immoral purposes,” Jan 10, 1910. Grand Jury. (case# 3317)
[28] "Defends White Slave Story: Turner Declares That The Rockefeller Grand Jury Sustained Him” (New York Times, Jul 02, 1910).
[29] "White Slaver? Not in New York: Rockefeller Grand Jury Reports Allegations Are Largely Mythical. No Organized Traffic. Judge Says City’s Fair Name Has Been Slandered by Muckraking Writers.” (Chicago Daily Tribune, Jun 29, 1910).
[30] “Man’s Commerce In Women: Mr. Rockefeller’s Bureau of Social Hygiene Issues Its First Report.” McClure's Magazine 08, 1913. 185.
[31] "'White Slave Sales Described in Court: Counsel for the Defense of Belle Moore is Threatened With Penalty for Contempt. Talk of Agents’ ‘Orgies’ Negress, So Miller Testifies, Was Said by Her Companion to Have Been in the Slave Dealing Business Nine Years.” (New York Times, May 19, 1910).
[32] “General Investigation as to the Existence in the County of New York of an organized traffic in women for immoral purposes,” Jan 10, 1910. Grand Jury. (case# 3317) Pg. 405.
[33] People vs. Belle Moore Court of General Sessions of the Peace, County of New York, Part 1. May 18, 1910, New York City. (case #1169) pg. 9.
[34] People vs. Belle Moore Court of General Sessions of the Peace, County of New York, Part 1. May 18, 1910, New York City. (case #1169)
[35] In 1910 there were three compulsory prostitution convictions out of 19 indictments and all of those convictions came out of the Rockefeller grand jury, including Belle Moore and Harry Levinson. Between 1910 and 1913 there were only 66 indictments and 18 convictions under the compulsory prostitution law. “Annual Report of the Chief Clerk of the District Attorney’s Office, County of New York.” (District Attorney's Office, New York State, 1914), 57.
[36] “Five ‘White Slave’ Trade Investigations: The Revelations Made and Results Obtained by the Study of This Serious Question by Federal, State, and City Authorities.” (McClure's Magazine 07, 1910), 346.