The heyday of Jewish prostitution in the United States (c. 1900)

The rise of North American prostitution in general, and the history of its repression by the “progressive” movement in the first two decades of the twentieth century, have been remarkably well studied by Ruth Rosen¹. Edward Bristow, in an original and courageous work published at the same moment, linked its Jewish component to the trafficking of their own sisters by Jewish gangsters who had emigrated around 1900². Their activities complicated the picture of a prostitution dominated, in the United States of that time, by the imperatives of its protagonists’ economic survival. A form of women’s labor like any other, prostitution was often the work of “occasional” women. Or else it secreted, in the red-light districts of American cities, a milieu attentive to the defense of its own dignity.

The world of prostitution was nonetheless increasingly controlled, around 1900, through the use of pimps, by organized crime. The progressive reformers, who set themselves against this kind of commercialization, brought about the near-general disappearance of its toleration. Seen as a “social evil,” prostitution became increasingly the object of prohibition (this was the case in thirty-one states by 1917). This criminalization completed the process of making North American prostitutes the object of systematic repression. It also fostered the idea that they had been victims of coercion within a “white slave trade.” A political campaign developed against this trade, and in that respect it did not combat only a myth born of a collective panic. More than 300 people were convicted of this crime in the United States between 1910 and 1913. These traffickers in human flesh had developed practices of deprivation of liberty and dehumanization. This moral enslavement no doubt affected only a tenth of North American prostitutes. But the spotlight trained on it confirmed phenomena of the devaluation and dependency of women characteristic of industrial society.³

A historian of the Jewish struggle against the white slave trade, Edward J. Bristow found there the features of a social-purity movement that was international in scope. Within the Jewish milieu, it did not hesitate to oppose violently those who, in its own ranks, furthered prostitution. For Jewish traffickers, especially in countries of immigration, found themselves compromised there with the girls of their own nation, whom they exploited.

Distorted by contemporary antisemitism, this Jewish participation in the “white slave trade” was, by contrast, well evoked by the filmmaker Sergio Leone, who ended his career in 1984 by depicting, in Il était une fois en Amérique (Once Upon a Time in America), the story of two Jewish gangsters from New York who had arrived from their native Poland at the start of the twentieth century.

Their enrichment originated in the prostitution of their sisters, regarded as a natural form of profit and a male rite of initiation. This type of young Jew of 1900, the cynical exploiter of the sexuality of the girls of his own people, belongs to History and not to mythology.

Albert Londres’s reportage confirmed it, for Buenos Aires, at the end of the 1920s. This was a reality that antisemites exploited by attributing the entire “white slave trade” to a Jewish enterprise. Jewish intellectuals grew concerned about it, confronted with an unprecedented development of Jewish participation in international prostitution, around 1900, out of central and eastern Europe. This historical aberration, from the standpoint of Jewish traditions, is connected to the incredible economic and social upheaval of an eastern European Jewish community, four million of whose members emigrated overseas between 1880 and 1914.

A portion of the Jews who remained on the old continent then glimpsed, in the development of commercial prostitution, a source of considerable profit, and urban uprooting was enough to transform Jewish countrywomen from Poland or Russia into brothel fodder for the (Jewish) organizers of their sale. In a single generation, these products of the most orthodox and rigorous religious education became girls for soldiers or for proletarians, from Warsaw to Buenos Aires. The most authoritative police sources attest to the significant share of Jewish traffickers in this sort of trade. It had developed at the borders of the three central Empires, where the majority of the world’s Jewish population had gradually become concentrated. The Russian authorities, moreover, encouraged the proliferation of Jewish brothels (203 out of 289 licensed houses in 1889) as a means of their domination.

This mechanism, running from recruiters to girls by way of the madams, had only to change its destination and its geographic dimensions in order to adapt to overseas prostitution. It always rested on the supplying of Jewish women, by Jews, for the pleasure of non-Jews. The boldest of its entrepreneurs slipped, as early as the late 1870s, with their livestock, from Poland to Argentina. This gangsterism, closely linked to the police and to business circles, met, in May 1905, with the violent opposition of the Jewish workers of Warsaw, who for a moment destroyed its brothels. But the reign of these pimps over their victims was not lastingly affected by it.

In Austro-Hungarian Galicia, a high place of the Jewish trade, this network of girl-recruiters often took the form of family enterprises with very far-flung connections, on a worldwide scale. As early as 1892, in Lemberg, a sensational trial of 27 traffickers in girls had drawn the attention of the antisemites. They forgot that, among the victims of the former, two thirds were Jewish women. Vienna soon became the main transit point of this traffic. But, as the Yiddish songs indicate, the road to Buenos Aires defined still more clearly the paths of Jewish enrichment through prostitution. This activity set against one another, there, the orthodox concerned with their identity and the world of the brothels, fed by a permanent pipeline coming from eastern Europe. In 1930, 400 Jewish profiteers of the prostitution of their sisters were still thriving in the Argentine capital.

Their kind had constituted there, since 1890, a powerful community, the Zwi Migdal. Excluded by their brethren in 1894, they have possessed, since 1900, a cemetery of their own, thus dividing the Jews of Buenos Aires into two worlds. A. Dickenfaden, who had arrived as a young immigrant in 1885 and died in 1927, was the Napoleon of these pimps. He escaped all prosecution and passed away surrounded by esteem. The careful organization of the shipments of girls coming from Poland had been the foundation of this success. These prisoners, from the moment of their arrival, soon vanished into the community of Jewish prostitution. Their protectors formed themselves into a legal association in 1906, and their network, backed by Argentine policemen or politicians, remained a power in the 1920s despite the boycott imposed on them by the official Jewish milieu. They even had their own synagogue and displayed a concern for respectability. Profiteers of Jewish prostitution in Argentina, they knew how to invest their capital in their new homeland.

It is in the shadow of this development on a worldwide scale that one must place Allen Street, at the heart of the old Jewish quarter of New York’s East Side and a center of brothels whose history was analogous, since it too was a product of immigration, of crime, and of “family”-type exploitation. The neighborhood often claimed to be scandalized by the activities of the pimps and their girls. But, being as much afraid as ashamed, it ended up accommodating itself to them. In this early twentieth century, the young thug, the trafficker in women, was, in New York, a central figure in the folklore of the Jewish immigrants. Often presiding over a nationwide network, he could amass immense fortunes.

Many elements of the New York Jewish community were drawn to the human type of the pimp or the prostitute. Their activities were rooted in the history of Jewish immigration to the United States, which involved, between 1889 and 1914, a million and a half people, the majority of them young males. The creators of brothels, from the 1870s on, did not lack for successors who enjoyed police protection thanks to their integration into the Democratic electoral machine.

The 1890s saw the heyday of the Jewish kings of New York prostitution, a means of acculturation for immigrants coming from the Russian Empire and the basis of a veritable vice trust. Within the New York ghetto, the conflict of generations bore witness to the appeal of gangsterism to young immigrants fascinated by the practices of sexual “seduction.” The same was true in Chicago, where being a pimp constituted, within the Jewish community, a normal activity when one was young and poor.

A model of social success, the pimp employed the ruses familiar at the doors of employment agencies, theaters, or dance halls. The Jewish women thus recruited were drawn above all from those born locally. This procedure contrasted with the importation voyages inherent in Jewish prostitution in South America. The prostitution that then developed in the streets of New York owed a great deal to the psychological revolt of the children of immigrants against the old disciplines imposed by their parents. The desire to grow rich easily reinforced it. These young Jewish women who had become prostitutes preferred, like their other American sisters, for the profit it brought in, this kind of work to the others.

In 1914, there were, for 6,000 pimps, nearly 30,000 prostitutes, not counting the independents or the occasional ones. They constituted only a fifth of North American prostitution and had been declining since 1910. The profiteers and stars of their trade still enjoyed great prestige. Their New York association of 1896 soon had its own cemetery alongside that of the orthodox. It maintained order within Jewish prostitution, including by the murder of the disobedient, but it concerned itself with the medical surveillance of the girls. Its leaders knew a final golden age on the eve of 1914. They had contributed to making American prostitution an element of organized crime. Its profits ran into the millions of dollars, some of which were levied to secure police protection.

Once this golden age had passed, all that remained of the episode were the splendid funerary mausoleums of its chiefs. Wealthy and respectable, they had helped to set off a gigantic antisemitic panic founded on the myth of a white slave trade of Jewish origin. It had had as its sole origin the rise of organized prostitution within the immigrant community in New York at the end of the nineteenth century. Alongside it, in the rest of the United States, one encountered other Jewish immigrant women exploited by other traffickers, as, for example, in Texas, in the camps of Mexican workers.

Within the framework of the globalization of this kind of activity, Joe Silver, born in Poland in 1869, prospered first in the United States and then in London. He embarked at Southampton in June 1898 to import his methods into South Africa. One understands why many Jewish leaders deemed it necessary to fight against a white slave trade that touched them so closely. In New York as elsewhere, around 1910, the association between Jew and trafficker in women was obvious. Despite the shame it felt in speaking of it, the Jewish press did not hide this phenomenon. Jewish literature in all its forms abounds with expressions of sympathy for the victims of this traffic and with denunciations of its profiteers. The white slave trade was then combated, in Yiddish, by numerous well-informed witnesses. They mobilized Jewish opinion against it and managed to secure, for this struggle, the support of the official organizations.

A great debate then set the Jews of the United States against one another over the question of whether the Jewish trade ought to be given publicity by being fought openly. Would this not run the risk of fostering antisemitism? In Philadelphia, Chicago, or Portland, rabbis obsessed with the myth of Jewish purity found it dangerous to speak of what contradicted it. The Zionists equated this struggle with a diversion of energies more usefully spent elsewhere. Some Jewish socialists preferred to attack capitalism, the cause of all evils, or reduced the trade to a pure fantasy.

The advocates of its extinction, within the Jewish community, shared on the contrary the same moral relentlessness as their Christian or secular brethren. They thought first of the victims who found themselves in the brothels, and many Jewish feminists took part, moreover, in their movement. Bertha Pappenheim, Freud’s Anna O., who enrolled a fifth of German Jewish women in her organization created in 1904 to combat prostitution, thus had imitators in the United States despite the misogyny of certain rabbis. Others, however, supported this struggle against the trade in order the better to diminish antisemitism.

Action committees mobilized Jewish opinion, throughout the world, from the 1880s on, against the trafficking of its sisters. An international network was thus set up against a corrupting organization that was just as international. Militants kept watch everywhere over the routes along which the girls or the traffickers might pass and prompted, at the beginning of the twentieth century, hundreds of investigations against them. They had the legislation against the trade strengthened. These Jewish activists succeeded in imposing their cooperation on the organizers of the struggle against this traffic. Religious circles themselves were gradually won over to it, and the leaders of this movement thus did not hesitate to wash their dirty linen usefully in public.

The struggle of American Jews against the trade thus obtained important results within the overall action undertaken, in the United States, at the municipal and legislative levels. The leaders of the former had rallied to it because this evil concerned them in the first place. Unanimous in their wish to defend the honor of their people against the antisemites, they were at the origin of a national campaign in which the rabbis joined the activists. This struggle led to legislation that attempted to curb exploitation, dissuaded many Jewish women from entering prostitution, strengthened solidarity within the communities, and offered a choice terrain for feminist action. Although Jews continued to be accused of being traffickers in Christian women, fewer and fewer of them sold their sisters in the aftermath of the First World War. The improvement of the material conditions of Jewish life in America ceased to place this problem at the heart of their community. In the 1920s, if, in Chicago for example, Jewish pimps still made up nearly a fifth of the total, New York’s Jewish prostitutes fell from 18 to 11 percent of the whole. This decline in Jewish prostitution marked the end of an era, and the international organizations recorded it.

This no doubt did not prevent the continuation of exploitation by the Galician traffickers, who took advantage, in order to supply the brothels of New York, of the naïve fascination of young Jewish women with the West, the country where one “lives well.” But little by little, in the course of the 1930s, the great traffic in women, inaugurated, between Europe and America, by the Jewish immigrants, slowed down, dying out after sixty years.⁴

Notes