The Fox and the Flies: The World of Joseph Silver, Racketeer and Psychopath

by Charles van Onselen

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3 ratings, 3.67 average rating, 1 review (more data...)

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published

April 5th 2007 by Jonathan Cape

binding

Hardcover, 672 pages

isbn

0224079298 (isbn13: 9780224079297)

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All ratings | 4 stars (2) | 3 stars (1) | avg 3.67

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Neal rated it:

10/16/07

Read in September, 2007

A marvellously written work of social history. Rarely does one being form the quilting point of so many seemingly disparate threads of history.

It is also the most convincing and empirically plausible case for Jack the Ripper having been a mysoginistic, flighty and impetuous Polish immigrant from a backwater village with a lucrative cattle trading industry and associated slaughterhouse which gave the warped child his first view of butchery.

A migrant Jew fleeing the pogroms and reprisals...more A marvellously written work of social history. Rarely does one being form the quilting point of so many seemingly disparate threads of history.

It is also the most convincing and empirically plausible case for Jack the Ripper having been a mysoginistic, flighty and impetuous Polish immigrant from a backwater village with a lucrative cattle trading industry and associated slaughterhouse which gave the warped child his first view of butchery.

A migrant Jew fleeing the pogroms and reprisals that erupted in the then Russian Empire after Czar Alexander II's assassination at the hands (and grenades) of semitic revolutionaries, Joseph Silver, a thoroughly nasty but exceedingly cunning individual, captured the attention of major twentieth century figures as he floated round the Atlantic World.

Alerted to the operations of this notorious pimp and racketeer, President Paul Kruger of the ZAR, and future president and then State attorney Jan Smuts, kept a close watch on the man who was partly to blame for the country's later segregationist policies and immorality legislation.

During his time in Southern Africa, Silver made a fortune with his high-turnover, low-cost, multiracial sex trade which catered to the vices of an itinerant, impoverished, alienated male migrant mining community, and upset conservative politians and authorities.

He was imprisoned in Sing Sing prison outside New York, perhaps the most dehumanising penitentiary in the New World, only to continue his wayward endeavors on the Lower East Side and eventually, through his arrest, expose the prolific corruptness of Tammany Hall politicians.

Most fascinating of all though: Silver stalked Whitechapel in the 1880's fronting as a draper to conceal his darker urges.

Riddled with the pox and obsessed with Old Testament invective condemning prostitutes to eternal perdition and real-world punishment by self-elected servants of Jehovah, the Fox has nevertheless been overlooked. And yet he was a police suspect at the time of the gruesome Ripper murders.

That he changed his name and spent 30 of 36 months subsequent to the last of the canonical five crimes, incarcerated in various prisons, struck him from the list of usual suspects. Out of sight, out of mind. But never out of Van Onselen's mind.

After 20 years of research into the man that made vice his vocation until he was executed for espionage in WW1, the author of this accomplished biography will astound you with evidence that has evaded Ripperologists and historians for more than a hundred years.

But this is not simply a facile, sensationalist whodunnit. Silver's bloody fingers can be found in every important slice of the 20th century pie and this is what makes teh study so important. Anti-semitism, war, revolution, colonial expansion, the birth of modern forensics all combined to spawn, and destroy, a monster who was, above all, a symptom of a violent opportunistic era.

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The Fox and the Flies: The World of Joseph Silver, Racketeer and Psychopath

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