Skip to comments.

Posted on 11/06/2001 9:19:20 PM PST by madrussian

In recent years, as reports have multiplied detailing the huge extent of the trade in women that is conducted in Israel, astonishment has also been heard in the country over the fact that Jews have been able to find a place "for the first time in 2,000 years," in this despicable branch of international crime. Such statements anger Dr. Nelly Las, who for quite a while has been following everything that is published on the subject of trade in women: She is angered by the assumption implicit in them that Jews are endowed with moral qualities superior to those of other peoples.

Las, who has been researching Jewish involvement in international prostitution at the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century, knows that the presence of Jews, both among the pimps and among the prostitutes, was massive during that era. In eastern Europe, and especially in Poland and Russia, networks of Jewish traders in women operated that lured Jewish girls and sold them into prostitution in the United States and South America.

It is no accident that these facts are not widely known, the researcher says. In most of the Jewish communities of the world, the prostitution business was considered then - and many years afterward - to be taboo, a shameful matter which should be concealed and which respectable people did not discuss in public. This perception, she believes, also trickled down to researchers who dealt with Jewish life in Europe before the Holocaust.

The terrible exploitation of Jewish women by Jewish pimps in Europe and America at the beginning of the 20th century was mentioned here and there in the works of Sholem Aleichem, Mendele Mocher Seforim and Isaac Bashevis Singer, but was in effect repressed in Jewish historical consciousness.

Says Las: "The Jewish memory became accustomed over many generations to only two situations of the Jews in the Diaspora: the period of glory, during which the Jewish people made major contributions to world civilization, and the periods of prosecutions, with all the suffering and distress that they caused. They are afraid to mention the behavioral deviations that occurred in Jewish society, because they create stigmas and usually feed anti-Semitism."

She also believes that the Holocaust contributed to forgetting the phenomenon: Concealing the facts leads to the distortion of them, and it is this that indirectly feeds anti-Semitism.

Las' research indicates that prostitution was a known phenomenon in most of the Jewish communities in the large cities of Eastern Europe. In Warsaw, for example, there was an area called the "Jewish Prostitutes' Quarter." Employed in scores of Jewish-owned brothels were hundreds of Jewish women who came from Warsaw itself and from surrounding villages and towns; a minority of the clients were Jews. Las relates that this quarter, which was only one of many prostitutes' quarters in the city, was the most popular among Polish soldiers. For very many of the women who worked there, she adds, prostitution was a way to escape the poverty and distress that characterized the lives of most of the Jews in the Jewish towns.

A similar phenomenon existed in Czarist Russia, where Jews were confined to the Pale of Settlement; engaging in prostitution in Saint Petersburg afforded official authorization for leaving the Pale.

Prostitution in Poland was officially organized. The authorities allowed pimps to operate openly and only required them to register their prostitutes and to see to it that they underwent periodic medical examinations. During the 1920s, about 30,000 prostitutes were registered in Warsaw. Las estimates that about one-quarter of them were Jewish. This is a large proportion, but it is a bit less than the proportion of Jews in the population of the city.

Large concentrations of brothels were to be found in Cracow, Poland and in other cities such as Odessa, Vilna, Budapest, Vienna and Minsk. In her study, Las cites the American consul in Odessa, who in 1910 reported, no doubt exaggerating greatly, that "the entire prostitution business in the city is in the hands of Jews." Of the 226 prostitutes who were registered then in Minsk, 67 were Jewish. The proportion of Jewish women among those who were hospitalized for treatment of sexual diseases was 50 percent.

Also during that period, the export of prostitutes from Europe to the United States and South America also began to flourish. Some of the women who were sold in this way had worked as prostitutes in Europe, and hoped that they would be able to improve their living and working conditions in America. Many others were naive girls, who were ensnared by methods remarkably similar to those used by procurers today as well: Most of them were promised legitimate jobs, which would allow them to live respectably in America and send money to their parents in Europe. The end of their journey also resembles what happens to such "exported" women today.

"These women," explains Las, "found themselves in New York or in Buenos Aires, in a strange country, without knowing the language, completely dependent on their pimps who demanded that they work for no pay, at least until the expenses of their trips had been covered."

Later on, they were sold to other pimps. According to one piece of evidence that Las found, the price of a European woman in Buenos Aires in the 1920s ranged between $500 and $1,500.

The Jewish traders were also prominent in the export field. Their presence in Berlin, London and Hamburg, three transit points for immigrants to America, was quite evident. Hamburg police records show that in 1912, 402 sex traders were arrested in the city, 271 of them Jews. Their victims were pulled out of the ports of Europe where they were kept in harsh conditions, sometimes in the hold of rickety cargo ships. They were taken to brothels in the United States (particularly in New York, Chicago and Philadelphia) and South America (Sao Paolo, Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires) and the Mediterranean basin (Istanbul and Alexandria).

"Jews without conscience who operated in the underworld," wrote Las in an article that was published recently, "knew all the customs and mechanisms of Jewish society and knew how to exploit the innocence of Jewish girls." She goes on to report that there were various means of ensnaring them. The pimps promised work and the future arrangement of immigration permits for their families as well.

Some of the traders in women had local Jewish women working as go-betweens in the towns and villages who could easily identify potential victims. They focused on agunot - women whose husbands had abandoned them or vanished, who by Jewish law were not allowed to remarry, says Las: "In eastern Europe, there were tens of thousands of agunot, women whose husbands had disappeared in World War I, or who had emigrated to America and cut off all ties. In a world ruled by tradition, the agunot were completely helpless and easy prey for the procurers."

The Jewish traders in women were not operating in a vacuum, stresses Las: They were part of a general and widespread phenomenon whereby tens of thousands of European women were brought to America.

"The global trade in women did not begin with the fall of the Soviet Union. It had already flourished at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th," according to the researcher. The Jews' part in it reached its zenith around World War I, declined in the 1930s, and ended with the outbreak of World War II and the Holocaust.

Las says that there have been Jewish prostitutes in every period and in every country, but only in the period under discussion, did Jewish prostitution become an organized and prominent phenomenon. The majority of Jews, and in particular their leaders, were disgusted by public discussion of the phenomenon and, as a result, they also refrained from aiding its victims.

Las remembers that during her youth in the 1960s, in Marrakesh in Morocco, people in the synagogue would point their finger at a certain woman, who regularly attended prayers on the High Holidays, and whisper to one another something about her dubious occupation.

Dr. Nelly Las began to research Jewish prostitution by chance while writing a book about the history of Jewish women's organizations around the world. She came upon documents about the struggle of women's organizations in England, the U.S. and Germany to involve the institutions serving their communities in giving aid to Jewish prostitutes. They were not always successful. Leaders of most of the Jewish communities in the world, men of course, stuck to their position that "it is not respectable" to deal with this phenomenon, according to Las.

"Something of this way of looking at things exists today as well," she says, noting that a publication associated with the Jewish community in France refused to publish an article she had written on the grounds that "it is better not to deal with this."

But apparently things are changing nonetheless. The article finally appeared in "Kivunim Hadashim ["New Directions"]: The Journal of Zionism and Judaism," published in Hebrew by the World Zionist Organization.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.