“What was forbidden is now permitted." — Rabbi Samuel Dresner

Sex and the Jews: Letter to a Jewish Correspondent

Dr Lasha Darkmoon

August 29, 2010

A few months ago, I received an angry email from a young woman called Victoria. Having ticked me off severely for various things I’d said in an article —  and after a further exchange of emotional letters — Victoria, who was half Jewish, told me she would no longer be writing to me. So I wrote her a valedictory note in which I took my leave of her with the friendly words, “Farewell, my dear Jewess!”  

Silence ensued for several weeks. And then, to my surprise, I received another confrontational letter from Victoria informing me that she was writing to me again (a) “to correct certain misconceptions you have”, and (b) to tell me that writing to me was “pointless.”

I found this quite amusing. It’s not often I get letters listing all my shortcomings and telling me how pointless it is writing to me. It makes a change. Victoria had taken offense at the term 'Jewess'.  “Referring to me as a ‘Jewess’ was very offensive and condescending,” she scolded, “because I am only part Jewish.…But I guess in your racist mind,  the fact that I am even part Jewish is enough of a reason for you to deny my humanity completely. Continuing any further correspondence with you is pointless.”

This is the letter I wrote Victoria in response to her final communication. I don’t usually write such long letters to my correspondents, complete with a scholarly apparatus of facts, figures, citations, embedded links and picture illustrations.  On this occasion, I decided to make an exception.   

*          *          * 

Dear Victoria, 

Your condemnation of the word "Jewess" as anti-Semitic would be accepted, I think, as fair comment nowadays. I meant no offense, but in any case please accept my apologies.  

You may not be aware of this, Victoria, but it’s a sad fact that because of severe economic hardships endured by Jews in past centuries, many Jewish girls were forced into a life of prostitution. In all the great European cities, a certain type of prostitute was always to be found: exotic and semi-Asiatic in appearance. She was Jewish, and she was very much in demand. The word “Jewess” therefore entered the language as a loose synonym for “Jewish prostitute”.   

When Baudelaire writes a poem about a Parisian prostitute with whom he had just spent the night, he refers to her simply as a “Jewess”. That was enough to identify her as a prostitute. “Une nuit que j'étais près d'une affreuse Juive…” (“One night as I lay next to a frightful Jewess…”).

When Keats refers to Jewish prostitutes in an unpublished poetic fragment quoted in a private letter (1819), he doesn’t call them “prostitutes”. He just calls them “Jewesses”. Why? Because so many Jewesses were prostitutes that the two terms had virtually become interchangeable. “Nor in obscurèd purlieus would he seek / For curlèd Jewesses, with ankles neat, / Who, as they walk abroad, make tinkling with their feet."  (See here.)  

Keats is here referring to the typical Jewess with her "curly" ringlets. The tinkling ankle bells he mentions were often worn in past eras by prostitutes to signal their approach. Ever since Ancient India, such bells have been prostitute accessories.

*          *          * 

You say you are "half Jewish", Victoria, and that your family originally came from the Ukraine. Did you know that Odessa, the fourth largest city of Ukraine, was once a magnet for prostitute lovers from all over Europe? The city was famous for its sumptuous brothels, all supervised by Jewish madams who had formerly been prostitutes themselves. As for the girls working in those brothels, they were predominantly Jewish. Valued for their seductive charms, these joygirls were referred to simply as "Jewesses." 

Here is a pertinent  quote:  

By the 1860s a French visitor to Odessa wrote that Jews there were responsible for a white slavery market in Russian women to Turkey. This is feasible, especially since we know that Jewish brothel-keepers were already in place at the other end in Constantinople. The 1889 census shows that Jewish women ran 30 of 36 licensed brothels in Kherson province, where Odessa was located. In 1908 the American consul there claimed that the whole business of prostitution is almost exclusively in the hands of Jews. Jewesses were prominent in the practice of prostitution. Thus, of 5127 licensed prostitutes in 1889, 1122 or 22 per cent were Jewish.  (See here; Note: 22% is significantly high, given that Jews constituted only 4% of the Ukrainian population..   

A Rabbi Rosenak of the German Union of Rabbis writes in 1902 that up to 50% of the prostitutes in his area were Jewish. He deplores the fact and considers it “inconceivable” that so many Jewish women should go astray.    

Jewish prostitution flourished throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Jewish procuresses ran the brothels, luring both Christian and Jewish girls into a life of prostitution. One Jewish madam was known as "Lucky Sarah", so named because she was lucky enough to have founded the lucrative Hungarian export trade in girls. Hungarian girls were considered sexy. They had those dark, long-lashed eyes and exotic high cheek bones that so many men find attractive. In short, the Jewish look one finds enshrined in Hollywood’s first femme fatale, also known as “the Vamp”:  

Theda Bara (born  Theodosia Goodman, 1885–1955), Jewish silent screen actress famous for her femme fatale roles. Note the corkscrew curls mentioned earlier by Keats ("curled Jewesses"). The  classic Hollywood femme fatale, Wikipedia tells us, was "often foreign ... of an indeterminate Eastern European or Asian ancestry."

Equally well-known to the Jewish Underworld of the time was Sarah Grossman, another Jewish procuress nicknamed "The Turk" because of the number of girls she had tricked into a life of prostitution in Constantinople. Two major sex emporiums were the industrial towns of Czernowitz and Lemberg. Here countless girls were enticed into a life of sex slavery. In 1892 a famous mass trial of twenty-seven procurers was held in Lemberg.  All the defendants were Jewish. The trial received so much attention, we are told, that it marked “a high water point for the anti-Semites.”  

“A major device of the procurers was a Jewish ceremony referred to as the stillah chuppah. This included a religious wedding ceremony which had no civil validity. The soon-to-be abducted female would be misled into believing that she was married with the rights of a wife, only to discover later that her legal rights were nil. Innumerable Jewesses found themselves tossed into brothels by this device.”  (See here).

You see what is happening here, Victoria?  Vast numbers of innocent Jewish girls were tricked into a life of prostitution by their fellow Jews. It was their own race who tricked them and sold them down the river. It reminds me of the Jewish rabbis who tricked Norman Finkelstein’s mother out of her fair share of Holocaust reparations.

These are the facts, Victoria. They are the truth. Resist the truth if you want, but truth will prevail in the end. Rather than dismiss me as an “anti-Semite” for drawing the obvious conclusions from these well-known historical data, you should come to terms with the fact that most ordinary Jews are the dupes and victims of organized Jewry. It's not these ordinary Jews I criticize or condemn, it’s their rabbinical and ideological controllers: the Puppet Masters, or the "Masters of Discourse," to use Israel Shamir’s apt phrase.    

It’s not the sheep, it’s the Bad Shepherds, who are the problem.  

*          *          * 

No class of men appears to be quite as sex-obsessed as the Orthodox Jews and the rabbinate. If you compare the religious texts of the various world religions, you will find that all of them — with the single exception of Judaism — maintain a high moral tone throughout. They don’t keep harping on about breasts and penises, prostitutes and semen. Judaism does.  

Consider this inflammatory passage from the Hebrew English Bible, enough to bring a blush to any maidenly cheek: 

There she lusted after her lovers whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses. So you longed for the lewdness of your youth when in Egypt your bosom was caressed and your young breasts fondled. (Ezekiel 23: 20-21). 

The number of Victorian damsels who must have swooned away over that passage is probably beyond computation.  

Turn to the Babylonian Talmud and you will find yourself suddenly transported into a hothouse world of indelicate anecdotes dealing specifically with prostitutes and their rabbinical (or yeshiva student) clients. There are so many of these stories in the Talmud that a special name had to be invented for them: aggadah. Though these instructive anecdotes touch on all conceivable topics, usually with a rabbi as the central figure, sex often looms large. It can certainly be argued that Judaism is more obsessed with sex than any other world religion. (Scroll down to “Contents”, here.) 

One such story starts like this: “They said of Rabbi Elazar ben Dordia that he did not leave one prostitute in the world that he did not come to. One time he heard that there was a certain prostitute in a town by the sea who took a purse of dinars for her price.  He took a purse of dinars and went and crossed seven rivers to reach her…” (Tractate Avodah Zara 17a). Another story begins: “There was once a man who heard that there was a prostitute in a town by the sea who took four hundred gold coins as her price.  He sent to her four hundred gold coins and set a time to come to her.  When his time came, he went. She said ‘Let him come in’.  When he entered, she sat naked on the top bed…etc. etc. ”  (Tractate Menachot, 44a)

The Talmud is full of such stories about rabbis and their students paying visits to prostitutes. Since the word “pornography” literally means “writing about prostitutes,” the Talmud is perhaps the only religious classic that could be described — in a literal sense — as pornographic.  

We read in the Talmud of Rahab the harlot, for example, first mentioned in the book of Joshua. One of the most bewitching  femmes  fatales of antiquity, on a par with Helen of Troy and the fabulous Corinthian courtesan Lais mentioned by Demosthenes, the beautiful Rahab first began to sell her body at the age of ten. "There was no prince or ruler who had not slept with Rahab the prostitute," the Talmud informs us breathlessly. (Tractate Zavachim  116b).

The rabbis, being the religious rulers of the day, were among the first to enjoy this nubile nymphette’s favors. Pedophilia? Yes, the Talmud is full of it. We are told of this Jewish Lolita: "They [the rabbis] allow her an honored place in Jewish tradition....Her past as a harlot is not held against her, and is almost entirely forgotten once she converts to Judaism." (See here). 

Nothing changes. Plus ça change. Pedophilia is okay, it seems, if you happen to be a Jewish rabbi or Roman Polanski — but not if you’re a Catholic priest.