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British Journal of Criminology Advance Access originally published online on June 21, 2006
British Journal of Criminology 2007 47(1):61-79; doi:10.1093/bjc/azl027
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The British Journal of Criminology 47:61-79 (2007)
© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (ISTD). All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

British Jews and the Racialisation of Crime in the Age of Empire

Dr Paul Knepper*

* The University of Sheffield, Department of Sociological Studies, Elmfield Northumberland Road, Sheffield, S10 2TU; tel; 0114 222 6438, fax; 0114 276 8125; p.knepper{at}sheffield.ac.uk.

In the decades before the First World War (1880-1914), as thousands of Jews from Russia and Poland crowded into London’s East End, journalists, politicians, and anti-immigrant agitators introduced a vocabulary blending racial identity and criminality. ‘Jewish criminality’, embodied in the Jewish prostitute and trafficker, represented a ‘category in the making’. Looking back at this period not only affords an understanding of an early episode of the racialisation of crime, but insight into the response of a racialised population. The London-based Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women (JAPGW), founded in 1885 by members of Anglo-Jewry’s leading families, carried out an extensive anti-trafficking campaign. To understand why they chose to promote public awareness of Jewish involvement in the international sex trade despite the uses to which their efforts would be put by anti-Semites, it is necessary to see their outlook against the historical period in which they lived. The JAPGW countered the racialisation of crime using a conceptual vocabulary common to the era; their outlook reflected ethno-religious commitment, Victorian social convention, and faith in social science knowledge.


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