Jack The Ripper And The Whitechapel Murders

Superintendent Arnold wrote a report which agrees with his account.[3] Detective Constable Daniel Halse of the City of London Police, arrived a short time later, and took down a different version: "The Juwes are not the men who will be blamed for nothing."[4] A third version, "The Juws [sic] are not the men To be blamed for nothing", was recorded by City surveyor, Frederick William Foster.[5] A copy according with Long's version of the message was attached to a report from Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Charles Warren to the Home Office.[6] A summary report on the writing by Chief Inspector Swanson rendered it as "The Jewes [sic] are not the men to be blamed for nothing."[7] However, it is uncertain if Swanson ever saw the writing.[7]

Author Martin Fido notes that the writing included a double negative, a common feature of Cockney speech. He suggests that the writing might be translated into standard English as "J.ews will not take responsibility for anything" and that the message was written by someone who believed he or she had been wronged by one of the many J.ewish merchants or tradesmen in the area.[17] Historian Philip Sugden has said that the spelling of "J.ews" as "Juews" could reflect a local dialect on the part of the author of the grafitto.[18]

In the controversial book Jack the Ripper: British Intelligence Agent, author and "master of the paranormal"[19] Tom Slemen claims that "Juwes" is a Manchurian word[20] meaning "two", and that Sir Charles Warren, a respected archaeologist who had knowledge of both the Biblical and Manchu languages, must have recognised the out-of-place word, and yet claimed he was baffled by the reference. In 1909 (says Slemen), Warren presided over a lecture with Claude Reignier Conder entitled "The Origins of the Chinese" at London's Caxton Hall, in which the similarities to the Manchu and European languages were pointed out, and the word Juwe was said to be the root of the English words dual, duet, duo.[21] Slemen uses this theory to finger Conder as the Ripper.

A contemporaneous explanation was offered by Robert D'Onston Stephenson, a journalist and writer interested in the occult and black magic. In an article (signed "One Who Thinks He Knows") in the Pall Mall Gazette of 1 December 1888, Stephenson concluded from the overall sentence construction, the double negative, the double definite article "the Juwes are the men", and the unusual misspelling that the Ripper was most probably French. Stephenson claimed that an "uneducated Englishman" or "ignorant J.ew" was unlikely to misspell "J.ew", whereas it was similar to the French juives. He excluded French-speaking Swiss and Belgians from his suspicions because "the idiosyncrasy of both those nationalities is adverse to this class of crime. On the contrary, in France, the murdering of prostitutes has long been practised, and has been considered to be almost peculiarly a French crime."[22] This claim was disputed by a native French speaker in a letter to the editor of that same publication that ran on 6 December.[23]

Author Stephen Knight suggested that "Juwes" referred not to "J.ews," but to Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum, the three killers of Hiram Abiff, a semi-legendary figure in Freemasonry, and furthermore, that the message was written by the killer (or killers) as part of a Masonic plot.[24] There is no evidence that anyone prior to Knight had ever referred to those three figures by the term "Juwes".[25] Knight's suggestion was used in fictional treatments of the murders, such as the film Murder by Decree, and the graphic novel From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell.

In addition to the confusion over the exact wording and meaning of the phrase, and whether it was written by the murderer or not, author and former homicide detective Trevor Marriott raised another possibility: the piece of apron may not necessarily have been dropped by the murderer on his way back to the East End from Mitre Square. The victim herself might have used it as a sanitary towel, and dropped it on her way from the East End to Mitre Square.[26] In Marriott's own words, it is an explanation that "many experts will regard as unbelievable".[27]

A still from Murder by Decree showing its depiction of the Goulston Street graffito. The film portrays "Juwes" as a Masonic term, and the original graffito was written in cursive script, not capitals.