ABSTRACT

As information emerged about the risks facing women travelling alone from Eastern Europe – unfulfilled marriage promises, problematic divorces and men seeking women for prostitution rings – women’s groups in Britain, Germany and America developed services to aid women and children, 1 their ‘natural clientele’. 2 By the mid-1880s, acting out of Jewish values and Victorian morality, prominent Jewish women began to combat the association of Jews with trafficking by founding a Jewish rescue association. Rescue work attracted a number of Christian and Jewish women who sought to ‘purify’ public and private spheres. Some of the reformers promoted restrictive legislation – a controversial approach for feminists. Religious faith motivated many rescue workers. 3 Jews wanted to challenge public associations of foreigner with ‘Hebrew’ and white slavery. 4 Because prostitution was, as Paul Knepper notes, ‘profoundly embarrassing for Jews concerned with framing Jewish identity within British class, racial and gender sensibilities’, it sparked an atypically visible response. 5