Jewish police informers in the Atlantic world, 1880-1914

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dc.contributor.author Van Onselen, Charles
dc.date.accessioned 2007-11-01T10:01:46Z
dc.date.available 2007-11-01T10:01:46Z
dc.date.issued 2007-03
dc.description.abstract The great migration from the tsarist empire, sparked by the assassination of Alexander II, in 1881, saw two to three million east European Jews re-settling in the great cities of the Atlantic world before the First World War. Often discriminated against in labour markets, and socially marginalized in new environments, Russo-Polish males either persisted in, or resorted to, organized crime centred on the illicit sale of alcohol, professional gambling, and prostitution to survive. Atlantic states, however, were reluctant to employ Jews as uniformed police or detectives in their fight against syndicated crime. In order to overcome the challenge of ethnicized crime, law-enforcement agencies, like nineteenth-century tsarist administrations before them, employed informers. Jewish informers who, unbeknown to police handlers, were sometimes also psychopaths in an era before the condition was clinically identified, were used to infiltrate underworld structures. By nature, informing offered a short-term, unstable, existence fraught with unintended consequences for police and spies alike – thereby encouraging extraordinary geographical mobility amongst informers. Orthodox histories of law-enforcement agencies tend to focus on structural changes in police forces but a re-examination of the role of informers in organized crime should allow for the development of more subtle insights into the evolution of policing as a dynamic, interactive, social process. en
dc.format.extent 154694 bytes
dc.format.mimetype application/pdf
dc.identifier.citation Van Onselen, C 2007, 'Jewish police informers in the Atlantic world, 1880-1914', The Historical Journal, vol. 50, no. 1, pp. 119-144. [http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=HIS] en
dc.identifier.issn 0018-246X
dc.identifier.other 10.1017/S0018246X06005942
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/2263/3825
dc.language.iso en en
dc.publisher Cambridge University Press en
dc.rights Cambridge University Press en
dc.subject Jewish informers en
dc.subject.lcsh Informers -- History -- Europe en
dc.subject.lcsh Police -- History -- Europe en
dc.subject.lcsh Jews -- History -- 1789-1945 en
dc.subject.lcsh Europe -- History -- 1871-1918 en
dc.subject.lcsh Organized crime -- History -- Europe en
dc.subject.lcsh Crime prevention -- History -- Europe en
dc.title Jewish police informers in the Atlantic world, 1880-1914 en
dc.type Article en


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