This paper analyzes two Jewish sex-workers cemeteries from late-nineteenth-century and early- twentieth-century New York. During this era, the Jewish community took part in an international burial boycott intended to clamp down on Jewish prostitution. This boycott came both out of concerns for the women being trafficked, as well as the shame prostitution brought upon the Jewish community more broadly. Indeed Jewish communities identified both women who engaged in sex work and the men who trafficked them as impure (tmeim). In response to the burial boycott, a Jewish organized crime ring founded the New York Independent Benevolent Association (NYIBA) to free people engaged in the sex trade from burial discrimination. While other Jewish benevolent associations were typically organized based on nostalgic connections to the “Old Country,” members of the NYIBA were bound together by a life of crime. Founded in 1896, the NYIBA included not only prostitutes, but pimps, brothel owners, and cadets (procurers of women). While the organization did not officially traffic women, many members did. Thus the NYIBA both protected female sex workers and the men who harmed them. My presentation provides the first in depth analysis of the NYIBA cemeteries in Brooklyn and Queens.
In this paper, I analyze American Jews’ use of burials to control Jews involved in the sex trade, and sex workers’ subsequent rebellion against that control. Previous scholars have highlighted religion’s role in necropolitics, that is the way death is used to control populations. However, their analysis has typically ignored burial sites in favor of other necropolitical practices such as incarceration (Ringer, 2021; Young, 2022). In contrast, I turn to NYIBA’s cemeteries in Brooklyn and Queens to understand wayward Jews’ response to death subjugation. Methodologically, my analysis also differs from prior studies of Jewish “impure” cemeteries in Argentina and Brazil in my close attention to the NYIBA cemeteries’ spatial layout, inscriptions, and iconography. I do so to reveal how the NYIBA used their cemeteries to memorialize the dead and combat Jewish communal attempts to dictate who could attain eternal life.
The NYIBA cemeteries of Brooklyn and Queens reflect how Jewish immigrants changed burial practices in the greater New York metropolitan area between 1880-1920. While early New York Jewish cemeteries had largely been the domain of synagogues, post 1880 fraternal organizations increasingly cared for the Jewish dead. As in Europe and the Ottoman Empire, New York cemeteries traditionally provided Jews with a portal into the “world to come” (afterlife) as well as positive integration into communal memory. Both New York City and the Jewish community, however, limited access to a “good death” for people violating communal norms by waging what anthropologist Jason de Leon has referred to as a “war upon the corpse” (De León, 2015, p. 68).
Sex workers’ need for proper burial was paramount as the city targeted New York’s poor, diseased, and criminalized for necroviolence. A term coined by anthropologist Jason de Leon, necroviolence is the “violence performed and produced through the specific treatment of corpses that is perceived to be offensive, sacrilegious, or inhumane by the perpetrator, the victim (and her or his cultural group), or both” (De León, 2015, p. 69). The city used an archipelago of “ghostly islands” at its periphery to isolate, quarantine, or punish people deemed undesirable, including sex workers. A low-lying mudflat, Hart Island contained the city’s main potter’s field, what Natasha Lushetich has referred to as a “graveyard of the dispossessed”—a place where bodies were “stripped of being” and “quickly returned to the state of simple skeletons…emptied and insignificant corporealities” (Lushetich, 2018, p. 206). Even worse, between 1854-2016, the city allowed medical schools to dissect unclaimed bodies. Many religious Jews understood Jewish law as forbidding dissection, but even secular Jews considered postmortem dismemberment as a form of social death, since the “dissected body was nothing but a collection of body parts and waste, a thing” (Sappol, 2004, p. 35; Steinberg, 2003). This “thingification” was typically reserved for the city’s poor, nonwhites, immigrants, criminals, manual laborers, and prostitutes.
American Jewish crime syndicates like the NYIBA fought against these humiliations by creating their own cemeteries. By creating their own burial grounds, members of organized crime rings were able to revere their dead. To be sure, the funerals themselves were part of commemoration. Yet even after the crowds dissipated, however, gravestones insisted upon members’ esteem and familial ties. Following a brief overview of the NYIBA cemeteries’ origins, I analyze the cemeteries with attention to three elements: (1) spatial separation, (2) allusions to the afterlife and purity, and (3) honoring the dead via inscriptions. Each element accentuates communal attempts to socially erase the impure, and wayward Jews’ resistance to necroviolence. Equally important, NYIBA cemeteries underscore the religious practices of those deemed irreligious.
My study of the NYIBA cemeteries reveals how wayward Jews sought to honor and perpetuate the memory of their dead. The creation of alternate burial societies for those deemed “wicked” allowed wayward Jews to commemorate the dead as they sought fit, gaining freedom over their afterlives. As such, the NYIBA cemeteries expand our understanding of marginal Jews’ religious activities and their search for social inclusion. While Jewish communities often assumed that criminalized Jews did not care about their souls, this appears false. Gravestones in the Brooklyn NYIBA commonly include poignant pleas for the deceased’s immortality of the soul and perpetual memory. Moreover, wayward Jews engaged in rites designed to ensure members’ purification before and after death.
Works Cited
De León, J. (2015) The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail. University of California Press.
Lushetich, N. (2018). The Aesthetics of Necropolitics Rowman & Littlefield International.
Ringer, C. D. (2021). Necropolitics: The Religious Crisis of Mass Incarceration In America. Lexington Books.
Sappol, M. (2004). A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity In Nineteenth-Century America. Princeton University Press.
Steinberg, A. (2003). Encyclopedia of Jewish Medical Ethics, trans. Fred Rosner. Feldheim Publishers.
Young, R.F. (2022). World Christianity and Interfaith Relations. Augsburg Fortress Publishers.
This paper analyzes American Jews’ use of burials to control Jews involved in the sex trade, and sex workers’ subsequent rebellion against that control. Previous scholars have highlighted religion’s role in necropolitics, that is the way death is used to control populations. However, their analysis has typically ignored burial sites in favor of other necropolitical practices such as incarceration. In contrast, I turn to NYIBA’s cemeteries in Brooklyn and Queens to understand wayward Jews’ response to death subjugation. Methodologically, my analysis also differs from prior studies of Jewish “impure” cemeteries in Argentina and Brazil in my close attention to the NYIBA cemeteries’ spatial layout, inscriptions, and iconography. I do so to reveal how the NYIBA used their cemeteries to memorialize the dead and combat Jewish communal attempts to dictate who could attain eternal life.