“A Generation of Monsters”: Jews, Prostitution, and Racial Purity in the 1892 L'viv White Slavery Trial

Abstract

“How long will the jackals continue to feed upon our live bodies?” So begins a Polish newspaper's depiction of the rapacious activities of twenty-seven alleged international traffickers on trial for transporting girls from Austrian Galicia to brothels and harems in the Middle East, Africa, and the Americas. Aft er years of veiled discussion in the Polish-language press about the mysterious disappearance of poor female workers and peasant daughters, the case erupted in the fall of 1892, with lasting implications for the way trafficking and the domestic sex trade would be understood in the Habsburg lands and the former Polish territories alike. Seventeen men and ten women—all of them Jewish—stood trial for a decades-long conspiracy to scour the Crownland in search of “human goods” and “sell them to … local public houses or transport [them] abroad.” The affair helped define the public's perception of the sex trade in Eastern Europe between the 1880s and 1930, as thousands of young women were smuggled out of the region and into sexual servitude. The trial played out in the Galician administrative capital of L'viv, a city of mixed Polish, Jewish, German, and Ukrainian population. Trial transcripts and newspaper coverage provide a rare glimpse into the secret world of commercial sex at the turn of the twentieth century. More importantly, commentary from the journalists and local citizens attending the proceedings offers a window into the way the Galician public understood the commercial sex trade, a tolerated practice that employed medical doctors, police inspectors, landlords, pimps, and procurers, alongside the prostitutes themselves. The trial attracted attention as far away as Cracow, Warsaw, and Vienna, where the Austrian parliament devoted a fiery session to its outcome and to a discussion of the “shameful outrages of the Jewish people” in the aff air. In the Galician setting, public exposure to the horrors of international prostitution networks contributed to a new and more militant direction in Polish nationalist sentiment, one that inextricably linked sexuality with ethnicity.