In the second half of the nineteenth century, several thousand impoverished young Jewish women from Eastern Europe were forced into prostitution in the frontier colonies of Latin America, South Africa, India, and parts of the United States by the Zwi Migdal, a notorious criminal gang of Jewish mobsters.
Isabel Vincent, acclaimed author of Hitler's Silent Partners, tells the remarkable true story of three such women—Sophia Chamys, Rachel Liberman, and Rebecca Freedman—who, like so many others, were desperate to escape a hopeless future in Europe's teeming urban ghettos and rural shtetls. Bodies and Souls is a shocking and spellbinding account of a monumental betrayal that brings to light a dark and shameful hitherto untold chapter in Jewish history—brilliantly chronicling the heartbreaking plight of women rejected by a society that deemed them impure and detailing their extraordinary struggles to live with dignity in a community of their own creation.