Abraham Shoenfeld, 1891-1977

Private investigator and writer, Abraham (Abe) Herman Shoenfeld, was born on April 24, 1891 to Meyer and Dora Shoenfeld, Hungarian Jews. Because his father was a political and labor organizer, Abraham grew up surrounded by major political figures and labor leaders. The Shoenfelds lived on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and in 1899, Meyer, with aid from the Baron de Hirsch Fund, helped form a New Jersey agricultural colony, now known as Kenilworth, where he resettled his own family and other Lower East Side Jewish families, mostly those involved in the tailoring business. 1 Abe Shoenfeld attended P.S. 20, graduating in 1905, and entered Stuyvesant High School, but dropped out at the end of his first year at age 15. 2

Young Shoenfeld developed an intimate knowledge of the Jewish criminal subculture on the Lower East Side. He first became an investigator for John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s Bureau of Social Hygiene, under George Kneeland in 1912, and on the foundation of Shoenfeld’s research into New York City’s vice and crime scene, Kneeland wrote the report, “Commercialized Prostitution in New York City,” published by the Bureau.

In the wake of the media stir caused by the July 1912 murder of Herman Rosenthal, Judah L. Magnes hired Shoenfeld, based on his work for Kneeland and his growing expertise on the crime world, to be Chief Investigator for the Bureau of Social Morals of the New York Kehillah. The Kehillah, also known as the “Jewish Community of New York City,” had been founded in response to New York City Police Commissioner Theodore Bingham’s controversial statement in 1908 that Jews were responsible for half the city’s crimes. The aim of the Kehillah’s Bureau of Social Morals, overseen by Magnes, Jacob Schiff, Felix Warburg, William Salomon, Adolph Lewisohn, Louis Marshall and Samuel Greenbaum, was to diminish Jewish criminal involvement by providing criminal intelligence to politicians and the police department and pressuring for action to be taken based on this intelligence. 3

Shoenfeld, together with a team of police officers and a network of informers, infiltrated criminal organizations and establishments. Undercover for his first year, Shoenfeld posed as a writer in order to gather information directly from the criminals. He and his team created an extensive index card file of details on individuals, and he wrote voluminous reports, documenting in detail Jewish criminal culture and social problems from 1912 to 1917 for the wealthy overseers of Kehillah. After 1917, he conducted vice work on a less formal basis, no longer paid a salary by Magnes and without the help of a regular team. He informally passed information along to the police. 4

Shoenfeld was simultaneously giving information to the Narcotics Division of the U.S. Department of Justice between 1912 and 1921. In his unpublished memoirs, he states that he “served the Government from 1912 to April 1964,” but did not receive any direct payment from them. 5

In the early 1920s he worked out of a private office at Felshon Service Investigators on Rector Street. 6 Following that he began writing and doing “ghost jobs,” the term for “assignments of an ultra-private nature.” 7 He wrote the novel The Joy Peddler, which was published in 1927 and incited considerable controversy for its provocative content.

On October 22, 1934, Shoenfeld married Annie Evans, who was 38 at the time.

From 1938 to 1964, Shoenfeld investigated anti-Semitic organizations and individuals for the American Jewish Committee (AJC). In 1938, as part of member Richard Rothschild’s six-point plan and mobilization against Nazi propaganda, the AJC had shifted resources towards investigation of fascist, pro-Nazi organizations and individuals generating virulent anti-Semitic propaganda. Shoenfeld served as the Chief of Investigation under the Legal Division (also known as the Investigative and Fact-Finding Division and the Legal and Fact Finding Division). Shoenfeld coordinated a network of agents who worked undercover within the scrutinized organizations, and he wrote detailed reports for the AJC based on intelligence gathered by his agents and other sources. Some of this information was then utilized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, military intelligence and the House Committee on Un-American Activities. 8

Shoenfeld died in Roosevelt Hospital in New York on September 27, 1977.

From the guide to the Abraham Shoenfeld Papers, 1892, 1920-1978, 2010 (bulk 1927-1964), (American Jewish Historical Society)