Some time ago I wrote an article on the anti-jewish ideas and tropes that appear in Arthur Conan Doyle's stories about his fictional consulting detective: Sherlock Holmes. (1) In this article I mentioned in passing that the Holmes' arch-nemesis Professor James Moriarty was largely based on a real individual named Adam Worth and that he was jewish.
I wanted to briefly enlarge on this point here, because it is an interesting aside in literary history and also worth noting to opponents of the jews everywhere.
Now the master-criminal literary archetype on which Moriarty's role and persona dates from much earlier than Conan Doyle's own work. Specifically it derives from the novelist Wilkie Collins' character Count Fosco in his 1859-1860 serialized novel 'The Woman in White'. (2) Moriarty is as such almost entirely based on Collins' Count Fosco (and we know that Conan Doyle had read 'A Woman in White'). (3)
Moriarty is at the same time however an inversion of Count Fosco; as the latter was a fat, jovial man who hid his malice and scheming behind that exterior and used his apparent good humour to great advantage in his schemes. Meanwhile Moriarty is lean (almost skeletal), reclusive, emotionally cold and hides from the world rather than embracing it wholesale as Fosco does.
The more obvious reason for this inversion itself might be that the man that Adam Worth was very much like Fosco and very unlike Moriarty (much like Worth's similarly jewish tutor in criminality Frederika 'Ma' Mandelbaum I might add). (4) Worth was jovial, very socially active and hid his criminality behind a high-rolling and good humoured exterior.
There is no doubt that Conan Doyle based Moriarty's modus operandi and his achievements on Worth's career. (5) For example Morarity's spider-like network of agents performing crimes that their leader plans and who are provided excellent legal representation in case of capture is directly taken from Worth's real world criminal set-up. Another is Moriarty's theft of the 'Mona Lisa' from the Louvre by a daring scheme in much the same as Worth stole the famous painting 'The Duchess of Devonshire' from a London art gallery using not dissimilar methods to his fictional descendant.
Indeed Holmes' famous description of Moriarty as the 'Napoleon of Crime' is directly taken from Sir Robert Anderson's (of Jack the Ripper fame) description of Worth in the 1880s. (6)
It seems reasonable to suppose that what Conan Donan did is to take the master-criminal literary archetype pioneered by Collins' in Count Fosco character and combine that basic idea with Worth's real world activities and methods to create a composite, but yet utterly believable, character to oppose (and attempt to kill off) Holmes.
Now as a jovial, verbose and socially able character is hardly what you'd expect as a criminal mastermind (especially in Victorian London) and is a difficult one to write in literary terms. Conan Doyle simply inverted Fosco and Worth turning the master criminal from chubby/fat into thin and skeletal (i.e., more sinister and spider-like) from an uneducated loud mouth to a hyper-educated cold-calculating machine (again better fitting Worth's criminal methodology in literary as opposed to realistic terms [hence the fact that Moriarty is a Professor of Mathematics]) and from a social butterfly to a social misfit (to complement the idea of Moriarty as the spider at the centre of the criminal web and a man in the shadows rather than hiding in plain sight).
When we combine that with the knowledge that before he wrote 'The Valley of Fear' (i.e., the Holmes story where Moriarty is first described in detail) Conan Doyle read a book which heavily featured Worth called by 'The Molly Maguires and the Detectives' by Allan Pinkerton (of the Pinkerton Detective Agency) (7) and his 'The Valley of Fear' has been described as a long paraphrase of Pinkerton by some literary scholars who have compared the two texts. (8)
Then it becomes clear that Professor James Moriarty is based almost purely on Adam Worth and the details that are used to try and argue against this are simple inversions or literary additions to make Moriarty far more sinister looking and sounding than his real-life jewish model: (7) Adam Worth.
References
(1) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/the-anti-semitism-of-sherlock-holmes
(2) Judith Flanders, 2011, 'The Invention of Murder', 1st Edition, Harper Collins: London, p. 293
(3) Ibid.
(4) On Mandelbaum see my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/fredericka-ma-mandelbaum-jewish-supercriminal
(5) Ben Macintyre, 2012, [1997], 'The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and times of Adam Worth, The Real Moriarty', 1st Edition, Harper Press: London, p. 208
(6) Ibid., p. 209
(7) Ibid., p. 212
(8) Ibid., p. 213
(9) On Worth's jewish origins see ibid., p. 6