Edmund Levin - A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel

There was in Asia, in a great city,

Among Christian folk, a street of Jewry,

Sustained by a lord of that country

For foul usury and lucre of villainy,

Hateful to Christ and to his company;

And through the street men might ride and wend

For it was free and open at either end.

A little school of Christian folk there stood

Down at the farther end, in which there were

Many children, born of Christian blood.

from The Prioresss Tale,
The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer

In the spring of 1911, a young boy was found stabbed to death in a cave on the desolate outskirts of the city of Kiev, then part of the Russian Empire, his body riddled with some fifty puncture wounds. Four months later, a troop of police and gendarmes raided the home of a Jewish brick factory clerk named Mendel Beilis and dragged him off to prison in the middle of the night. Beiliss trial for the murder of thirteen-year-old Andrei Yushchinsky, which took place in the fall of 1913, was the most sensational court case of its time and surely one of the most bizarre ever tried in an ostensibly civilized society. The case was front-page news around the world. The reason for the intense international attention: the Russian state had charged Beilis not simply with the boys murder but with the ritual Jewish killing of this Christian child.

Beilis was an improbable candidate on whom to pin a crime supposedly associated with his race. As a Jew, he was barely observant and of modest religious learning. But soon after the discovery of the body, the Russian anti-Semites known as the Black Hundreds were leveling the centuries-old slander known as the blood libel or blood accusation. A leaflet passed out at the boys funeral proclaimed, The Yids have tortured Andrusha Yushchinsky to death! If a Jew was to be accused, Beilis turned out to be, for reasons that will become clear, the most convenient choice. Only slowly comprehending the tremendous significance of his case, Beilis found himself at the center of an anti-Semitic maelstrom.

The notion that, for their demonic purposes, Jews commit ritual murder to obtain Christian blood, generally the blood of children, had its origins in Western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The blood libel was a hardy and persistent bacillus, sometimes lying dormant for decades, then erupting virulently. At the turn of the previous century a spate of alleged ritual murder cases arose across Central and Eastern Europe. But there had never been a court case like the Beilis trial in Kiev, a prosecution that was pursued with the full backing of the state.

The corrupt and decadent Russia of Tsar Nicholas II was pervaded by a violently paranoid fear of Jewish power, as evidenced by the some fourteen hundred different government statutes and regulations limiting where Jews could live, what schools they could attend, and which professions they could pursue. In the centurys first few years the Black Hundreds killed and maimed hundreds of Jews in horrifying pogroms, with imperial officials often willfully ignoring the violence. It was around this time that Russian anti-Semites are believed to have fabricated the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Jews supposed secret plan for world domination.

In its judicial procedures, if not in its genuine respect for human rights, Russia emulated the West, with the full apparatus of courts, judges, and juries. To prove the charge of ritual murder, the prosecution would duly produce expert witnesses: pathologists, clergymen, even a psychological profiler. That the methods of Western justice could be so perverted in the service of this case is part of what gives Mendel Beiliss story so much of its eerie resonance. The toxic mixture of the medieval and the modern was a formula whose destructive power would be fully realized in the heart of Europe a generation later.

I first heard of the Beilis case as a boy from my Russian Jewish grandmother, who would recount tales of the old country, and of the Jews persecution under the tsars, around the dinner table. (How I wish now I had written those tales down.) I recall her once telling a story or two and then saying with a half shake of her head and a pained and bitter smile, And Mendel Beilis! as if those three words contained a world.

Many years later, moved by that memory to learn more about the case, I was surprised to find that the last book about it had been written nearly a half century earlier and that the only account based on primary sources had been published in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. I also learned that, after the fall of the Soviet state, the archival materialsincluding the original case fileshad become accessible to foreign scholars. But no one had mined them to tell the full story of the Beilis affair from its strange beginnings to its dramatic and ambiguous conclusion.

Within weeks I was scrolling through thousands of documents on microfilm, later supplemented by hundreds more obtained directly from the archives, many of which were labeled top secret. My effort to reconstruct the two-and-a-half-year drama took me to Kiev, now the capital of Ukraine. A hundred years to the day after the crime, I was walking the citys streets, retracing the route young Andrei Yushchinsky had taken for a secret rendezvous with his best friend on the last day of his life. As I sat in the main Kiev library, reading remarkably well-preserved daily newspapers, I felt as if I was reliving the events as they happened.

The secret documents and other materials, especially the transcript of the thirty-four-day trial, do indeed contain a worlda complex and a fascinating one. The story encompasses the vast and varied panorama of East European Jewish life in the era: one of fantastically wealthy Jews, such as Kievs beet sugar magnates, of poor Jews, and of working-class Jews like Beilis who saved their kopeks to send their children to Russian schools, hoping to give them a better life. But the story takes in much more: not only the network of the Jews persecutors and their intrigues, but the many good Christian Russians who tried to stop the case, and a parade of both colorful and malevolent lowlifes who figured into Beiliss fate. The story also offers a surprising window into the revolutionary underground, which was to produce the men who would rule Russia in just half a decades time.