A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (16 page)

Kuliabko, though, was not quite done with Beilis’s family. The next day, Sunday, Beilis heard
children’s voices outside his door. Dovidke had been brought in for more questioning, along with Beilis’s
oldest child, Pinchas, who was thirteen. If the father did not confess, the Okhrana chief thought, then perhaps something useful could be extracted from the children. But though they must have been pressured to do so, the boys said nothing that would harm their father. Before they were allowed to leave, Beilis was given a few moments with them. He would not see any of his family again for many months.

“There is
no insurance against prison or death.” Beilis would write that this saying made perfect sense to him, being a Jew of his time and place. (His apparent misremembering of the
Russian original—substituting the word “death” for “beggar’s purse”—only made the saying more appropriately emphatic.) Until the moment of his arrest, he had thought himself quite secure in his adopted city. But as a Jew living in Kiev, part of him could not feel entirely surprised at being under lock and key.

The Russian Empire had been hostile to Jews for centuries. The first Cossack massacres of Jews had taken place in the mid-1600s, but the empire was home to few Jews until the end of the eighteenth century. Even the great Westernizer, Peter the Great, who was so open to new ways, could not bring himself to welcome the Jews. (Regarding their possible admission, he is reputed to have declared, “They are all
rogues and cheats; I am trying to eradicate evil, not to increase it.”) In 1727, Peter’s successor, Tsarina Anna, issued a decree banishing the empire’s small Jewish population. Periodic expulsions were the norm until
Catherine the Great took the throne in 1762. It was Catherine’s imperial hunger for large swaths of Polish land that made Russia home to the largest Jewish population of any country in the world. After the Third Partition of
Poland in 1795, about a
half-million Jews became Russian subjects. By 1900, that population had grown to more than five million, and Russia was the only country in
Europe other than Romania that had not granted Jews equal rights. Jews were still almost entirely restricted to the
Pale of Settlement, and even there they were barred from living in many towns, and in the countryside in general. Nor could they own land. But as
Simon
Dubnow, the pioneering chronicler of Russian Jewish life, wrote, “No place in the empire could vie, as regards hostility to the Jews, with the city of Kiev.”

The city Mendel Beilis had called home for fifteen years was, uniquely, located in the heart of the Pale but was not part of it. Jews
were permitted to live in towns and cities within a radius of hundreds of miles in every direction. But they were forbidden to live within the boundaries of Kiev itself without special permission. Legally speaking, Kiev was as “beyond the Pale” as were
Moscow and
St. Petersburg. In some ways, it was even more exclusionary. As the medieval cradle of Russian civilization, the “mother of Russian cities,” Kiev occupied a special place in the Russian national consciousness, making Jewish “intrusion” seem all the more intolerable. Kiev was the only city in the empire that restricted its Jews to certain neighborhoods. These areas—not surprisingly, the city’s least desirable ones—were often described as the empire’s last existing “
ghetto.” Many
poor Jews had no choice but to live in the infernal Plossky district, an industrial wasteland with no sewage system or running water whose residents packed themselves into the minimal gaps between the noxious factories and workshops.
Sholem Aleichem dubbed Kiev “Yehupets” or Egypt, where “from time immemorial Jews have been as welcome to the people of the city as a
migraine.”

And yet, Kiev beckoned. For thousands of Jews like Beilis born in the poor shtetls, or Jewish towns, the city promised a better life. Here one might find employment, send one’s child to a gymnasium where he could become a truly
Russian
Jew with better prospects, or even dream of making a fortune on the stock exchange where, as Sholem Aleichem wrote, “somebody heard … they make
cheese pies from snow and fill sacks with gold.”

A new life in Yehupets was often judged to be worth fearsome risks.
For perhaps every ten or so Jews who lived there legally, there was at least one like the Sholem Aleichem character who “trembled like a thief, lay freezing in misery in an attic all night or curled up like a dog in a cellar.” Kiev police were notorious for their nighttime raids, rounding up Jews, often whole families, suspected of residing in the city illegally. Even Jews who had the right papers might run afoul of some rule or find themselves expelled at the police’s whim. “If they find the contraband, in other words Jews ‘without the right of residence,’ ” Sholem Aleichem wrote, “they herd them like cattle to the police station and send them out of the city with great pomp, deporting them under guard, together with thieves” back to the Pale.

The months leading up to Beilis’s arrest had been the most anxious time for Kiev’s Jews since the pogrom of 1905. Even before the
Yushchinsky murder sparked fear of another Black Hundred massacre, the police raids had intensified. The Yiddish newspaper
Haynt
reported in the spring of 1911 that the Kiev police had come up with an innovation, the
daytime
raid. The correspondent noted with irony the “progress” that signified. “
For what purpose should people be tortured there at night and chaos be caused when the same can be done in the best way possible in broad daylight?” Large squadrons of policemen on horseback and on foot would storm Jewish stores, detaining all clerks and other employees en masse, and march them off “to the nearest police station with great cheer.” Such scenes attracted little attention: “A few people gather in little circles, no larger than when a tailor displays a new suit and pants, or when a stray dog is captured.”

But Kiev still embodied more hope than fear, a feeling that Sholem Aleichem elegiacally evoked:

In Sholem Aleichem’s grand, polyphonic drama of Jewish striving, Mendel Beilis’s story fit into the most mundane plotline. He came to Kiev not to escape anyone or anything or for riches. He was not ambitious. He could have stayed where he was. He wanted only to work and raise a family. But the city’s magnetic attraction was just strong enough to draw him into it after living his first two and a half decades in the Pale.

Mendel Beilis was born in 1873 or 1874, probably
in the small village of Neshcherov, about twenty-five miles south of Kiev. His father, Tevye, was a pious, learned Hasid whom he revered. Mendel could not mention him without noting that the son was the lesser man. Beilis himself had little education, only a few years in a heder, or Jewish primary school. The first years of his life, during the reign of the “Tsar Liberator”
Alexander II, who had freed the serfs in 1861, were a time of
relative prosperity for Jews, who hoped the regime might grant them equal rights. Although emancipation never occurred, the government did relax residence restrictions and expand admission to secondary schools and universities.
Alexander II’s assassination by a bomb-throwing terrorist in 1881 abruptly ended any policy of accommodation. When his son, the reactionary Alexander III, took the throne, a wave of
pogroms swept
Ukraine. The number of victims by the next century’s standards was small, no more than a couple of hundred. But as the first massacres of Jews in the
Russian Empire in nearly 150 years, the
pogroms traumatized the Jewish population.

Even more shocking than the massacres themselves was the official reaction to them. The government viewed violence against the Jews as evidence that the Russian people needed to be
protected
from the Jews. The “
Temporary Rules” of May 3, 1882, known as the May Laws, imposed stricter limits on Jews’ movement and commerce, marking the onset of a long-term decline in Jewish living standards. But the main effect, in historian Salo Baron’s phrase, was to give local officials the ability to subject Jews to “administrative persecutions.” (Most spectacularly, on the first day of
Passover in 1891, all of
Moscow’s Jews, except for a few highly privileged ones, were expelled.) The labyrinth of anti-Jewish measures came to embrace some fourteen hundred statutes and regulations, supplemented by thousands of additional decrees and judicial rulings. The “Temporary Rules” would remain in effect until the fall of the Romanov dynasty in 1917.

Although Jews lacked equal civil rights, they bore equal civic responsibilities. Alexander III demanded of a foreign Jewish delegation, “
Why do they [Russian Jews] evade
military service?” In fact, contrary to legend (including, to some degree, Jewish legend), Jews did not evade the tsar’s conscription any more than Russians did. And around the age of eighteen, Mendel Beilis was drafted into the Imperial Army.

He was sent some six hundred miles northeast to the city of Tver where, like 97 percent of Jewish recruits, he served in the infantry for the ludicrous salary of approximately
twenty rubles a year. Life for all recruits was harsh. But Jews were more ruthlessly punished for minor infractions than their Russian comrades. All Jews were seen as potential deserters and closely watched.

Still, military service was
not the catastrophe for a Jew it had once been. Alexander II had abolished the horrific “
cantonist” system under
which Jewish boys—officially no younger than twelve, but sometimes as young as eight or nine years old—were impressed into the army, often undergoing forced conversions to
Russian Orthodoxy. The original twenty-five-year term of service had been reduced to about five, followed by nine years in the reserves. No attempts were made to convert Jewish recruits. It was impossible to keep kosher, but Jewish soldiers were allowed to gather in the regimental canteens and barracks to celebrate major Jewish holidays and were granted leave to attend seders and services in nearby Jewish communities. The more pragmatic Russian commanders even actively encouraged religious observance, sensibly seeing it as preferable to the traditional soldierly pastimes of whoring and drinking.

Military service did not strip Jewish recruits of their religion, but it did change the kind of Jews they were. For Mendel
Beilis, as for thousands of other Jewish soldiers, the army was a kind of school. “
The Jewish soldier underwent training, served, fought, and ate alongside the Russian Orthodox soldier,” the historian
Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern has written. “His Judaism metamorphosed from a way of life into a creed, sustained by randomly observed rituals.” In the melting pot of the army, Beilis’s command of the Russian language improved. His social interaction with Russians increased his self-assurance. The degree of his religious observance relaxed. The army had prepared him for the big city.

Unlike
Sholem Aleichem’s parade of strivers, though, he did not rush there. He ended up in the profane domain of Yehupets only thanks to an unlikely chain of circumstances that hinged on his revered father’s renowned piety.

A man of solid virtues, Mendel Beilis was never one to exert his will to shape his life. A current swept him into the army, and then to a woman named Esther, whom he married a year after his discharge. Her uncle owned a brickmaking kiln in a town about eight miles from Kiev, where he went to work. And, one day in 1896,
opportunity came to him in the form of a letter from one of his cousins, who worked for the “sugar king” Jonah Zaitsev, offering him a job at the
brick factory he was building in Kiev.

Before he was conscripted, Beilis had worked in a
brandy distillery Zaitsev owned in another town. He had secured the job thanks to his father, Tevye, who, improbably, had been on friendly terms with
Zaitsev, one of the region’s wealthiest men, and had even been invited a number of times to the
rich man’s home. Years later, Zaitsev again took an interest in the son of his poor and pious friend, now dead, and must have felt it a good deed to give a decent job in the city to this young man starting a family.

Fifteen years later,
Beilis was satisfied with his job as the factory’s clerk and dispatcher. The pay was just forty-five rubles a month, plus rent-free lodging, and he worked at it six days a week. But he could pay for his oldest child, Pinchas, to attend a Russian gymnasium to which the boy had been admitted under the 5 percent quota for Jews. (Jews as a whole, by this time, amounted to about 15 percent of
Kiev’s population of 450,000.) David, just turning eight, studied in a heder. Out of six children, they had lost only one, the twin of their two-year-old daughter’s. “I thanked the Lord for what I had,” Beilis later wrote. “Everything pointed to a
peaceful future.”

Beilis’s
arrest on July 22 was supposed to have been kept secret until his formal transfer to the regular police, but the
news soon leaked out. “Finally, it seems, the case is on the right path,” the far-right newspaper
Zemshchina
reported approvingly days later. “The Yid Mendel Beilis, arrested in proposed connection to the crime, was subjected to a second interrogation by Investigator Fenenko.” The report was overly optimistic. Vasily Fenenko, the investigating magistrate, had in fact refused to interrogate or arrest Beilis. A resolute opponent of the blood accusation, he believed Beilis to be
innocent. Behind the scenes an intense battle was taking place over the prisoner’s fate.

Prosecutor Grigory Chaplinsky was absent from the city when the arrest took place, having traveled two hundred miles to the estate of the minister of justice, Ivan Shcheglovitov, to confer about the case, which was taking on imperial importance.
His conversion from Catholicism to Russian Orthodoxy and Russian nationalism seemed to be yielding the rewards to his career that he had hoped for. He had surely expected to spend the weekend basking in the minister’s congratulations over his success in holding a Jew accountable for the Kiev boy’s murder. But on July 23, Chaplinsky was handed a small slip of paper covered with numbers—a coded
telegram from his office. Decoded, it read: