A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (2 page)

Despite its remarkable resonance in its own time and beyond, the
Beilis case has been strangely
neglected.
Bernard Malamud, inspired by its power, used it as the basis for his Pulitzer Prize–and National Book Award–winning 1967 novel,
The Fixer.
But not only has there been no full-length nonfiction treatment of the case in nearly fifty years, there is not a single book recounting the complete story of the
investigation and the
trial, based on the original sources, from beginning to end. This book tells the full story of the case for the first time, exposing its genesis in the minds of a few fanatics and its path to worldwide cause célèbre.

The blood libel has been called the
“master libel” against the Jews. It directly inspired the rampant metaphor of the Jews as economic “bloodsuckers.” And more subtly, it’s been argued, it underlies the slander of the Jews as a disloyal, conspiratorial, and parasitical force that exploits its hosts, sucking society’s energy. The Beilis affair, as the outstanding example of the blood libel in the modern era, merits the closest study.

A hundred years after Mendel Beilis was first led into a Kiev courtroom, the killing of Andrei Yushchinsky remains a rallying point for the extreme right fringe in Russia and
Ukraine. The Blood Libel today has its greatest mainstream acceptance in the
Middle East, where it has been featured in major newspapers such as Saudi Arabia’s
Al Riyadh,
propounded by a Cairo University professor, and been the subject of a book by a
Syrian government minister. And in the Middle East, the Jew as vampire or bloodsucker is an all-too-common trope. Still, if the twentieth century has taught us anything, it is that societies that consider themselves “enlightened” need especially to be on their guard against infection by irrational hatred. The ordeal of Mendel Beilis stands as a cautionary reminder of the power and persistence of a murderous lie. In the twenty-first century, the blood libel is still with us.

This is a work of nonfiction based chiefly on primary sources—principally the trial transcript and the voluminous case files in the State Archives of the Kiev Region—and contemporary Russian newspaper accounts, as well as selected articles from the Yiddish press. What I refer to as Mendel Beilis’s “Lost
Memoir”—a lengthy, multipart interview the defendant gave to the Yiddish newspaper
Haynt
(Today) in 1913 that had likely lain unread for a century—has been especially useful in completing a portrait of the man in the dock.

All words in quotation marks come from a transcript, document, newspaper report, or the recollection of a direct participant. No details—no matter how strange they may seem—have been invented.

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All dates in the text are given according to the Julian (Old Style) Calendar, in use in Russia until 1918, which lagged thirteen days behind the Gregorian Calendar used in the West.

In the following narrative, I have generally preferred the term “blood accusation” to the more common “blood libel,” judging it more appropriate to the story of a court case where the validity of the charge is at issue. But the blood accusation has been, always and everywhere, a libel.

T
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EAD
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LAYERS

T
HE
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USPECTS

T
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EN
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HO
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RAMED
B
EILIS

B
EILIS
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D
EFENDERS
: O
FFICIALS
, P
OLICE, AND
J
OURNALISTS

B
EILIS
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TTORNEYS

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HE
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ROSECUTION

W
ITNESSES FOR THE
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EFENSE

W
ITNESSES FOR THE
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ROSECUTION

A
SSORTED
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IFFRAFF

A
SSORTED
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OLITICIANS AND
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FFICIALS

A
NDREI
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USHCHINSKY
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F
AMILY

Two boys were looking for
buried treasure.

Early in the afternoon of March 20, 1911, a pair of gymnasium students of twelve or thirteen set off to explore the
Berner Estate, a scruffy piece of wilderness adjoining the
Lukianovka neighborhood on the northern outskirts of
Kiev. A dozen or so acres in size, strewn with mysterious mounds, ruts, and ravines and dotted with brush, the Berner Estate had an outstanding feature irresistible to adventurous boys: its numerous caves. The
caves had been uncovered accidentally by road workers some six decades earlier, causing considerable excitement among archaeologists and would-be treasure hunters. According to legend, treasure grounds were distinguished by unusual rock formations such as the ones found on the estate. A local landowner, convinced that the caves harbored the lost trove of an early eighteenth-century Cossack leader, ordered an intensive search back in the 1850s.

Treasure was said to be watched over by vengeful guardian spirits, but if the men obeying the landowner’s command were at all fearful of supernatural forces, they were also thorough; by the time archaeologists arrived, every cave but one had been scraped clean of every human artifact. In that sole untouched cave, however, they found the earliest known traces of Kiev’s first Neolithic inhabitants. These were remarkable discoveries—a flint blade, pottery shards, and a burned-out granite hearth so brittle from repeated firings that a trespasser could
pulverize the stone to powder just by gripping a piece of it with his fingers. Further excavation of the area unearthed some
two thousand human skeletons. The Berner Estate had been a burial ground.

By that spring day in 1911, the archaeologists were long gone, and the area had become a no-man’s-land, a local newspaper branding it “a place for the
Lukianovka children’s games, where local hooligans and derelicts have convenient refuge.” But the lore persisted of lost
Cossack treasure, hidden by a leader or “hetman,” or by the rebellious eighteenth-century plunderers known as the
Haidamaks. In the imaginations of the two young boys that March afternoon, somewhere within this broad, bleak slope, only a thousand feet from their neighborhood’s crooked streets, vast riches lay hidden. Standing at the
crest of the slope, which was rather steep, the boys could see the brownish ribbon of the Dnieper River, which marked Kiev’s upper boundary. To the right, about halfway down, they could see the awnings and chimneys of the brick factory owned by the Jew Zaitsev. The neighborhood children liked to sneak onto the factory grounds and play there until the watchman chased them off.