A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (53 page)

When the imperial family’s remains were interred in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in
St. Petersburg in July 1998, Patriarch Aleksy and other high
Church officials refused to attend. The priests presiding over the service did not utter the victims’ names; the ceremony was treated as a ritual that would be performed for unknowns. The refusal of the Church to acknowledge the identity of the remains could, of course, only encourage speculation about the nature of the murders, which continues in the far-right-wing media to this day.
In the post-Soviet era, the sensational accounts of Wilton and the White Russians from the 1920s have been republished and embellished in new versions. One especially popular one, marketed as scholarly nonfiction, features a mysterious rabbi who supervises the ritual.

Then there is the strange case of
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the
anticommunist hero and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature who died in 2008. Though a deeply conservative Russian nationalist, he in no way advocated for the truthfulness of the blood accusation. Yet, in one of his final works,
Two Hundred Years Together,
about the Russians’ relationship with the Jews, he struggles with the Beilis case. He begins with the right question: “
How was it possible in the twentieth century, without a factually based
indictment, to instigate such a
trial that threatened an entire people?” But, as the Russian journalist and historian
Semyon Reznik writes, while Solzhenitsyn makes it clear he “does not approve of those who conducted the Beilis case, he
tries in every way he can to shield them, to obscure the clarity of the picture.”

Solzhenitsyn writes that “Beilis was indicted, on the basis of dubious evidence, because he was a Jew.” The evidence, of course, was not “dubious” but better said to have been nonexistent or fabricated by the state. Solzhenitsyn’s account contains numerous other inaccuracies that invariably cast Beilis’s defenders in a bad light and make his prosecution seem, if not defensible, then a less evil act than it was. On major points he accepts the prosecution’s view of the evidence. Andrei Yushchinsky, he writes, “was killed in an unusual manner: forty-seven wounds were inflicted on him, with apparent knowledge of anatomy,” with wounds whose “apparent goal was to drain his blood while alive.” All those allegations, of course, were contradicted by the defense experts—and in the matter of the perpetrators’ supposed anatomical knowledge, by an expert for the prosecution. It is surely indicative of the modern-day persistence of the blood accusation that one of the greatest Russian literary, political, and moral figures of the last century could not honestly come to terms with the case of Mendel Beilis.

For decades, the grave in Section 34, Row 11, Plot No. 4 of the
Lukianovka Cemetery in
Kiev had been abandoned, lacking even a proper grave marker. The first sign of renewed interest in the site came in 2003 when a
group of about fifteen men dressed in facsimiles of tsarist officers’ uniforms came from St. Petersburg, along with two Russian Orthodox priests, to pay their respects at the final resting place of Andrei Yushchinsky.

Soon after that visit—without official permission, according to the cemetery’s director—neat new shrubbery appeared on the plot, as well as a new cross with two metal plates bearing inscriptions. In the decrepit cemetery, where many graves had turned into weed-filled sinkholes, Andrei’s plot now stood out as unusually well tended.

The inscription on the first plate read:

In calling Andrei a “martyr,” the inscription was inappropriate, since the poor boy’s murder, horrible though it was, had nothing to do with his faith. Beneath the first plate someone had affixed another one, bearing a much more plainspoken and provocative inscription:

In February 2004, after reports of this
anti-Semitic act incited an uproar, the cemetery sought a court order to remove the plate—a legal necessity, according to the director—but within days
someone had made off with the offensive plaque, rendering legal action unnecessary.

Andrei’s grave site continued to attract the attention of the Russian and
Ukrainian Far Right. In February 2006, the
grave was renovated again, thanks to the efforts of a group from a large private Ukrainian university, the Inter-Regional Academy of Personnel Management, known by its Ukrainian acronym MAUP, which has been cited by the U.S.
State Department and the
Anti-Defamation League as a disseminator of anti-Semitic propaganda. The major addition was a rectangular marble tablet placed over the grave, inscribed with the text of the first question to the jury—about the forty-seven wounds and five glasses of blood—which, given the affirmative verdict, supposedly confirmed the existence of ritual murder. Local Jewish groups were outraged by the inscription, but because it was a quote from a court proceeding that was not overtly inflammatory,
no legal basis could be found to have it removed. It remains there today.

It would be mistaken to exaggerate the extent of
anti-Semitism in
Ukraine. Ukraine does not sponsor official anti-Semitism. When anti-Semitic incidents have occurred, the government has condemned them. Nonetheless, Andrei Yushchinsky’s grave site has become a place of pilgrimage for far-right true believers. Every year, on the anniversary of the murder, a sizeable and organized group comes to pay its respects to the Boy Martyr, a thirteen-year-old child whose memory is both celebrated and abused. Smaller groups of mourners make their way there as well. In springtime a visitor will find Andrei’s grave covered with
fresh flowers.

I have many people to thank.

My amazing agent, Renee Zuckerbrot, plucked me off the Internet to suggest I write “a book,” when I had no idea what that book would be, and then saw the potential in this story. Altie Karper acquired the book for Schocken and gave me consistent encouragement during the long process of researching and writing.

Leonid Finberg, head of the Judaica Institute in Kiev, the go- to person for anyone doing research on Ukrainian Jewish history, was indispensable in helping me secure access to archival documents. He also provided me with my indefatigable research assistant, Olga Savchuk.

Thanks also go to my other research assistants: Nicole Warren, who scouted out every possible mention of the case in blurry microfilms of Russian newspapers, and also read through the manuscript, making many useful comments; and Nataliya Rovenskaya, Kateryna Demchuk, Jane Gorjevsky, and Lydia Hamilton.

Katia Shraga transcribed handwritten documents that even native Russians found impossible to read and imparted to me some of her skill.

Professors Natan Meir and Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern provided very helpful research advice along the way. Professor Robert Weinberg was generous with his time, reading and commenting on drafts of several chapters.

David Groff gave me the benefit of his immense editorial acumen throughout the writing of this book. Alexander Zaslavsky and Caroline Howard contributed many incisive and constructive comments on the manuscript.

Jay Beilis, Mendel’s grandson, and his cousin Hilda Edelist were generous with their memories and information about their family and put me onto material I otherwise would not have found.

Mark Stein, coeditor of a new edition of Mendel Beilis’s memoir, shared much interesting material.

Carrie Friedman-Cohen located and translated Beilis’s lost memoir in the Yiddish newspaper
Haynt
and translated most of the Yiddish material in this book; Jessica Kirzane also contributed Yiddish translation work.

Alex Ratnovsky, of the Yeshiva University library, provided indispensable assistance.

My wife, Lilia, fulfilled multiple roles: graphic artist, Russian-language consultant, critical and sensitive reader. I owe her more than I can express.

The major source for information about the Mendel Beilis case is the three-volume trial transcript, which was printed daily in the newspaper
Kievskaia Mysl’
and published in three volumes as
Delo Beilisa: Stenographicheskii Otchet
. These will be cited as: STEN I, II, and III. The transcript is a unique and extraordinary document, the product of a private effort, as Russian trial proceedings were not routinely transcribed in full.

The transcript, however, was recognized at the time by both sides as being not entirely accurate. I have supplemented or used alternative versions of witness testimony as recorded by reporters for the newspapers
Rech’, Kievskaia Mysl’,
and
Kievlianin
and, occasionally, other sources.

In 2005, the State Archive of the Kiev Region, Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Kievskoi Oblasti (GAKO), put out seven reels of microfilm with some five thousand pages of documents about the case.
Dokumenty po delu Beilisa
(
The Beilis Case Papers
) was published by the U.S. firm Eastview Information Services. This material is cited as “GAKO-DpdB” by reel number and in standard archival notation.

I also obtained hundreds of pages of additional documents from the Kiev State Archive. This material is cited as “GAKO” in standard archival notion.

After the February 1917 revolution, the Provisional Government convened an Extraordinary Commission to investigate the crimes of the tsarist regime, including the prosecution of Beilis. The testimony was published in
Padenie Tsarskogo Rezhima
(The Fall of the Tsarist Regime),
cited as
“Padenie.”

Another indispensable source: a collection of depositions given to the Extraordinary Commission by key figures in the Beilis case, published in book form in 1999 as
Delo Mendelia Beilisa: Materialy Chrezvychainoi sledstvennoi komissii Vremennogo pravitel’stva o sudebnom protsesse 1913 g. po obvineniiu v ritual’nom ubiistve
(The Case of Mendel Beilis: Materials of the Extraordinary Investigative Commission of the Provisional Government about the Trial of 1913 on the Accusation of Ritual Murder.)
This work is cited as
Materialy Chrezvychainoi
.

Special mention must be made of the Russian jurist and historian Alexander Tager, author of
Tsarskaia Rossiia i delo Beilisa
(published in English as
The Decay of Czarism: The Beiliss Trial
), and two indispensable articles in the journal
Krasnyi Arkhiv,
collecting important documents about the case.
His effort was heroic and his fate tragic, as he perished in the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. His works are still the only source for much of what we know about the case.

The sources for the personal experiences of Mendel Beilis are his autobiography,
The Story of My Sufferings,
and the multipart interview with him published in the Yiddish newspaper
Haynt
in November–December 1913, “Mayn Lebn in Turme un in Gerikht” (My Life in Prison and the Court). Where the accounts overlap, I have generally preferred the
Haynt
version, given its proximity to the events. Beilis also gave an interview to the Hearst papers, which published a multipart series in the spring of 1914. The material unfortunately contains so many obvious errors and exaggerations that I have used it very sparingly.