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

by Levin, Edmund

  You can understand how bitter my heart was. I sit and think about the tragedy that had so suddenly fallen on my head, when I hear a cry from the corridor, a child’s cry. I listen carefully, and my heart begins to tremble—I recognize the cry of my child Dovidke. Why is he here? What do they want from him? All of my limbs began to shake. I could not bear it and I began to bang on the wall.

  Beilis’s youngest son David (Dovidke) barely eight years old, had also been taken in the raid. Kuliabko was personally interrogating him. About a quarter of an hour later, the Okhrana chief entered with another boy—Vera Cheberyak’s son, Zhenya.

  “So you see,” Kuliabko said, “I caught your son telling a lie. He told me that he had never played with Andrusha Yushchinsky and Zhenochka says that he did play with him.” Beilis remained silent. He did not know what to say. Kuliabko then abruptly left the room with the boy, giving Beilis time alone for dark thoughts to gather.

  I again remained for a few hours with my bitter heart. The feeling that my son was held in captivity tortured me terribly. He was a little boy, a pitsl…and moreover still very weak. His cries, which I heard, stabbed me like a knife, and I could not calm myself down. An even worse impression, that I will never forget, was made on me a little while later, when I saw him through the window of my room, which looked out to the corridor. I stood there and looked through the window; he was walking with one hand on the other, his head bent down. My heart shrunk terribly and again, even stronger, I began to bang on the wall.

  Kuliabko reentered. “Why are you banging?”

  “What do you want with my son?” Beilis said. He began, he recalled, “to cry and beg.”

  “Have no fear, we will not let any harm come to him,” Kuliabko said, and then left Beilis alone to face his first night in prison.

  The door opened and a woman brought in some food. “I do not want to eat,” he told her, and asked her to give the food to his boy. The woman, who was a Christian, had tears in her eyes and told him that the boy had already been given some food.

  “What is he doing there?” Beilis asked.

  “Nothing, he is sitting on the bed,” she answered, wiping the tears from her eyes.

  Beilis reached into the torn pocket of his waistcoat for some loose change that he had neglected to hand over in the rush and confusion of the arrest. He tried to give the Christian woman the twenty kopeks, but she would not take them. He took comfort from this kind woman looking after his son, but he spent a sleepless night.

  In the morning the Christian woman returned.

  “Well, how is he?” Beilis asked her. “What did he do at night?”

  “He slept with me,” she answered, “but neither of us could fall asleep.” Again she began to cry. After she left, hour after hour, Beilis jumped up at every creak in the corridor, running to the window, hoping to catch sight of his son. At around ten o’clock in the morning, Beilis heard voices through the wall. One said: “Do you know how to get home?” And immediately after that: “Take him away.” Beilis rushed to the window and saw his son walking with a guard. This time he was not walking with his head bent but held high, a smile on his face. They were letting Dovidke go home.

  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 Yushch
insky 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:

  Where can a homeless young man go who dreams of achieving something in his life? Of course, to the big city. The big city is … a magnetic center for everybody who is looking for business, work, profession or position. A newly married man who has spent his wife’s dowry; a husband who is disgusted with his wife; a man who quarreled with his father-in-law or mother-in-law or with his parents; a merchant who broke with his companions—where will all of them go? To the big city.

  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 Investig
ator 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:

  MENDEL CHEBERYAK ARRESTED MATTER OF SECURITY SHAKHOVSKYS DENY TESTIMONY OF AGENT TOMORROW WILL QUESTION WOLF.

  The message’s form—unpunctuated, run-on, fevered—suited its alarming content. Mendel Beilis and Vera Cheberyak had been arrested as a “matter of state security.” The Shakhovskys—the Lamplighters—were now denying or recanting what they had told “agent” Adam Polishchuk about the man with the dark beard, who was supposedly “Mendel.” This meant the case, such as it was, had ceased to exist. The proponents of the anti-Semitic theory of the case were pinning their hopes on the forthcoming interrogation of the drunken derelict Anna the Wolf. The heavy-drinking Shakhovskys had not been formally deposed. Their stories had only been relayed in reports by Polishchuk, the renegade former police officer Krasovsky thought was working for him but who was actually doing the bidding of Golubev and the far-right Union of Russian People. The couple had indeed said the words Polishchuk had written down, but their stories were wildly contradictory and unreliable. And now the couple was being questioned in what was, for the prosecution, their most dangerous state: sober.