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

by Levin, Edmund

  Hours after Beilis’s arrest, Kazimir “the Lamplighter” Shakhovsky was formally questioned for the first time. He was confronted with the shoemaker Nakonechny’s accusation that he had decided to “pin” the murder on Beilis because the clerk had accused him of stealing wood from the Zaitsev factory. Though he denied actually intending to frame Beilis, Shakhovsky admitted that Nakonechy’s account of their conversation was essentially true. But more important, in this deposition he definitively denied his wife’s claim that he had been an eyewitness to the crime. He declared, “I never told my wife that I saw Mendel drag Andrusha Yushchinsky toward the kiln since I did not see that.”

  Bibulous pilferer though he was, Shakhovsky sounds truthful in insisting that he had no desire to frame his neighbor. Under pressure to implicate Beilis, he had done something he knew to be wrong; now, step by step, he was going to make it right. Questioned again the next day, Shakhovsky went on to retract the story he had earlier told. He still maintained that he had run into Zhenya and that the boy had told him that he, Andrei, and some other children had gone to the factory to play on the clay grinders and had been chased off. But he retracted the essential part of his early claim: “About the man with a black beard, Zhenya didn’t tell me anything, I added that myself. I said that about the man with the black beard because I assumed that no one but Mendel could have been there to scare them off.” He implied he had been pressured to say what investigators wanted: “The detectives [meaning, primarily, Polishchuk] were telling me about Mendel all the time … They talked about that so many times that I decided to add a little myself in my testimony … I have no grudge against Mendel. I only stated my supposition that he could have taken part in the crime.” He then added, “You should ask Zhenya Cheberyak who probably knows about the whole thing but for some reason doesn’t want to tell you the truth.”

  From the beginning, Shakhovsky had hinted at his belief that Vera Cheberyak was involved in the crime. Oddly, the hard-drinking Lamplighter, rather than any of the investigators, was apparently the first person to note an important circumstantial detail. When his wife had caught sight of the boy, she recalled him as holding his books. But when he had seen Andrei, a little later, on that street corner, the boy had no books and no coat. “I personally have no doubt that he left his books and coat at Cheberyak’s apartment,” Shakhovsky told investigators. “Where else could he have put [them]?” It took some courage for Shakhovsky to share his suspicions. Two days earlier the Lamplighter had run into Cheberyak on the street and she had threatened, according to a police report, to “deal with him in her own way.”

  Ulyana Shakhovskaya was formally questioned for the first time on July 22 or July 23, with similar results. She retracted most of her previous testimony, while revealing something of Polishchuk’s interrogation methods. “To my previous testimony, I am adding the following: The day before yesterday … I, with Polishchuk, my husband and an agent drank vodka. From the vodka I drank I got so drunk that I definitely don’t remember anything of what I told agent Polishchuk … My husband never told me that he himself saw Mendel and his son [Dovidke] drag Andrei toward the kiln.” She still insisted that Anna the Wolf told her she saw “Mendel” carry Andrei off under his arm toward the kiln. But Ulyana allowed as how “telling me about this, Wolfie was a little tipsy.” It later transpired that Polishchuk had sat drinking with the Shakhovskys from the time she got off work until three in the morning.

  Ulyana also raised suspicions about Vera Cheberyak. She had run into her on the street on her way to give her deposition. Cheberyak complained that she, too, was under scrutiny and spat out, “Because of a shit like Zhenya, I am going to have to answer.” The phrasing in Russian is ambiguous, with two possible meanings. “I am going to have to answer questions.” Or: “I am going to have to answer for the crime.”

  Chaplinsky, the chief prosecutor, returned to Kiev around July 25. Had he been panicked by the telegram from headquarters? Had he at any point contemplated abandoning the tottering case and letting the prisoner go? Perhaps he hesitated for a few hours or a day. But when he sat down with Brandorf, the local prosecutor in direct charge of the case, and Fenenko, the investigating magistrate, he betrayed no doubt or indecision. He had settled upon a brilliantly simple tactic to deal with the Shakhovskys’ inconvenient recantations: ignore them. Given enough time, he must have calculated, the prosecution would surely secure, in one way or another, the ballast of more “evidence.” People would be found to fill the archetypal roles, especially that of the vivid and ingenuous eyewitness, successor to Thomas of Monmouth’s maidservant who “saw the boy through a chink in the door.” (In this calculation, Chaplinsky would prove correct, if only after an uncomfortably long interval.) The important thing was to keep in custody the only Jew on whom there was any chance of pinning the crime. Chaplinsky must have understood the flimsiness of the case. But he knew pursuing it was in the interests of his career, and he knew he had the backing of the justice minister, Shcheglovitov; in their meeting at his estate, Chaplinsky had surely conferred with him about how to proceed. The murder of a thirteen-year-old boy was now a priority of the imperial government.

  The tsarist regime was not entirely lawless; a man could not be held by the Okhrana “as a matter of state security” for more than two weeks, which under certain circumstances was extendable to one month. When the time limit expired, the prisoner had to be handed over to the regular police and charged with a crime or set free. Chaplinsky, in any case, saw nothing to be gained by keeping Beilis locked up as a political prisoner. The whole point was to very publicly charge him with the bloodthirsty killing of a Christian child.

  As Fenenko and Brandorf sat down with Chaplinsky to discuss what should be done with the prisoner, they knew that they had one point of leverage. Chaplinsky did not have the power to directly order Beilis officially arrested and criminally charged. Only Fenenko, as the investigating magistrate, could do that. Chaplinsky could dismiss Fenenko, of course, but that would cause a scandal, which he surely wanted to avoid.

  Fenenko, true to his straightforward nature, simply told Chaplinsky that, in view of the clearly false nature of the testimony, it amounted to slander against an innocent man, and he would not order the arrest. Brandorf, more diplomatic and canny, tried to reason with Chaplinsky. He later recalled the scene:

  In order to prove the insufficiency of the basis for charging Beilis, I scribbled down on a piece of paper all the arguments laid out by Chaplinsky, and it added up to some kind of unbelievable assortment of suppositions and guesses, but no kind of logical framework of a pattern of evidence. When I read aloud this shameful, from my point of view, “indictment” and expected that it would … convince him of the impossibility of charging a person with murder on the basis of such information—let alone for a “ritual” purpose—the effect was the opposite … Chaplinsky found that on paper “it came out even better.”

  At this point, Brandorf stopped arguing. He did threaten to draw up a memo making the case for charging Vera Cheberyak that would be much more well-founded than the one against Beilis. But Chaplinsky, recalled Brandorf, “told me that he couldn’t allow an Orthodox Christian woman to be charged in a ‘Jewish’ case.” In this way, he let it be known that he was abandoning the outlandish theory linking Beilis and Cheberyak as partners in crime. Only the Jew would stand accused. The “Christian woman” would soon be released.

  Nikolai Krasovsky had been marginalized in the case due to his unnecessary and disastrous detour into investigating Andrei’s family. But he was belatedly regaining the form that had made him one of Russia’s most respected detectives. Fenenko now brought him in to refute the allegations against Beilis. Krasovsky laid out the results of his investigation with complete objectivity. In a deposition on July 26, Krasovsky expressed his opinion that Pinchas Beilis was not telling the truth when he (for what would have been understandable reasons) denied knowing Andrei, finding that he had, in fact, played with Andrei and Zhenya a number of time
s. (There is no testimony in the record confirming they knew each other, though Andrei had a number of Jewish playmates.) He duly reported the unfounded rumors that Beilis and Cheberyak had been on intimate terms. More important, he reported that another search of Beilis’s home and surrounding premises had turned up a bag of tools belonging to the factory harness maker, including several awls; Krasovsky had shown them to autopsy specialist Tufanov, who categorically determined that none of them could have inflicted Andrei’s wounds. Krasovsky concluded: “I can present no information pointing toward the participation of Mendel Beilis” in the crime.

  Though utterly convinced of Beilis’s innocence, under pressure from Chaplinsky Fenenko did partially relent. He agreed to order Beilis’s arrest by the police, but only on the condition that Chaplinsky give him a direct order in writing. Fenenko could have resigned—he was a man of some means, had no family to support, and could have managed without the government salary. But he decided the only result would be his replacement by a servile tool of the prosecution, and justice would be better served if he stayed on. At least, this was the explanation he gave later. But perhaps it was a rationalization; his very probity ultimately made him uncomfortable with an extreme act of defiance.

  Chaplinsky did not immediately agree to Fenenko’s condition. The investigating magistrate’s pristine reputation meant his stamp of approval would add immensely to the case’s credibility. This was something too valuable to give up without a fight. But Fenenko would not give in. The confrontation played out over four days. On July 29, Chaplinsky relented, informing the minister of justice that he was personally recommending Beilis’s arrest. On August 3, with two days remaining in the two-week time limit for holding Beilis at the Okhrana, Chaplinsky gave Fenenko the formal written order he had demanded.

  Fenenko had heard Chaplinsky argue his case, but he still may have been shocked at the written order’s incoherence, twisted logic, and brazen fabrications.

  Chaplinsky’s order to Fenenko was nearly identical to his report to minister of justice Shcheglovitov. “The murder of Andrei Yushchinsky,” the prosecutor informed the minister, “was committed by Jews for the purpose of obtaining Christian blood for the fulfillment of Jewish religious rituals.” This judgment, he continued, “finds full confirmation in the conclusions of the Archimandrite Ambrosius and the distinguished professor in the department of psychiatry Ivan Alexeevich Sikorsky.” (The contrary opinion of the distinguished theologian Father Glagolev goes unmentioned.)

  In a parody of deductive reasoning, the order to Fenenko leads to the preordained result step by shaky step. The body was found near the Zaitsev factory, which was “under the supervision of the Jew Mendel Beilis.” The factory contained “capacious kilns,” which could serve as a “convenient place for commission of the crime.” (No matter that Krasovsky and Fenenko examined the premises and concluded that the crime could not have been committed there.) The brick factory was “the only place in the area” with clay matching that found on the boy’s clothing (contradicted by Krasovsky’s analysis). Awls found at a Zaitsev factory workshop were “of the kind that inflicted all of the wounds” on the boy (already definitively dismissed by the pathologist). The security of the crime scene would have had to be ensured by someone. “Therefore”—the fatal word—“it stands to reason that the Zaitsev factory manager would have been in on the plan.”

  In both his report to the justice minister and in his order to Fenenko, Chaplinsky then slips in an astonishingly candid admission. Taken as a whole, the prosecutor concludes, “all the not completely firm testimony pointing toward Mendel Beilis … of Kazimir and Ulyana Shakhovsky, Adam Polishchuk and other witnesses, acquires the character of serious evidence against him.” The only eyewitness testimony against Beilis, he is conceding, is “not completely firm”—a euphemism for untrustworthy, coerced, and recanted. (What he meant by “other witnesses” is a mystery, since there were none.)

  Chaplinsky hides nothing. He admits the story that Kazimir Shakhovsky saw Beilis and his son dragging Andrei to the kiln was “not confirmed.” He reveals that Anna “the Wolf” Zakharova had failed in her audition for the archetypal role of eyewitness to the terrible deed; she had “categorically declared under questioning that she told nothing to Ulyana Shakhovskaya and did not have any conversations about Yushchinsky’s murder.” And yet, he insists, “one cannot but come to the conclusion that Mendel Beilis took part in commission of the murder.”

  Fenenko, having received the order to charge Beilis, requested that the prisoner be brought to the courthouse. Unfortunately for the investigator, the arrest would not be merely a matter of signing an arrest warrant. His sense of duty required that he personally inform the prisoner he was being charged with a murder that both of them knew he did not commit.

  Kuliabko did not question Beilis again after that first day at the Okhrana. He had, unsurprisingly, turned out to be an inept interrogator. Forcing a confession out of Beilis would have required genuine inquisitorial ability—the kind of guile and instinct for a prisoner’s psychological vulnerability of a Krasovsky. Moreover, Beilis was discovering in himself a new kind of strength that Kuliabko’s simplistic bullying, however agonizing, could not overcome.

  Beilis was left alone, except when he was brought his meals, which he could not touch. He lost weight, and by the time Kuliabko appeared on the seventh day of his confinement he could barely stand.

  “Well,” Kuliabko said, “have you already considered your situation?” It was a final, feeble invitation to confess.

  “I have nothing to consider,” Beilis replied, “because I do not know anything.”

  That was their last exchange. That day, July 28, Beilis was transferred to a police precinct house. The mechanism for his criminal arrest and charging was being set in motion.

  The premises in his new jail cell were a little brighter. A few Jews who had been detained in the regular police raids were held there and one of them, a tailor named Berkowitz, tried to comfort Beilis. Berkowitz had been brought in a month earlier when the police found one of his grown sons living with him, having come to the city to recuperate from an illness. The son was deported back to the Pale. Berkowitz was arrested for harboring an “illegal.”

  Every day the tailor’s wife would bring him food and drink, and when she arrived Berkowitz persuaded Beilis to partake. Berkowitz told him he should remain strong and not lose hope. “Let us make a toast,” he said, pouring them both some brandy. “L’Chaim. You will see that the Almighty will help.” Beilis had no appetite, but he ate and drank one little glass of brandy and then another. He felt stronger and his mood lightened a bit, but then he remembered that he had had no word from home and no visits since that day when he had seen his children. He wondered if his bosses or anyone from the factory was trying to help him. He got a piece of paper and wrote a letter to Dubovik, the factory manager, and sent it off with Berkowitz’s wife. At least he could now be sure people would know of his situation.

  Suddenly, Beilis was informed by a police officer that he was being summoned to meet with the “investigator.” He was unfamiliar with the exact meaning of the word, but at the district court he was led into a large room where he recognized Investigator Fenenko as the man who had visited the factory a number of times after Andrei was murdered. Also present was A. A. Karbovsky, who had replaced Brandorf as the prosecutor in charge of the case.

  Fenenko began by asking, “Did you know Andrei Yushchinsky?” Beilis responded that while he may have seen him on the street, he did not know him.

  Fenenko and Karbovsky bandied about Jewish religious terms that he did not know. Karbovsky, in particular, would consult a notebook and ask him questions with words like pidyon (a ritual fee paid a rabbi on behalf of a firstborn son) and aphikomon (the piece of matzo hidden at the Passover seder) and misnagid (non-Hasidic Jew) to which Beilis could only shake his head. His ignorance was unfeigned. (Questioned after her husband’s arrest, Esther Beilis told the authorities, “My husb
and is not at all religious … He even works very often on Saturday and doesn’t observe Jewish holidays since he’s a poor man and we have no time to celebrate anything, but have to work for our daily bread to support the family.”)

  So when Fenenko asked, “Was your father a Hasid?” Beilis could not understand why he was being asked the question, and it also somewhat confounded him. He later confessed: “I must also tell you that I really did not know, and it is still not entirely clear to me what a ‘Hasid’ is. In my understanding, a ‘Hasid’ is a religious Jew who strictly abides by all the laws, and dresses in long clothing. According to this understanding, all Jews in my opinion were divided into two types—‘Hasidim,’ meaning, all religious Jews who wear long clothing, and non-Hasidim, meaning today’s Jews who wear short clothing, and do not abide by the laws. And so, because my father, may he rest in peace, was very religious, wore long clothing, and strictly abided by all the laws—I considered him a Hasid.”

  So to Fenenko’s question, Beilis answered, “Yes.”

  “And you yourself?” Fenenko asked, “Are you also a Hasid?”

  “This, as bad as I felt, caused me to smile,” Beilis recalled. “Me a ‘Hasid’?!” he thought. He replied that he was a simple God-fearing man but no Hasid by any measure.

  A reluctant Fenenko was likely given his list of questions by Chaplinsky, whose line of inquiry was focusing on the supposedly nefarious Hasids or Hasidim. Hasidism had originated as an ecstatic, mystical Jewish movement in mid-eighteenth-century Poland and now constituted a large plurality of the region’s Jews. The region’s other main Jewish strain consisted of the misnagdim or mitnagdim—literally “opponents” of Hasidism—who propounded a more traditional form of the faith. By Beilis’s time, the acrimony between the two groups had subsided, and in matters of religious observance their distinctions were minor. But the Hasidim would be portrayed by the prosecution as a sinister and secretive sect, “the men with black beards,” who conducted the bloody and barbaric ritual.