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

by Levin, Edmund

  Drawing on the power of that Talmudic saying, Beilis began to eat and sleep better; maintaining his own well-being was a way to spite his people’s enemies. He resolved to live to see the day when the truth would be revealed.

  As Beilis sat alone in his jail cell, murmuring long-forgotten prayers, he could take solace from something else as well. Civilized opinion was rallying to his cause. He was indeed becoming “a second Dreyfus.”

  The first mention in the West of Andrei Yushchinky’s murder came from Reuter’s news agency. At the end of April 1911, the agency—with no editorial comment—telegraphed to its subscribers a translation of a sensational article about the case from the Russian far-right press. (A sample: “In bygone days the Chassidim used to crucify their victim, but later they considered it sufficient to drive nails into various parts of his body …”) Credulous editors published the article in a half-dozen provincial newspapers in Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and it also served as the basis for a few reports in American papers. The London-based Jewish Chronicle expressed outrage “that an agency of the reputation and standing of Reuter’s should aid in circulating these infamous slanders.” Dr. Herbert Friedenwald, secretary of the American Jewish Committee, accused the Russian government of ginning up the ritual murder charge “as a pretext for starting a pogrom” or, even more insidiously, with the goal of inciting the Russian populace in order to demonstrate that the regime had the power to prevent a pogrom if it so desired. (The speculation was off the mark—even at that early stage of the affair, the regime sought to avert anti-Jewish violence.) Friedenwald declared the case to be another reason to support the committee’s campaign for the abrogation of America’s commercial treaty with Russia.

  For well over a year, Friedenwald’s statement was the last of any note by an American public figure about the case. Once news of the accusation against Mendel Beilis seeped into the West, the worldwide protest movement in his defense began not in the United States or Great Britain, but in Germany. The realm of Kaiser Wilhelm II was initially the most hospitable soil for an effort to defend a Russian Jew. France and Great Britain were allies of Russia; together, the three countries constituted the Triple Entente, an alliance whose goal was to counter German power. The French and British foreign ministries avoided any issue that might unnecessarily upset the Russian government. Public opinion in France and Great Britain ran strongly against the kaiser’s regime; to press judgment unduly on Russia exposed a critic to the charge of undermining the entente and being pro-German. W. T. Stead, one of the greatest British journalists of the era, took Jewish anti-Russian activists to task for this very reason. “No one has ever accused me of anti-Semitism,” he wrote in one of his final articles before he boarded the RMS Titanic in April 1912, for a voyage in which he would be one of the 1,514 casualties. “I owe too much to the authors of the Old and New Testaments … I am all the more bound to warn my Jewish friends that they may give dangerous impetus to anti-Semitism if they persist in subordinating the interests of general peace to pursuit of their vendetta with Russia.” Stead, a renowned humanitarian and champion of civil rights, was no reactionary, but as the historian Maurice Samuel acerbically observed, “One cannot help wondering how he saw a vendetta of the Jews against the Russian government rather than the reverse.”

  Launching the pro-Beilis movement, then, was a politically complex maneuver. Jewish leaders in Western Europe, much like their Russian counterparts, faced their own sensitive, tactical decisions when it came to defending their brethren. Fortunately, Western European Jews had two remarkable leaders—one German, one British—of superb sophistication in the ways of diplomacy, the press, and public opinion. Dr. Paul Nathan was a philanthropist and head of the Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden, or Aid Society of German Jews. Lucien Wolf led the Conjoint Foreign Committee of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Anglo-Jewish Association. He was also a diplomatic correspondent for leading British newspapers and editor of Darkest Russia, a weekly chronicle of the plight of the Russian Jews. The two men, who were close friends, were sometimes referred to in jest, but not inaccurately, as “the ministers of foreign affairs” of German and British Jewry. No one could accuse Nathan and Wolf of timidity, but they were careful to formulate the pro-Beilis effort as a movement of outraged Gentiles. This was not to be seen as a “Jewish” protest. They solicited no Jews to sign the open letters they organized.

  The public advocacy for Beilis took off following Beilis’s indictment in the spring of 1912. Nathan launched the effort, coordinating the first open letter, denouncing the “unscrupulous fiction” of the blood libel. Published on March 19, 1912, it was signed by German as well as Austrian and Danish religious leaders, scholars, politicians, and writers, including Gerhart Hauptmann, who would win the Nobel Prize in Literature that year, and novelist Thomas Mann. Ten days later an open letter in France condemned the “absurd” and “libelous” charge against Beilis, signed by 150 luminaries including the future Nobel literature laureate Anatole France. The text of each letter was diplomatically fine-tuned: the German version was addressed to humanity at large, making an appeal in the name of civilization, while the French signatories, taking the tone of colleagues counseling a valued ally, were careful to call themselves “friends of Russia.”

  The ebullient Margolin would have enjoyed explaining to Beilis how the greatest men of the age were denouncing the Russian government because of what it was doing to him. Perhaps Beilis had heard of Sherlock Holmes, whose name had already entered the Russian and even Yiddish lexicon as a synonym for a great detective? His creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, had signed the open letter that had been published in the Times of London along with some 240 other notables. Among the luminaries signing the British letter were the archbishops of Canterbury and York; the primate of Ireland; the Speaker of the House of Commons and leading members of Parliament, including Labour Party leader J. Ramsay McDonald; numerous professors at Oxford and Cambridge universities; and eminent writers such as Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw.

  Dated May 4, 1912, the Times letter declared, “The question is one of civilization, humanity and truth. The blood accusation is a relic of the days of Witchcraft and Black Magic, a cruel and utterly baseless libel on Judaism, an insult to Western culture and a dishonor to the Churches in whose name it has been formulated by ignorant fanatics.” The letter warned that there was “grave reason to fear” that the revival of the incendiary charge could provoke violence and “endanger many innocent lives.”

  That the British signatories declared themselves to be “animated by the sincerest friendship for Russia” did nothing to mollify the Russian government. Baron Heyking, the Russian consul general in London, indignantly responded in a letter to the Times of London on May 10, 1912. “The accusation of ritual murder is not at all leveled against Judaism and the Jewish people as a whole,” Heyking wrote, “but only against the accused, who is believed to belong to a small secret sect carrying the Talmudian teaching to the extreme of ritual murder.” He insisted: “That secret sect must not be confounded with the Jews at large.” But the baron, in defending the honor of his government, unintentionally gave the game away. He was apparently unaware that, officially, the defendant was at this point not accused of ritual murder; in fact, the court had explicitly ruled to the opposite effect when it excluded the testimony of expert witnesses on the Jewish religion as irrelevant. But the baron, like everyone else, understood perfectly well that the heart of the case was the blood accusation. And, even as he denied it, he made it clear that “the Jews at large” stood accused. His letter clearly implied that if the horrific rite was inherent in “the Talmudian teaching,” then every Jew must share in the guilt.

  Through an intense exercise of personal will, Mendel Beilis had retained his grip on his sanity, but his initial, sickening intuition about the delay in the trial was utterly correct. His stay in judicial purgatory would be longer than anyone anticipated—thanks in part to his obvious innocence,
which was proving to be a serious nuisance to the government.

  “The trial will undoubtedly end in the exoneration of the defendant due to the impossibility of factually proving his guilt,” Kiev governor A. F. Giers to wrote an Interior Ministry official on April 19. When the defendant was set free, he feared, “[it] would make an extremely distressing and unpleasant impression on the Russian population.” Among the Jews, his acquittal would “arouse indescribable jubilation and joy.” This was, in other words, a formula for disorder, violence, pogroms. The governor did not dare suggest dropping the case, however. He was worried exclusively about its timing. Elections to the Duma were taking place in the fall. Any disorder at that time would be most unfortunate. He respectfully recommended that the trial be postponed until after the elections. Informed of the request, justice minister Shcheglovitov immediately agreed. Beyond his recognition of the impact of the trial, what is notable about Shcheglovitov’s decision is that the man in charge of the imperial judicial system, the prime backer of the case, believed that Mendel Beilis would in all likelihood be acquitted.

  The trial would ultimately be delayed far into the next year. The postponement transformed the case, providing all parties the gift of time. It gave the prosecution time to manufacture new evidence. It gave Vera Cheberyak time to scheme. And it gave Margolin and Brazul, aided now by Nikolai Krasovsky, formerly the chief detective on the case, time to take the offensive.

  In March 1912, Krasovsky returned to Kiev unemployed, disgraced, and determined to regain his reputation. The previous fall, with sorrow and relief, he had washed his hands in frustration of this cursed case. Then on New Year’s Eve 1911, he had been shocked to be summarily dismissed from his post as a provincial police officer. Now it seemed that his fate, like that of Mendel Beilis himself, depended on unmasking the real killers of Andrei Yushchinsky.

  Krasovsky had held from the beginning that, in the absence of physical evidence, the only way to crack the case was to coax someone into confessing. Exactly how he was going to accomplish this he had no idea. He was no longer a police officer; he could not arrest a suspect, bring him in, and interrogate him in the hope the person would break. He would have to find a way to penetrate Vera Cheberyak’s gang and trick one or more of the perpetrators into confessing.

  Arnold Margolin was glad to have the renowned detective working on his side. But now that he was officially Beilis’s attorney, he acted more cautiously than he had previously, keeping himself one step removed from the investigative work and using two of his liberal lawyer colleagues as intermediaries, even as he stayed deeply involved in Krasovsky’s efforts. With Margolin’s covert help, Krasovsky and Brazul formed a somewhat uneasy partnership. The detective had his doubts about the journalist. When they met, Krasovsky berated Brazul for failing to consult with him before going public with his preposterous theory that the blind Mifle was behind the crime. (Perhaps Krasovsky had forgotten that he had brushed off Brazul’s first offer of collaboration some months earlier.) But now Brazul had finally come to the conclusion—correctly, in Krasovsky’s view—that Vera Cheberyak was not merely someone who had information about the murder but was herself complicit in the crime.

  Over the next several weeks, Krasovsky formulated a plan that at first blush seems outlandish: they would penetrate the gang with help from the treacherous Russian revolutionary underground. Krasovsky and Brazul quickly settled on two young revolutionaries they thought they could recruit to their cause. Amzor Karaev was a twenty-five-year-old anarchist-communist of noble birth. By nationality an Ossetian from the Caucasus, he had served four prison sentences, including three and half years for possession of explosives. Flamboyant, violent, and mercurial, he has been described as a character straight out of Dostoyevsky. His fellow radical, Sergei Makhalin, was a twenty-one-year-old aspiring opera singer and agricultural college dropout who had been arrested three times for political crimes, including for an “expropriation”—as revolutionaries called their robberies—when he was just sixteen years old. He belonged to no party and had no ideology other than hatred of the regime and a desire to enlighten the masses; he gave free classes on urgent questions of the day, with the hope of imbuing in the common folk, as he put it, “the spark of truth.”

  It might seem absurd to turn to two such figures to exonerate a Jew wrongly accused of a murder believed to have been committed by professional criminals. But while Krasovsky’s plan was audacious and risky, it had a cunningly persuasive rationale. The Russian revolutionary underground and the criminal underworld overlapped. In fact, one so shaded into the other that it was sometimes difficult to know who was a radical and who was a criminal. Contemporaries called it “the seamy side of revolution.” As one anarchist leader lamented, too often “the bomb-thrower expropriators … were no better than the bandits of southern Italy.” The revolutionary movement, of course, had a strong intellectual contingent, which included men such as Stolypin’s assassin Dimitry Bogrov or, to name two much better-known figures, the future leaders of the Bolshevik revolution, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. The “seamy” and intellectual contingents converged as well, but the criminal crew did much of the dirty work, especially the armed robberies that funded the movement. In this period the future Soviet supreme leader Joseph Stalin was the pistol-packing, bandit revolutionary par excellence, organizing and taking part in numerous bank robberies and holdups in his native Georgia. Karaev, like Stalin, was from the Caucasus, where revolutionary cells were most likely to act like traditional bandit gangs.

  But not just any revolutionary figure would do for the task that Krasovsky had in mind. He needed a man who was both in good standing in the underworld and would be taken seriously by the public and, possibly, a jury. In the spring of 1912, this was not an easy brief to fill; being a revolutionary no longer had the righteous glamour it previously possessed. Just a few years earlier, in 1905 and 1906, throwing a bomb or stealing from the state or the plutocrats earned one a halo of romantic allure. Assassinations of tsarist officials—an average of about ten per day in those years—earned the sympathy, if not open approval, of respectable liberals. By 1912, however, disillusion had set in. The regime had collected itself and crushed the revolutionaries. Revelations that leading radicals had secretly been police informers tarnished their popular appeal. The recent assassination of Prime Minister Stolypin struck even liberals who detested him as a senseless atrocity.

  In Amzor Karaev, Krasovsky and Margolin believed they had a rare man who retained the charisma of the revolutionary outlaw. Karaev was idolized by his fellow convicts for his bravery and brazenness in standing up to prison authorities. He was famous, in particular, for one extraordinary incident. One day, several years earlier, he had complained to a prison guard of a toothache and asked to see a doctor. The guard mocked him and refused his request. In protest, Karaev emptied the contents of a kerosene lamp on the floor. For this offense he was convicted, unjustly, on charges of attempting to escape. When Karaev saw the guard again he stabbed him to death. Karaev was charged with murder, but a jury acquitted him, and he returned to prison a hero. The verdict might seem like a surprise, and little is known about how the jury reached its conclusion, but until about 1907 much of the Russian public, and even quite a few officials, were highly sympathetic to the revolutionaries, which sometimes allowed liberal lawyers to obtain surprisingly lenient sentences if not outright acquittals. With his radical swagger and lawbreaking reputation, Karaev certainly seemed like the kind of man who could gain the confidence of Vera Cheberyak’s confederates. The question was how to persuade him to come to Kiev and take part in the emerging plan.

  Brazul approached Makhalin, an acquaintance of his, and told him of the scheme. Like Krasovsky, Makhalin had his doubts about Brazul, whom he considered a “frivolous” person, but he signed on to the plan. He had known Karaev in prison and he sent him a cryptic letter to his home in his native Ossetia, saying he had an important matter to discuss and it had to be in person. Karaev agreed to c
ome to Kiev.

  When Karaev arrived in the city, and Makhalin dropped by his hotel room to explain why he had summoned him, Karaev’s initial reaction was apoplectic. He was enraged that Makhalin had made him travel thousands of miles to hear such a proposal. “You want me to conduct an investigation?” he said, in Makhalin’s recollection. “How dare you!” He was offended at what he took to be an enticement to violate his criminal code of honor. Karaev took out his pistol and started waving it around—a gesture he resorted to when he felt a point needed emphasis. Makhalin tried to calm him, telling him that they should just sit down and have a sensible talk. Karaev put away the gun and listened as Makhalin assumed the earnest tone he employed when teaching his free classes to the poor. He explained to Karaev that, in his view, the Beilis case was “introducing poisonous anger in the masses” and it was necessary to do something about it. Makhalin understood the powerful hatred underlying this case; as a boy, he later testified, he had witnessed a pogrom, an experience that had helped turn him into a revolutionary. Karaev felt himself being persuaded by Makhalin’s appeal to his conscience. As an anarchist-communist, he could only despise all discrimination based on race or religion. The pair then met with Krasovsky, who at first concealed his identity, presenting himself as “Mr. Karasev,” a gentleman who had taken an interest in the Beilis case and was helping with the investigation (an assertion that was more or less true). Karaev took three days to think things over and then informed Makhalin he would take part in the plan to prove the innocence of the poor Jewish brick-factory clerk.

  Karaev, Makhalin, and Krasovsky would all later provide accounts of how the plan was executed, with all of them agreeing on all important details. Their versions would closely correspond to the one offered by Vera Cheberyak’s half brother, Peter Singaevsky, except for those details that incriminate him. Those discrepancies would set the stage for a dramatic confrontation at Beilis’s trial, as Cheberyak and Singaevsky faced their accusers in open court.