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

by Levin, Edmund

  As for the Beilis case, minister of justice Shcheglovitov confidentially acknowledged its flimsiness to more than one person. But there was never any question of dropping the case. The minister looked upon the thinness of the evidence against the defendant as but a challenge to be overcome. Conversations he had in the year or so leading up to the trial document how he groped toward a novel and cunning solution.

  A meeting with an old acquaintance in mid- to late 1912 captures Shcheglovitov when he was at his most uncertain and even pathetic. When the acquaintance, a government official named Vladimir Talberg, scolded him for backing a case that rested on such a “shaky foundation,” he did not dispute the assessment. But he insisted that “long experience” had taught him that even in a “hopeless” case, “the talent of the chief judge,” as well as the prosecutor, aided by “unexpected turns of events,” could result in a conviction. He was, in other words, counting largely on biased conduct from the bench and blind luck.

  By the summer of 1913—that is, two or three months before the trial—Shcheglovitov seized on the hope that the problem lay not in the evidence but the failure of the prosecution to make the most of it. He complained that Kiev’s chief prosecutor, Grigory Chaplinsky, had let him down. Surely, he thought, a competent investigator could firm up the case. To that end, he summoned Arkady Koshko, the chief of detectives of the Moscow police, to St. Petersburg to review the entire case file.

  After a full month of work, Koshko met with the minister again to brief him on his conclusions. Koshko’s memoir sheds unusual light on the minister’s thinking. “The investigation was conducted improperly, one-sidedly and, I would say, in a biased manner,” Koshko recalled telling the minister, to his extreme irritation. The detective saw no evidence that Beilis was guilty, nor any convincing reason to believe the crime was ritual in character.

  After listening to Koshko’s presentation for a few minutes, the minister interjected, “I can see that at the impending trial the Jews will have no better defender than you!”

  “I am not at all defending the Jews,” Koshko replied. “I am just reporting to Your Excellency my completely objective opinion.”

  Shcheglovitov then took another tack, whose significance Koshko did not fully understand at the time. “Let us assume for a moment that Beilis is innocent,” he said. “Isn’t it obvious to you that this was ritual crime?”

  “No, it is not at all obvious,” Koshko replied.

  The minister told Koshko, “I have never doubted it [the crime’s ritual character] for a minute, based on the irrefutable conclusions of the great authority, Father Pranaitis,” the prosecution’s expert witness on the Jewish religion. For some time the detective and the minister argued over this point—whether the evidence pointed toward a ritual murder, irrespective of Beilis’s guilt. As they sparred, the minister demonstrated great familiarity with the work of the Tashkent priest.

  “I hope that the verdict of the jurors will shake your philo-Semitic views,” the minister said, concluding the conversation, pointedly without extending his hand: “Good day, sir!”

  Shcheglovitov’s remarks to Koshko were the first hints that the state had come up with an innovative insurance policy against the failure to convict the defendant. The minister’s attempt to separate the issue of Beilis’s guilt from that of the ritual nature of the crime would become the heart of the prosecution’s strategy. Judge Boldyrev, it was decided, would ask the jury to consider two questions separately. The first question would be straightforward: Was the defendant innocent or guilty of the murder of Andrei Yushchinsky? The second question would, in effect, ask the jury to decide whether Andrei Yushchinsky had been killed as part of a Jewish ritual. (The exact wording of the question, which had yet to be worked out, would be indirect, but unmistakable in its implication.) The jury would be free to find Mendel Beilis not guilty, but the prosecution’s argument would lead it to answer the second question affirmatively. Treating the issue of the blood accusation separately from the guilt of the defendant appears to have been historically unprecedented. Whoever thought of it, perhaps Shcheglovitov himself, had hit upon an ingenious maneuver.

  The prosecution, then, felt an unusual level of comfort in putting on a case against Beilis that it understood was highly flawed. It knew that it would still have a chance at a favorable verdict, even if the jury found the defendant not guilty. On this matter the prosecution was surprisingly candid. Not long before the trial began, Beilis’s attorney Vasily Maklakov ran into civil prosecutor Georgy Zamyslovsky in the halls of the Duma, the parliamentary body in which they both served. Maklakov told Zamyslovsky that he thought the prosecution’s case was weak. “Let him [Beilis] be acquitted,” Zamyslovsky replied. “What’s important to us is to prove that this was a ritual murder.”

  Still, the prosecution had hardly given up on getting a murder conviction against Mendel Beilis and condemning him to a life of hard labor. It knew that it had two illicit advantages over the defense: it was receiving daily intelligence reports on the sequestered jurors, and it had an active ally in Judge Boldyrev. For the first five days of the trial, the judge, perhaps out of concern for his reputation, had conducted the trial in an impartial manner, repeatedly admonishing prosecutor Vipper for his procedural infractions. “The judge often interrupts the prosecutor,” a police agent telegraphed in a report to St. Petersburg at the end of the fifth day, “That severely unnerves him.” The judge’s conduct of the trial, the agent noted, greatly dissatisfied Kiev’s chief prosecutor, Grigory Chaplinsky. Someone, probably Chaplinsky himself, must have had a talk with Boldryev because the next day the agent reported that the judge and Vipper had “made up.” By the eleventh day, another agent noted approvingly that “the judge skillfully directs the attention of the jurors to the details [of the prosecution’s case]…and subtly but unmistakably guides witnesses who become confused to the right path.”

  Boldyrev was aware of the illegal surveillance of the jurors, approved of it, and, with Vipper and Zamyslovsky, avidly listened to reports of their private conversations. His bias in favor of the prosecution would become more and more apparent. But only at the end of the trial would it become clear to what extreme lengths Judge Boldyrev would go to maximize the chances of a conviction.

  Unaware of these machinations, after a long court day was over, the exhausted defendant looked forward to laying himself down on his nice new cot; but as he slumbered his trial went on. All over America Mendel Beilises were taking to the stage, putting themselves in the dock with great flair, lending the proceedings the fine dramatic form they lacked in real life. “The Mendel Beilis epidemic,” anticipated with such distaste by a dyspeptic critic, was intensifying. The Yiddish productions played to packed houses of spectators who cheered Gruzenberg, hooted at the prosecution, and cried at the woes of the defendant, who was invariably tortured without mercy. The Yiddish press expressed outrage and embarrassment at the plays, denouncing them as “shund”—trash, cheap melodrama. “The audience sheds rivers of tears,” one dismissive critic wrote of a New York production. “Every woman soaks seven handkerchiefs … and every man three.”

  But the plays spread the news. Many productions left the denouement unresolved, adapting to events as they developed, amounting, in the words of one historian, to “three-dimensional newsreels.” And they were precocious expressions of a wave of public protest only now gaining momentum in the country.

  One of the few to grasp this point was an editorial writer in the New York–based Zionist newspaper Dos Yiddishe Folk (The Jewish People). The popularity of the plays, the author argued, “shows once more the nationalism and deep Jewishness of most of our people … It is this feeling that has given us sufficient strength to withstand the many enemies who rise up in every generation to annihilate us.” The author was far more perceptive than the ostentatiously high-minded critics. They failed to pick up on what the popularity of the vulgar plays said about American Jews: their sense of solidarity, their commitment to justice, and
their potential for collective action.

  With the Yiddish theater acting as a kind of raucous chorus, a massive grassroots movement in support of Beilis had belatedly begun sweeping the United States. The American Jewish Committee, America’s leading Jewish lobbying organization, remained wary of public protests as possibly counterproductive. (So, too, establishment leaders in Europe. In Germany, the Jewish Chronicle reported the assimilationists to be “furious” at the Zionists for organizing pro-Beilis rallies. In Great Britain, Lucien Wolf, known as the Jewish community’s “minister of foreign affairs,” wrote that he favored “discreet diplomacy,” arguing in a private letter that the “protest meetings or other Jewish agitation on the Blood Accusation will only play into the hand of the anti-Semites.”)

  The American Jewish Committee organized a letter of protest from prominent Christian clergymen, which it hoped the State Department would deliver to St. Petersburg through proper channels. But around the nation, countless Jewish congregations and local Jewish organizations began taking action on their own, spontaneously holding rallies and petitioning the White House. They were joined by many local and state governments and a variety of Christian and other groups. The New York and Wisconsin state legislatures passed resolutions condemning the trial. The House of Deputies of the Episcopal Church called on the Russian Orthodox leaders to declare the ritual-murder charge against the Jews to be false. The New York Esperantists pledged to instigate a worldwide protest movement and drafted an open letter, in Esperanto, for distribution throughout Europe. The success of the Esperantists was rather limited, but in America the pro-Beilis movement would culminate in some of the largest mass protests of Jews and greatest upsurge of Jewish-Christian solidarity the country had yet seen.

  As the eighth day of the trial began, the courtroom was overflowing, the seats filled with “elegant women and girls of Kiev society, clergymen, military men, officials,” the Kiev Opinion contributor Bonch-Bruevich said in a dispatch. “Lorgnettes, binoculars (though forbidden)…and a sea of feathers in women’s hats, flutter, shake and obstruct one’s view.” Every court officer with an excuse to be present sat in a row behind the judges’ bench, their gold buttons gleaming. The crowd was not simply excited, according to one Kievan reporter, it was ravenous. All the spectators wanted to be able to say that they had been there for the testimony of the notorious Vera Cheberyak.

  As opening acts, the witnesses preceding her that day were cast to perfection, maintaining the interest of the audience but not upstaging the dark diva herself. Mendel Beilis made one of his periodic cameo appearances. He never took the stand during the trial, but he did exercise his right under Russian court procedure to give an “explanation” on a specific matter, describing how he had supervised the baking and delivery of matzo for his employer Jonah Zaitsev, an activity that the prosecution presented in the most sinister light. Beilis explained there was no ritual for the production of matzo, just a rabbi present to ensure that the crew observed the rules of kosher baking. “These are just illiterate Jews,” he told the court. “They roll out the matzo, and then might start eating bread and drinking tea. And that’s strictly forbidden. So [the rabbi] is watching so that … they don’t do that.” A reporter noted that Beilis spoke more loudly than he had on previous occasions and “with a great deal of gesticulation.” He would still weep from time to time but was becoming more comfortable in the courtroom.

  Then Detective Krasovsky’s former assistant, Adam Polishchuk, an elegantly dressed young man with a crew cut and short beard, took the stand. Krasovsky had once trusted him, but now Polishchuk was a full-fledged participant in the effort to convict Beilis. Asked his profession, he told the court that he worked for the secret police. When Krasovsky had hired him, he had been an unemployed police officer; presumably his new job was a reward for the service he was about to provide.

  Polishchuk, startlingly, proceeded to accuse Krasovsky of murdering Vera Cheberyak’s two children with poisoned pastries, in contradiction to the pathologists’ report that conclusively proved that they had died natural deaths of dysentery. As for the defendant, Polishchuk suggested that Mendel Beilis had murdered Andrei in league with the hay and straw dealer Faivel Shneyerson, who took his meals at the Beilises’ home. (The prosecution, in essence, made an unindicted coconspirator out of Shneyerson, a young man who was supposedly of the noble line of Lubavitcher Hasidic wise men.)

  But Polishchuk, prodded by the defense, made his greatest impression with his description of Zhenya Cheberyak’s deathbed scene. In August 1912, while still working for Krasovsky, he had been assigned to watch over the gravely ill boy. Because his original deposition was part of the record, he could not lie about this key episode. He said nothing willingly, forcing the defense to dig for every detail. But even in his halting rendition, the story was chilling. Nothing could blunt the eeriness of how Zhenya’s final thoughts turned to his dead friend, or the attempt by his mother to persuade her dying boy to exonerate her (“Tell them, little one, that I had nothing to do with it”) and her apparent fear that he would say something to incriminate her, as she silenced him by covering his mouth with kisses.

  Eleven-year-old Ludmila Cheberyak, Vera’s only surviving child, her chestnut hair divided in two braids that reached nearly to her waist, directly preceded her mother on the stand. She possessed not only her mother’s large eyes, dark brows, and long eyelashes, but the same ability to spin tales. She struck observers as having unnatural poise for one so young, yet somehow maintaining an air of childish innocence as she told the nightmarish story of the children’s jaunt to the Zaitsev factory and how Beilis and two other Jews had supposedly chased them.

  The defense had earlier argued the whole story had to be false because, in the fall of 1910, the Zaitsev factory management had put a complete stop to the children’s visits to the clay grinders by erecting an impassable wooden fence. The fence was the subject of endless testimony. The defense probably got the better of the argument, but negatives are notoriously hard to prove and it was a challenge to rule out the possibility that the children had ever found a way through the fence, which made Ludmila’s testimony crucial.

  “We were playing on the clay grinders,” the girl told the court. “After a while the factory manager Mendel”—prosecution witnesses always seemed to give Beilis a promotion—“started chasing us and the others chased us as well.” Her story was well wrought (undoubtedly with the help of her mother and perhaps the prosecution), as if to insulate her from cross-examination. She did not assert that she herself had seen Beilis grab Andrei. Such an account would have opened her to an aggressive line of questioning from the defense. She said she had only heard Andrei scream as she and the other children were chased off. However, she said her younger sister, Valia, now conveniently deceased, had seen Mendel grab Andrei: “She screamed and told me, ‘Andrusha, Andrusha, they dragged him off.’ ”

  The judge then called for an eye-to-eye confrontation between Ludmila and the shoemaker Nakonechny’s daughter Dunya. Ludmila claimed that Dunya had been playing with her and the boys when the Jews chased after them. When Dunya took her place beside her former friend at the witness stand, she lost no time calling her a liar.

  Judge: “Did you play with that girl on the clay grinder … did Beilis chase you away?”

  Dunya: “That never happened.”

  Ludmila: “We were chased then.”

  Dunya: “Who ever chased us? Think again, and then let’s see you lie.”

  Ludmila started to cry. “Girl, why are you crying?” the judge asked. She answered, “I am afraid.” The prosecutor asked for it to be entered into the record that the girl cried and said she was afraid. He was setting up a main argument of his summation—that a Jewish conspiracy had bribed witnesses to support Beilis, or else had intimidated witnesses into retracting incriminating testimony or maintaining their silence.

  Vera Cheberyak strode to the stand in an eye-catching black velvet hat with a wide brim, trimmed all around in yel
lowish-orange faux ostrich feathers, from which rose a sort of feather pom-pom that bobbed distractingly as she moved. Beilis looked at her intently, maintaining his gaze the entire time she testified. Witnesses were supposed to face the judges at all times so, seated where he was, about a dozen feet directly to the right of the stand, Beilis could stare only at her profile, perhaps focusing on her nose with its small bump and its slight but definite bend to one side. As more than one observer noted, it seemed at this moment as if there were two defendants in the courtroom. Was the real perpetrator sitting in the dock or standing before the judges? Or, a skeptical reporter asked, was he perhaps somewhere else, laughing at the whole farce?

  Cheberyak began with a request to the judge that betrayed both her self-awareness and her anxiety. “Would you be so kind as to read aloud my previous testimony?” she asked, meaning her prior statements to investigators. “After all,” she said, “I cannot remember everything.” She clearly was hoping for assistance in her effort to avoid contradicting herself or to smooth over her inconsistencies as best she could. But the judge had no choice but to say no. Previous statements could be read back only after the witness had begun testifying and if one side or the other pointed to a possible discrepancy between different versions. “Whatever you remember,” Judge Boldyrev said, “that is what you will tell the court.”