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

by Levin, Edmund

  The same day that the jurors in Kiev were nodding off at the hours of mind-numbing testimony about brick deliveries, five thousand miles away, in the Chicago Loop, a tumultuous scene was unfolding. An uninformed bystander might have thought it the scene of an incipient riot. At around one p.m., thousands of people thronged the streets of the city’s commercial, cultural, and governmental center, massing on the intersection of Clark and Randolph Streets and blocking traffic. Reserve police officers had to be called in to keep the crowd under control and prevent people from being trampled. At first the crowd streamed toward a rally at the Garrick Theater. The first fifteen hundred people or so at the head of the crowd were admitted, with thousands remaining outside. The throng was unusually diverse—“Jew and Gentile, Catholic and Protestant, white men and negroes”—as a Chicago Tribune reporter described it. But they were united in protest against the despicable mockery of justice in Russia.

  America had lagged greatly behind Europe in coming to Beilis’s defense. The first open letters of protest, signed by scores of eminent persons, had been published in France and Germany a year and a half earlier, in the spring of 1912. Paris had been the scene of the first large protest after the trial began, in a gathering addressed by the great socialist leader Jean Jaures. In Germany, Zionist groups organized protests all over their country. Even Germany’s moderately conservative National Liberal Party, not regarded as terribly philo-Semitic, sent a representative to a pro-Beilis meeting to sign a petition.

  America had taken its time, but now demonstrations held across the country dwarfed those in the Old World. Mass meetings were held in Cincinnati and in Canton, Ohio; in Fort Smith, Arkansas; in Kenosha, Wisconsin; in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Six thousand people took part in a protest organized by the Socialist Party in Detroit. But the most impressive mass protest, in the United States or the world, would occur this day in Chicago.

  The Garrick Theater was supposed to have been the only venue that day, but the overflow stretched a block and a half to George M. Cohan’s Grand Opera House, which was quickly opened up to accommodate another fourteen hundred protesters. Hundreds more still thronged the streets. Impromptu speakers shuttled between the theaters to brief the crowd.

  In the Grand Opera House, Judge Edward O. Brown of the Illinois Appellate Court presided, with a hundred dignitaries seated behind him onstage. He introduced the world-renowned settlement house pioneer and social reformer Jane Addams, founder of Chicago’s Hull House, who declared that outbreaks of racial and religious bigotry and superstition were a pestilence to be stamped out. “It seems to me,” Addams told a cheering audience, “that this question of persecution must be governed by the same social control that exterminated the black plague and cholera epidemic … Something of the same sort must be done in the moral world. Nations must come together and say that things once believed must no longer be tolerated.”

  America’s most prominent black leader, Booker T. Washington, told of how inspiring he found it “to see hundreds of men and women struggling to get into a meeting for the purpose of seeing that justice is brought a great people.” He was joined by a local black pastor, the Reverend Archibald J. Cary, who said he was taking part in the protest as a member of a people who knew something about oppression; he went on to thank Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck, and Co., and one of the country’s great philanthropists, for looking beyond his own creed as a Jew in funding a Young Men’s Christian Association for the black community. (Rosenwald, a trustee and benefactor of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, later gave millions in matching grants for the education of black children throughout the South in so-called Rosenwald Schools.)

  Illinois’s governor, Edward F. Dunne, wired a message to the gathering, branding anyone who advanced the blood accusation “as a malignant person or gullible fool.” Father P. J. O’Callaghan of the Paulist Fathers proclaimed, “The greatest glory of the Catholic Church is that it is Jewish and the greatest honor any man may have is that he may say in some sense that he is of the House of Israel. The greatest work we can do is stamp out the hatred of the Jews by men who call themselves Christians.”

  The speakers’ attacks on the tsarist regime and the defense of the Jews implied no self-righteousness where America was concerned. Rabbi Emil Hirsch, Chicago’s most prominent Reform Jewish leader, closed the Grand Opera House event with “an appeal for justice for the American Negro” as well as a reprimand to Chicago clubs that excluded Jews and thereby fomented prejudice. For Rabbi Hirsch, as for Jane Addams and men like Julius Rosenwald, the Beilis case was part of a much larger cause. “The railroading of Beilis to the gallows is a grave attack on elemental justice,” Hirsch wrote soon afterward in the Reform Jewish journal the Advocate, “but so is every lynching of Negroes. The Pale of Russia is an insufferable hell. What about the attempt of certain states to create new ghettos for Negro families? The Talmudic admonition must not go unheeded…‘One who would reprove others should have a care to perfect himself first.’ ”

  The first act of protest by a Washington politician had occurred two days earlier, with the introduction of a resolution by a Jewish member of the House of Representatives, Adolph J. Sabath of Illinois. Numerous other members of Congress soon proposed their own resolutions or otherwise spoke out. Speaker of the House Champ Clark of Missouri declared on the House floor, “The ritual murder prosecution … is the most preposterous performance of the age and finds no parallel since [trials for] witchcraft.” The pro-Beilis movement in Congress not only condemned the trial in Kiev but demanded action by the American government. Denouncing the “outrageous and unfounded charge” against the Jews, the Sabath resolution called on “the Secretary of State … to convey through our Ambassador at St. Petersburg the sentiments of the American people” about the trial. However, neither Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan nor the American ambassador to Russia, Charles S. Wilson, were inclined to do anything of the kind.

  Their hesitancy had nothing to do with domestic politics. Unlike France or Great Britain, America had no significant pro-Russian interest group. The entire American press, both respectable and yellow, was solidly on the side of the defendant. The New York Times headlined its first editorial on the case, “The Czar on Trial.” William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers adopted Beilis as a cause. Hearst’s New York American headlined one article, “And Yet It Moves,” a reference to Galileo’s trial for heresy. But the American government would never criticize the prosecution of Beilis in public. Nor, it is nearly certain, did it ever do so in private. There were two reasons for the government’s reluctance. The first was straightforward: the administration was focused at the time on reinvigorating commercial ties with Russia (even though during his 1912 presidential campaign Woodrow Wilson had, for reasons of political expediency, spoken out in favor of abrogating the Russo-American commercial treaty). The second reason was less obvious: the State Department fretted that the national uproar over the Jewish defendant could ricochet in ways that would complicate the situation in, of all places, Mexico.

  In a series of diplomatic cables between Washington and St. Petersburg, Secretary of State Bryan and Ambassador Wilson hashed out how to react to the trial in Kiev. Wilson cabled his first report on the case six days into the trial. It was remarkably ill-informed. “I have been much surprised to find that every Russian with whom I have talked, of every class of society, firmly believes Beilis guilty of the crime with which he is charged,” Wilson wrote. Moreover, he added, “the [Russian] Government feels itself backed up by the almost universal public opinion in taking any measures against the Jews in Russia.” The ambassador was apparently ignorant of widespread opposition to the tsarist regime, to anti-Jewish measures in particular, and, specifically, to the prosecution of Beilis.

  Around this time, the Russian ambassador to the United States, Boris Bakhmetev, met with Secretary Bryan to discuss the case. Bryan struck him, he reported, as possessing “no knowledge of the issue.” He briefed Bryan on Russ
ia’s position, reassuring him that the Jews as a people were most certainly not on trial. In his report to the foreign minister after the meeting, the ambassador complained that “American Yids have not passed up the convenient opportunity to quickly use the Kiev case to attempt to stir up new attacks on Russia” and singled out for scorn the irksome “Representative Sabath, himself a Yid.”

  Bakhmetev need not have worried about pernicious Jewish influence on the American government. Two weeks later, Ambassador Wilson sent a telegram to Washington relaying his conversation with Russian foreign minister Sergei Sazonov—which had to do with the chaotic situation in Mexico. In February 1913, eight months before the Beilis trial began, General Victoriano Huerta had overthrown the Mexican revolutionary government in power since 1910, had the president and vice president killed, and established himself as dictator. President Woodrow Wilson wanted Huerta deposed but had few allies on this other than Russia. Sazonov informed Ambassador Wilson that Russia was “more than ready” to support the United States in regard to the Mexican situation. However Sazonov, insisting the trial “was entirely an internal matter,” warned that congressional action in the Beilis case “could result in the preclusion of Russian support.” Ambassador Wilson recommended to Bryan that the United States make no public protest regarding the Beilis case, given “the unfortunate effect such criticism may have … on important questions pending between [Russia and the United States].”

  Secretary Bryan took the ambassador’s advice. He would not place the moral argument for lodging a protest against the trial, no matter its verdict, over what he saw as the interests of the United States.

  Day Thirteen. Oskar Gruzenberg believed he was being proven right in a prediction he had made two years earlier, but he could derive no satisfaction from this. Until this point, the trial could not have gone better for the defense. The prosecution had suffered an unbroken run of fiascoes. But now the defense itself was to be put on trial. Gruzenberg had foreseen this turn of events in late 1911, when he had warned his colleague, Arnold Margolin, Beilis’s first attorney, not to pursue his covert investigation of Vera Cheberyak. No good could come of it, he had believed. Margolin, together with the bumbling journalist Stepan Brazul-Brushkovsky, had been duped by this villain, who had gone to the authorities with her wild story about being offered a forty-thousand-ruble bribe to confess to Andrei’s murder. Margolin soon found himself under investigation for tampering with a witness. Now, instead of defending Beilis in court, he sat as a soon-to-be disbarred attorney about to be called as a witness himself. Gruzenberg was still highly optimistic about the outcome of the trial, but Margolin’s testimony would give the prosecution the chance to counterattack.

  To the end of their days, Gruzenberg and Margolin would disagree over the impact on the trial of what the newspapers called the “private investigation.” Margolin understood he had been taking a risk, but he believed his scheme had unmasked Vera Cheberyak as a likely accomplice to the crime, allowing her to become the focus of the trial, much to the defense’s benefit. In his view, thanks to himself, there would now be a six-day run of witnesses related to the question of Cheberyak’s role in Andrei’s disappearance, concluding with the two gang members who Gruzenberg himself agreed were the likely killers.

  Gruzenberg disputed this view. In his memoir of the case, he exhibits such embarrassment over the episode that he refrains from ever mentioning Margolin in connection with it, calling him only a “talented lawyer, deeply devoted” to the case, who had made a serious mistake. Gruzenberg agreed that the chance to question and confront the two purported killers, Boris Rudzinsky and Vera Cheberyak’s half-brother Peter Singaevsky, was a tremendous opportunity for the defense. He would have had to concede that these disreputable figures would almost certainly not be taking the stand had it not been for Margolin’s efforts, which attracted massive public attention, making the two criminals infamous, with their pictures reproduced in newspapers across the empire. But the private investigation gave too many gifts to the prosecution. For who were the upcoming defense witnesses? They were, arguably: a fool of a journalist (Brazul), a disgraced attorney (Margolin), a disgraced detective (Krasovsky), a young woman who appeared to be mentally unbalanced (Ekaterina Diakonova), and a revolutionary fop (Makhalin). While these witnesses would certainly divert attention from the defendant, they might also give the prosecution the chance to make the defense look foolish and dishonest. Gruzenberg, from his point of view, had to make the best of it—limit the damage, exploit the opportunities.

  The testimony of Brazul took up most of the day. He thoroughly agitated Vera Cheberyak, who repeatedly scurried to a windowsill to pour herself a glass of water. But observers agreed the journalist was an ineffective witness for the defense; civil prosecutor Shmakov caught him in a slew of inconsistencies. Vladimir D. Nabokov, who covered the trial for Speech, found that while Brazul was “undoubtedly sincere,” he came off as “unthoughtful, gullible,” someone easily bamboozled. The correspondent for the Jewish Chronicle was harsher, saying that Brazul came across as “an honest, thick-skinned busybody with an exaggerated opinion of his detective talents.”

  Margolin took the stand next. As a professional advocate of the first rank, he conducted himself with immense skill. As the prosecution probed his dealings with Vera Cheberyak, along with Brazul and two or three other of Brazul’s colleagues in the city of Kharkov in December 1911, he was never trapped in contradictions. In fact, he himself came armed to point out errors in Vera Cheberyak’s account (what shirt he had been wearing, the layout of his hotel room, and so forth) that ate up time and neutralized the prosecution’s attacks. As Shmakov questioned him aggressively, Margolin responded in kind. When asked if he had offered Vera Cheberyak forty thousand rubles to admit to the crime, he answered, “I think that only a demented person could do such a thing.”

  “I want a yes or no answer,” Shmakov retorted.

  “I just answered no,” Margolin replied. “After all, no one has yet subjected my mental faculties to any doubt.”

  The prosecution did make Margolin look less than candid around his efforts to keep the Kharkov meeting a secret. Margolin unconvincingly contended that he had done nothing to “hide” the meeting but had merely been “silent” about it. However, it was obvious that he had gone to some lengths to keep the meeting from being publicly known.

  Margolin, though, made sure he would fire the final salvo at the most auspicious moment. When the judge summoned Vera Cheberyak to the stand for an eye-to-eye confrontation with the witness, she told the court she recognized Margolin, though “he was a lot fatter then.” She reaffirmed her tale about the forty-thousand-ruble bribe, and Margolin denied it.

  Then, with Vera Cheberyak standing beside him, Margolin explained why her behavior made sense only if she had been an accomplice in Andrei’s murder. Why had this known criminal made such efforts to implicate others, while seeking no reward at all for herself? “Only someone who was defending herself against a threatening danger,” he argued, “who was trying to deflect suspicion from herself toward other persons, who wanted to lead astray the investigative authorities” would behave in such a way. When he finished, Vera Cheberyak remained silent.

  On the morning of the fourteenth day, an unusually large crowd swarmed the court tearoom to fortify themselves before the session began. No one wanted to miss a single word of the day’s proceedings. The courtroom was going to be as packed as it had been six days earlier for Vera Cheberyak’s main testimony. Nikolai Krasovsky—former acting chief detective of the Kiev police force, former provincial police official, former lead investigator into the murder of Andrei Yushchinsky—was about to take the stand. His various “formers” had not been joined by any current position, the Beilis affair having provided him only with vilification in the far-right press, respect if not adulation in the liberal press, and worldwide fame. In Europe and the United States the reportage portrayed him as the Russian Sherlock Holmes who had cracked the case. But at home
Krasovsky was unemployed and unemployable.

  The detective had enjoyed a twenty-year career of successes followed by drastic disappointments. An intelligent man who had for some reason failed to finish his gymnasium education, he had entered the police force, risen by dint of his competence to the post of acting chief detective, only to be sent to the provinces when his rival, Evgeny Mishchuk, beat him out for the Kiev post. Then he had been specially recalled to Kiev to handle the politically sensitive murder case, with consequences that now made him hero, villain, and star witness.

  The day had brought some welcome news for Beilis’s supporters. Prince A. D. Obolensky, former ober-procurator (or lay administrator) of the Russian Orthodox Holy Synod, the governing body of the Church, condemned as “blasphemy” the prosecution’s references to the Holy Bible. (He had earlier denounced the ritual-murder charge, in general, noting that “the use of blood is contrary to all the teachings of the Jewish religion.”) The day before, King Constantine of Greece had denounced the myth in an audience with the rabbis of Salonika and invited the chief rabbi to his yacht to tell him personally: “You may assure the entire Jewish population that the calumny will never be repeated in my kingdom.” (King Constantine seems to have been the only head of state to denounce the blood accusation in connection with the Beilis trial.) A number of Russian Orthodox clergymen had also publicly denounced the blood accusation in recent days. But in the courtroom the entire focus was on the former detective.