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

by Levin, Edmund

  On the thirty-third day of the trial, after rebuttals that added nothing of importance, the judge gave Mendel Beilis the final word.

  “Defendant Beilis,” he asked, “do you have anything to tell the gentlemen of the jury?”

  Beilis stood up quickly. “Gentlemen of the jury,” he said, speaking rapidly in his Yiddish-inflected Russian and looking directly at them, “I could say much in my defense. I am tired. I have no strength to say what I could. You can see that I am innocent. I ask you to acquit me so that I can see my poor children who have been waiting for me for two and a half years.”

  Then Beilis was taken back to prison. He lay down on his cot knowing this might be his last night of captivity or the prelude to a life of hard labor.

  The trial was nearly over, but far away, in America, Jewish leaders were still arguing over how, and how vocally, to help Mendel Beilis. Three days earlier the noted Reform rabbi Max Heller had taken the American Jewish leadership to task for its inaction. “Has the Jewish people ever afforded the world a more doleful and piteous spectacle of disunion and disorder than what it is presenting just now?” he asked in an article entitled “Statesmanship,” published in the American Israelite. He may have had in mind the nation’s leading Jewish lobbying organization, the American Jewish Committee, whose executive body first met about the case only on the thirty-second day of the trial—that is, the day before the end of summations. The only significant action the committee had taken to help Beilis was to organize the open letter to Tsar Nicholas from a group of prominent Christian clergymen. As they met, the committee’s leaders felt reason to be optimistic; their State Department sources were saying the Russian government believed Beilis would be acquitted. Still, they agreed it was prudent to have a plan of action should he be convicted. After discussing how they might pressure the Wilson administration into appealing to the Russian government, they came to no consensus.

  Jewish organized labor and the thriving socialist movement had also been slow to organize in Beilis’s defense. Midway through the trial, Abraham Cahan, the editor of the leading Yiddish newspaper, Forverts (Forward), had berated a New York gathering of twelve hundred socialists for being so preoccupied with local issues that they “ignore the evil-doing in Russia.” Only on the thirty-third day did a group of predominantly Jewish, or Jewish-led, unions—including the furriers, laundry, and millinery workers, as well as socialist movement chapters—decide to organize a protest. But the hour for protests had passed.

  October 28, 1913. At eight a.m., Mendel Beilis was taken to the prison office and handed over to his security detail. As usual before departing, this crew strip-searched him. Beilis endured the degrading routine without complaint. But then, just as his convoy was about to depart, the deputy warden demanded that the prison guards search Beilis as well. Beilis removed everything but his undershirt, which he had always been allowed to retain when searched. But now the deputy warden demanded he remove every piece of clothing. The needless humiliation sent Beilis into a rage. He tore off the undershirt, ripped it to pieces, and threw it in the guard’s face. The deputy warden pulled out his pistol and aimed it at him with such a wild look in his eyes that it seemed to Beilis he might really pull the trigger. Had this been any other insolent prisoner, shooting him would have been nothing out of the ordinary. Luckily, a courthouse security officer grabbed the pistol from the deputy warden’s hand. After the head warden came in and chastised Beilis for “starting trouble,” the convoy finally headed off.

  Beilis found St. Sophia Square filled with mounted police and surrounded by Cossacks on foot. The authorities would allow no crowd that could cause trouble to gather in the square. The thousand people or so who came to await the verdict had to squeeze onto the sidewalks, pressing themselves against the buildings around the square’s perimeter. Judging by press reports, the throng was entirely pro-Beilis or else held their tongues. Supporters of the prosecution gathered at the other end of the square, in St. Sophia Cathedral, where Vladimir Golubev’s right-wing youth group, Double Headed Eagle, held a requiem for Andrei.

  Once court was in session, the prosecution formally moved to put into effect its insurance policy. The jury’s first charge would be to decide, irrespective of Beilis’s guilt, the manner in which the crime had been committed and its location. “Has it been proven,” the charge read,

  that on the twelfth of March, 1911, in one of the buildings of the [Zaitsev] brick factory belonging to the Jewish surgical hospital, thirteen-year-old Andrei Yushchinsky … had wounds inflicted on him with a pointed instrument on the crown, and sides, and back of his head, and also on his neck, causing injuries to the veins in the brain, arteries of the left temple, and veins in the neck, resulting in copious blood loss, and that after Yushchinsky had lost up to five glasses of blood, there were inflicted on him, with the same weapon, wounds to the torso, causing injuries to the lungs, liver, right kidney, and heart, to the latter of which were directed the final wounds; and that these wounds, totaling forty-seven, caused Yushchinsky’s torturous suffering, resulting in the almost complete loss of blood and in his death?

  The question did not mention the word “ritual” or “religious.” The jury could avoid ruling on the killers’ motivation, but the wording served the purposes of the supporters of the blood accusation well enough. “Complete loss of blood” suggested that the intention had been to drain it from the body. Measuring the blood in “glasses” was suggestive of collecting and consuming it. The description of the crime accorded with the prosecution’s contention that the killers had waited for some time so as to let the blood flow out, and only then finished the boy off. And, of course, placing the location of the crime at the Jewish-owned Zaitsev factory implied Jewish culpability.

  The second question concerned the guilt or innocence of the defendant. The wording was almost exactly the same as the first question except that it began, “Is the defendant Menahem Mendel Tevyev Beilis guilty of having conspired with others unknown … in a plan motivated by religious fanaticism, to deprive thirteen-year-old Andrei Yushchinsky of his life …” Here the jury was asked to rule on motivation. Still, the prosecution avoided the word “ritual.” It did not need to push the jury on this point. The phrase “religious fanaticism” was sufficient. If Beilis was found guilty, no one would doubt that he had been convicted of ritual murder.

  The defense argued that there was no basis in law for the first question and that the way both were formulated was prejudicial. Judge Boldyrev overruled the objections and prepared to give his charge to the jury. This was his moment. Boldyrev’s superiors had promised him a promotion should he perform his duties at the trial to their satisfaction. Now he would prove himself worthy.

  Boldyrev’s two-hour address was as biased toward the prosecution as he could manage without shedding all pretense to juridical propriety. “Essentially,” Nabokov wrote in his daily analysis, “it was a summation for the prosecution, deliberate and well thought out.” In summarizing the thirty-three days of testimony for both sides, Judge Boldyrev gave a more compelling account of the prosecution’s point of view, though he was always careful to add that the jury could reject it. He stated, “You know that the body was drained of blood,” even though the experts for the defense disputed that contention. “Why did the killers allow blood to flow?” he asked. “What was the point of looking at their victim, as blood flowed out of him?” He saved his major nod to respectability for the end. “A great deal was said here about the Jews,” he told the jurors. “Forget all of that. You are deciding the fate only of Beilis.”

  The judge handed the list of charges to the foreman and sent the jurors off to deliberate. Expressionless, the twelve men filed out of the courtroom, led by the foreman, whose fawning demeanor toward the judge and prosecutor had so aroused Gruzenberg’s distrust. Gruzenberg made a final motion, asking the judge to call the jury back and amend his charge with material from the defense. Boldyrev denied the motion, and the waiting began.

  Most
of those who had only read about the trial—including, confidentially, senior Russian officials—believed the jury would vote to acquit. But they were thinking in terms of logic and of evidence. Most of the observers who had actually sat through the trial, Nabokov among them, believed that Beilis would be found guilty.

  The defendant’s lead attorney was ready for the worst. Gruzenberg confessed to a reporter that, as he waited, he could think only of reasons the jury would convict. The jurors were “exceptionally ignorant.” He had seen their faces, growing more “confused, helpless, embittered, sullen” with each passing day. The relentless talk of “Jewish domination,” “all-powerful Jewish gold,” and blood sacrifice, beaten into their heads for thirty-three days, must have succeeded in arousing in these simple Russians an instinctive ethnic animosity. His last hope had been Judge Boldyrev’s charge to the jury. But when the judge sent the jurors off, Gruzenberg could only think to himself, “Beilis is finished.”

  Russian jurors usually came back with a verdict quickly. After an hour passed, some pro-Beilis spectators argued that hesitance to convict was a good sign, but several attorneys in the crowd outside the courtroom said that long deliberations usually went against the defendant. Quite a few spectators, certain of the guilty verdict and overcome with anxiety, were heard to say, “I can’t take this,” and left the courthouse.

  After one hour and twenty minutes of deliberations a bell sounded inside the building. The jury had reached a verdict. The spectators stopped arguing and dashed into the courtroom to take their seats. Mendel Beilis was led in, leaning heavily on his guards, who sat him down in the prisoner’s dock for the last time.

  Court procedure could not be rushed. The bailiff cried out, “Court is in session! Please rise!” Everyone rose. The four judges entered and took their places at the bench, and then everyone sat down again. At 5:40 p.m. the bailiff announced, “The jury is entering! Please rise!” Everyone rose. The foreman handed Judge Boldyrev the sheet of paper with the verdicts. The judge read it and handed it back to him. Then all took their seats, except for the foreman, wearing his pince nez, who still stood before the bench, the piece of paper in his hand. The judge told him to proceed. The foreman began to read the first question, about whether the crime had been committed on the premises of the Zaitsev brick factory and in what manner.

  The question was long, but he was obliged to recite it in its entirety. The words—“blood loss,” “five glasses,” “forty-seven”—escaped his lips in a soft, quavering voice until he finally reached “and in his death.” The foreman then uttered two more words: “Yes, proven.” Regardless of the defendant’s guilt, the crime had been committed in the manner the prosecution had contended.

  The foreman then moved on to the second question. After he finished reading it, he pronounced three more words. Beilis began to sob violently, though people noticed there were no tears. He fell forward onto the railing of the dock. He rose up a number of times and then fell back again. He was reacting physically to the verdict, but it seemed to people that he gave no sign of understanding what it meant. In fact, he understood, but at first could not believe the three words: “Net, ne vinoven.” “No, not guilty.”

  The chief guard tried to give Beilis a glass of water, but Zarudny grabbed it from him, saying curtly, “Beilis is not yours anymore, he belongs to us,” and handed it to Beilis himself. Judge Boldyrev then told Beilis, “You are a free man. You may take your place among the public.” His guards stood aside, but Beilis did not move. The judges withdrew for a few minutes and returned to declare the case resolved. Beilis, still crying, managed to half stand and bow.

  He was held in the courthouse for nearly two hours until the crowd had dispersed. At seven thirty p.m. a police wagon took him back one last time to the prison, where he signed for the return of his belongings. Then he was conveyed to the Zaitsev brick factory, heavily guarded by police and night watchmen. At nine thirty p.m. he finally walked through the door of his home into his family’s arms.

  The next morning Beilis awoke as the man everyone in Kiev wanted to meet. “Old people and children, fashionably turned-out ladies and simple peasant women, workers and students, and little schoolchildren,” a Kiev Opinion reporter wrote, “they all make their way to the Zaitsev factory.” So many people were asking directions that at Alexandovskaya Square the tram conductor took to crying out, “Take Number 16 to Beilis’s!” Someone set up a sign outside the home saying “Beilis Station.” The arriving visitors stood in line to spend a moment with the world-famous defendant. Over the course of two days Beilis shook thousands of hands.

  Telegrams arrived by the hundreds. One, from Chicago, was in English. When someone was found to read it, it turned out to be an offer from an impresario to perform in his theater for a twenty-week run for twenty thousand rubles. Beilis laughed.

  The onetime brick factory clerk was utterly exhausted. He would have loved to leave the city, go somewhere to rest. But for now he would remain in Kiev, he told a reporter, “so that the Unionists”—that is, the Black Hundreds—“won’t say that I ran away.”

  Beilis’s supporters were overwhelmed by joy at the acquittal. But in the trial’s aftermath, the double verdict allowed both sides to claim victory. Civil prosecutor Zamyslovsky admitted that he was, of course, disappointed at the not-guilty verdict but insisted that the main goal—demonstrating the nature of the crime—had been accomplished. “The peculiarities of that act, given in detail,” he contended, “leave no doubt about the ritual character of the murder.” Beilis’s attorneys argued that the positive verdict on the first question in no way confirmed that the crime was a ritual murder. The question posed to the jury contained no reference to religion. To find that the crime took place somewhere on the Zaitsev factory’s thirty-three acres of grounds in itself meant nothing. Moreover, the prosecution had argued that if Jews had committed the murder, then Beilis must be involved. So, in exonerating Beilis, the jury must have exonerated the Jews. To paint the trial’s results as victory for the prosecution, Gruzenberg declared, was “a comic effort that deserves pity.”

  How had the jurors reached their decision? According to the popular right-wing newspaper New Times, the vote on Beilis’s guilt had been a six-six tie. This rumor grew into fact, but there was no proof of it. The verdict led some to speculate it had been rigged by the state. The Anglo-Jewish journalist and activist Lucien Wolf had little doubt that the outcome “was engineered by the authorities with the idea of throwing dust in the eyes of foreigners, while at the same time preserving the blood accusation.” Herman Bernstein, secretary of the American Jewish Committee, concluded that the verdicts were clearly “prearranged” to satisfy both public opinion in the West and the Black Hundreds in Russia. Such suspicion was reasonable, but the archival record, which includes numerous secret communications, contains absolutely nothing to support it. It is nearly certain that the jurors came to the decision on their own. As Gruzenberg told a reporter, “The muzhichki”—the little peasants—“they stood up for themselves.” Gruzenberg further recounts in his memoirs that the jury’s initial vote was seven to five to convict “but when the foreman began taking the final vote one peasant rose to his feet, prayed to an icon, and said resolutely, ‘I don’t want to have this sin on my conscience—he’s not guilty.’ ” (This beautiful and oft-repeated story unfortunately remains unconfirmed.)

  Agent Pavel Liubimov, in his final, secret report to the chief of the national police, called the Beilis trial a “political Tsushima”—referring to the sinking of the Russian fleet by the Japanese in 1905—“which will never be forgiven.” Many in the government undoubtedly did view it as a disaster on a par with a military defeat. Yet whatever the verdict, the case could only have ended as a fiasco for the regime. The whole affair, Vasily Maklakov wrote soon after the trial, was a sign “of a dangerous internal illness afflicting the state itself.” A regime that could prosecute such a bizarre case suffered from the kind of rot that only reform—or revolution—could
root out. A jury’s decision one way or the other could not alter that profound reality.

  For the government officials directly involved in it, the case was an undoubted success. In St. Petersburg, ten days after the verdict, a victory banquet was held “in honor of the heroes of the Kiev trial.” The minister of justice, Shcheglovitov himself, and prosecutor Oskar Vipper were the guests of honor. Also present was Alexander Dubrovin, founder of the Union of Russian People, the group synonymous with the term “Black Hundreds.” Congratulatory telegrams were sent to the absent heroes—including Chaplinsky, Dr. Kosorotov (who had been paid the balance of his four-thousand-ruble bribe for a job well done), Dr. Sikorsky, and others—praising them for their “noble patriotic courage” and “great moral dignity.”

  These men had correctly calculated that the case would advance their careers. They were showered with praise, promotions, and material rewards. Kiev’s chief prosecutor, Grigory Chaplinsky, was appointed to Russia’s highest court, the Senate. Judge Boldyrev received his promised appointment as chief judge of the Kiev Judicial Chamber, as well as an illegal pay increase. Civil prosecutor Zamyslovsky was paid twenty-five thousand rubles from the tsar’s secret fund to write a book about the case.