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

by Levin, Edmund

  A few days later, Gruzenberg, after receiving the surprise telephone call from his colleague, was poring over the secret Beilis files. “By evening I had been furnished with five volumes,” he recalled in his memoirs. “I seized the materials greedily and spent the entire night reading them.” He learned of the illegal surveillance of the jurors, of the correspondence among high officials who believed Beilis to be innocent. He read letters that had been intercepted by the government, containing important information for the defense that had never been delivered. Also included were copies of letters Gruzenberg himself had written late at night to his son and daughter back in the capital after exhausting days at court. The files contained correspondence about placing under surveillance people who had written sympathetically to the defense. The whole disgusting business was laid bare. “When I finished reading the secret materials,” Gruzenberg recalled, “dawn was already breaking. I went to the window and looked at the empty street, then across from my apartment at a [regimental barracks], bedecked with red flags and I said to myself, ‘We can thank fate that a people in revolt has swept away the dishonorable tsarist regime like a cobweb.’ ”

  Gruzenberg had some reason for optimism about the future of his country. The state apparatus was now in the hands of men like himself. In fact, members of Mendel Beilis’s defense team, as well as their prominent supporters, were playing a significant role in the just-established Provisional Government. The new justice minister, Kerensky, called Karabchevsky for advice on organizing the department. He appointed as his deputy Alexander Zarudny who, in four months, would become justice minister himself. Gruzenberg was made a senator, as Russia’s Supreme Court justices were called. Vasily Maklakov held a series of temporary posts in the government. Nabokov was appointed head of the chancellery, essentially the chief of staff. The government convened what it called an Extraordinary Commission to investigate the crimes of Tsar Nicholas’s regime, which included high officials’ perversion of justice and grossly corrupt actions in the Beilis affair. Shcheglovitov, Nikolai Maklakov, and Beletsky were subjected to harsh questioning about their actions in the case. The two former ministers defended their conduct, though Shcheglovitov admitted that some of the state’s actions had been illegal. But Beletsky repeatedly expressed deep shame over his involvement in the conspiracy to frame an innocent man. “My conscience is forcing me to speak,” he told the commission. “I want to confess and be of use.” Perhaps he was just trying to save himself, yet his condemnation of the blood accusation sounded sincere. “This legend lived, lives, and maybe will live,” he declared, “until it is expelled from people’s minds.”

  Unfortunately, the red flags that gladdened Gruzenberg’s heart did not bode well for Russia’s future. At first, red was simply the color of joy at the tsarist regime’s fall. The entire city was festooned with red flags. But, beginning in April, Nabokov noted something ominous about the flags. Once pure red, they were now written over with slogans denouncing ministers and calling for the new government’s removal. On April 3, Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (b)—better known as the Bolsheviks—had returned to Russia from his decade-long exile in Switzerland. Within three weeks, the Provisional Government was facing Bolshevik-inspired demonstrations and riots. The Bolsheviks did not take power in April, but they would soon enough. “Strictly speaking,” Nabokov later wrote, the next six months “were one continual process of dying.” “Glorious February” would become an historical dead end. The victory of humane men like Nabokov, who wanted to turn Russia into a democratic state based on the rule of law, had been a chimera. Lenin’s October Revolution would sweep nearly all of them away.

  Fates

  Some prominent figures in the Mendel Beilis trial died amid the battles and privations of World War I. But Lenin’s revolution would decide the destinies of most of the players in the case, some of whom would die at the hands of Russia’s new leaders, while others would escape into exile.

  Vladimir Golubev, who had first named Mendel Beilis as a suspect in Andrei Yushchinsky’s murder, was killed in 1915 while fighting in the First World War.

  Alexei Shmakov, the attorney for Andrei’s mother, who was effectively Vipper’s co-prosecutor, died in 1916.

  After the trial, Father Justin Pranaitis returned to Tashkent, where he was soon embroiled in a scandal, caught embezzling some fifteen hundred rubles in donations from a Catholic charity that he headed. He died just before the revolution, in January 1917.

  Dr. Ivan Sikorsky died in 1917, as well, in time to escape any retribution for his role in the Beilis trial.

  Shmakov’s cocounsel, Georgy Zamyslovsky, fled to the Caucasus region during the civil war that followed the Bolshevik Revolution. He died of typhus in the city of Vladikavkaz in 1920.

  Ivan Shcheglovitov, Nikolai Maklakov, and Stepan Beletsky were all executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918.

  Prosecutor Oskar Vipper fled to the city of Kaluga, about a hundred miles south of Moscow, keeping a low profile as a minor official in the Provincial Food Committee. He was eventually discovered, and in September 1919 he was tried for his role in the Beilis case by the Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal. The prosecutor asked for the death penalty. The tribunal, deciding mercy was in order, sentenced him “to be confined in a concentration camp until the complete establishment in the Republic of the communist system.” Vipper did not survive the year.

  Sergei Makhalin at first prospered after the revolution, serving in some sort of official post (exactly what is not known). But, according to a contemporary newspaper report, he soon found himself accused of having had connections to the tsarist secret police—which was true—and “to the well-known anti-Semite A. S. Shmakov,” which almost certainly was not. After the accusations were made, his execution quickly followed.

  In January 1914, thanks in part to testimony from her blinded ex-lover Pavel Mifle, Vera Cheberyak was convicted of selling stolen property to the Gusin watch store. She was sentenced to two months in prison. No reliable information exists on her life over the next four years. What is certain is that she was executed by the Bolsheviks in Kiev in 1918. According to an agent of the Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka, who was captured and interrogated by the “White” forces that were battling the “Reds,” Cheberyak was shot along with a number of others as punishment for their connection to the Union of Russian People—the Black Hundreds—which had played such a prominent role in propagandizing for the blood accusation against the Jews. The most credible account of how she died was published in the early 1960s in the New York Yiddish newspaper Tog-Morgn Zhurnal (Day-Morning Journal). A longtime journalist for the paper, Chaim Shoshkess, reported that he was locked up in a Bolshevik prison in the city of Kharkov in 1920 when a prison overseer named Antizersky boasted to his Jewish prisoners that he had interrogated the infamous Vera Cheberyak in the Kiev Cheka headquarters and that he had ended the life of the “wonderful lady,” as he mockingly called her, with his own hand. “She was on her knees beating her head against the ground, begging everyone for her life,” he told the prisoners. “But after three days of ‘speaking’ with her I gave her a bullet in the neck.” Her half brother, Peter Singaevsky, was also said to have been shot by the Bolsheviks.

  Vladimir D. Nabokov was shot to death in Berlin in 1922 while trying to defend his friend, the former Kadet Party leader Paul Miliukov, from an assassination attempt by right-wing Russian émigrés. His son, Vladimir Vladimirovich, went on to write such classic novels as Lolita and The Gift.

  After his abdication, Nicholas Romanov, his wife, Alexandra, and their five children became captives, first of the Provisional Government, then of the Bolsheviks. Nicholas and his family were executed—shot and bayoneted to death—by their Bolshevik guards in July 1918 in the Russian city of Ekaterinburg, twelve hundred miles east of Moscow, in the basement of the mansion where they were being held. In August 2000 Nicholas and his family were canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church.

  All of Be
ilis’s attorneys but one immigrated to Western Europe.

  Just before the October 1917 revolution, Vasily Maklakov was appointed the Provisional Government’s ambassador to France and remained there for most of his life. He died in Switzerland in 1957.

  Nikolai Karabchevsky also immigrated to France, dying in Paris in 1925.

  Oskar Gruzenberg died in Nice, France, in December 1940. When he was dying, a Christian colleague volunteered to give his blood for a transfusion. After the procedure, Gruzenberg found the strength to joke, “Well, how can anyone say now that Jews do not use Christian blood.” He died that night. In 1950, in accordance with his last wishes, his remains were reinterred in Israel.

  Alexander Zarudny, who was a member of a small socialist party, made his peace with the Bolsheviks and remained in the Soviet Union until his death in 1934.

  Stepan Brazul-Brushkovsky also remained in the Soviet Union, but had the misfortune of living until the bloodiest year of Stalin’s Great Terror. He was arrested and shot in 1937.

  After the Bolshevik Revolution, Nikolai Krasovsky moved to the Polish city of Rovno. (The city, called Rivne, is now part of Ukraine.) He was last heard from in 1927 when he wrote a letter to a French Zionist activist, attempting to secure payment for his memoirs, the publication of which, he maintained, would eliminate all doubt about who had killed Andrei Yushchinsky. “Having emigrated and therefore having endured all possible material privations,” he wrote, “these material benefits would finally extricate me from this difficult situation which, in any case, I did not deserve.” Krasovsky, as far as is known, received no help. His memoirs, it can be hoped, survive in some archive, waiting to be found.

  Arnold Margolin was unusual, though not unique among elite Jews, in his strong identification with the Ukrainian culture and nation and in his belief that both the Ukrainians and the Jews should have their own homeland. He served as a supreme court justice and vice minister of foreign affairs in the short-lived independent Ukrainian People’s Republic in 1918–1919, before the country was reconquered by the Bolsheviks. In 1922, Margolin immigrated to the United States. Within a few years he had passed the state bar exams in Massachusetts and New York and was a practicing attorney again, specializing in Russian law. During and after World War II he advocated for settlement of Jewish refugees in Palestine and in other countries. Margolin, who died in Washington in 1956, lived to see the creation of the state of Israel. His vision of an independent Ukraine only came to pass with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. In 2000, the U.S. Department of State established the annual Fulbright-Margolin Prize for Ukrainian writers, named for Senator J. William Fulbright and Arnold D. Margolin, “the outstanding Ukrainian lawyer and diplomat.”

  The strangest fate belonged to Vasily Shulgin. He fled Russia after the revolution, ending up in Yugoslavia. In 1944, during World War II, he was captured by Soviet forces, taken back to Russia, and sentenced to a long prison term for his anti-Soviet activity. Upon being freed in 1956 he, at least outwardly, became a Soviet patriot, penning an ardently pro-communist piece of propaganda, Letters to Russian Emigres. In 1965, he appeared in a fascinating documentary, Before the Court of History, in which he recounted the story of the abdication of Tsar Nicholas in the very railway car where the historic event occurred. Shulgin died in 1976 in the city of Vladimir at the age of ninety-eight.

  As for the trial’s exonerated defendant, within weeks of the verdict Mendel Beilis came to realize that his notoriety would make life in Russia impossible. No one could guarantee his safety or that of his family. In the spring of 1914, the Beilises immigrated to Palestine, where, to Mendel’s delight, he immediately felt at home. “The land of Israel had an invigorating effect on me,” he wrote in his memoirs. “It gave me new life and new hope.” He loved the hills and the fields and just breathing the air. And he felt something new: a sense of freedom. “I saw for the first time a race of proud, uncringing Jews,” he wrote, “who lived life openly and unafraid.” His first few months in Palestine may have been the happiest of his life.

  But the outbreak of World War I disrupted this idyll, as Great Britain and the Ottoman Empire fought for control of the Holy Land. The Beilis family was forced to move from the town of Petah Tikva when Ottoman forces drove them out and destroyed their home. To his parents’ great distress, their son Pinchas, barely seventeen, joined the Ottoman army because it was fighting the Russians. He soon deserted, putting himself at risk of execution. Beilis, meanwhile, grew short of money as he failed to find a way to make a decent living in wartime Palestine, and promises of help from the Jewish community always seemed to fall through. The Beilises were struck by personal tragedy when Pinchas, having survived the war, committed suicide. In 1922, hoping to improve his fortunes, Beilis reluctantly decided to move to America. The family settled in the Bronx. People in America still remembered him. He was feted in Chicago by social reformer Jane Addams and in Cincinnati by a “Mr. Manischewitz”—one of the five Manischewitz brothers, the most famous matzo makers in the world. But in America, too, he could not thrive. He was willing to do any kind of work, but people were reluctant to give the famous Beilis too menial a job. He found himself all but unemployable. He tried his hand in a printing business and at selling life insurance but failed. His memoirs, The Story of My Sufferings, self-published in 1925 with the help of Arnold Margolin and others in the American Jewish community, sold reasonably well, bringing in some money. Beilis could have made a fortune had he moved to America in 1913 and taken up offers to capitalize on his renown (for example, a $40,000 offer from Hearst’s New York American for a twenty-week speaking tour). He had no regrets, though, telling the Jewish Daily Bulletin in 1933 that he could never do anything that “involved my exploiting myself as a Jew and as a Jewish victim of an unjust and cruel persecution. So I refused. And I would still refuse today.” Yet twenty years of struggle did wear him down. By the early 1930s his main means of support was peddling his book door to door, which exhausted him. “I am not yet sixty,” he told an interviewer the year before his death, “but it’s as though I’ve lived through a thousand years.” When he died in 1934, four thousand people attended his funeral, a final manifestation of the fame that he had tried to avoid and had found such an awful burden.

  Echoes

  In Russia, for a few years after the verdict, “Beilis” became a derogatory epithet for “Jew.” Somewhat more strangely, during World War I some Russians nicknamed German zeppelins “Beilises,” because Jews were supposedly pro-German traitors. (Jews were also sometimes called “Vilyush,” a mocking diminutive of Kaiser Wilhelm.)

  Within a decade or so, however, Mendel Beilis, once one of the most famous people on earth, had largely faded from memory in Russia and in the world. But the blood accusation did not disappear. It lived on—predominantly outside of Russia.

  Its survival in the West should not have been surprising. In the Western condemnation of the Beilis trial there had arguably been no small element of hypocrisy. During the trial, prosecutor Oskar Vipper had complained to the jury:

  Some foreign newspapers refer to our Russia as a barbarous country where such indictments, where such cruel blood accusations are permitted … But it turns out that abroad such indictments are brought as well … Consequently attacks on Russia, from this point of view, are incorrect and unfounded.

  Vipper’s complaint was defensible. The Beilis affair could be seen as the climax of a wave of ritual murder cases in Eastern and Central Europe, the majority of which, as noted earlier, arose in Germany and Austria-Hungary. Between the early 1880s and 1913 there were at least as many recorded cases—approximately a hundred—as there had been in the previous seven hundred years (“cases” being defined here as accusations that were investigated or at least received considerable popular attention).

  The last actual ritual-murder trial outside of Eastern Europe occurred in the Prussian town of Konitz, in 1900. The victim was an eighteen-year-old student, Ernst Winter, who had been neatly dismembered,
his body parts scattered throughout the town, wrapped in packing paper. The case sparked anti-Semitic riots—the town’s synagogue was set on fire and Jewish homes vandalized—though thankfully no one was killed. A Jewish butcher and his son, Adolph and Moritz Lewy, were charged in the murder. They turned out to have solid alibis and the charge was dismissed. A third Jew was tried and acquitted. (Moritz Lewy, however, was convicted of perjury for denying that he knew the victim, based on extremely flimsy evidence. The kaiser, in his mercy, cut the four-year sentence in half.)

  Historians have reached no consensus on the precise reasons for the revival of the blood accusation with a half-dozen full-fledged trials in Europe in the latter part of the nineteenth century. But the wave was undoubtedly linked to the rise of modern anti-Semitism that culminated in some of the worst horrors of the twentieth century. Jew-hatred was now the province of “experts” who could testify in court. As the historian David Biale writes, “a folkloric belief that had remained relatively underground in central Europe after the Reformation was now given a certain bogus dignity as ‘scientific.’ ” The blood accusation’s revival, then, was arguably a warning sign. In reaction to the Beilis affair, Russia’s European critics might have done well to look inward, for the trial could be seen as a symptom, to borrow Vasily Maklakov’s words, of a “dangerous internal illness” afflicting the heart of Europe itself. During the trial, in fact, Vipper was quite explicit in confessing that he had been inspired by certain recent European trials.

  In the decades after his trial, Mendel Beilis never entirely lost his place in history. He was reliably mentioned in any tract on Jewish ritual murder or its refutation. In 1926, the official newspaper of Germany’s rising Nazi Party, Volkischer Beobachter, devoted a six-part series to the Beilis affair, calling it a “test of strength between the Russian state and people and the Jews.” In the 1930s, Julius Streicher, editor of the infamous Nazi weekly Der Sturmer, energetically propagandized for the ritual-murder charge, devoting special issues to the subject that listed Beilis in the pantheon of Jewish child-killers. “Look at the path which the Jewish people has traversed for millennia,” Streicher declared at a Nazi rally. “Everywhere murder, everywhere mass murder!” The Nazi regime itself, it is true, never adopted the blood accusation as a major part of its official propaganda. There were no Nazi versions of the Beilis trial. Still, as Biale has argued, the blood accusation was more important to the Nazi cause than it might initially appear. Thanks to the efforts of Streicher and others, the charge “lurked in the background, providing additional mythic ammunition” that aided in “the demonization of the Jews…[making] it easier for the Nazis to isolate their victims and then deport them to their deaths.” As the most notorious example of its kind, the Beilis case surely helped the ritual-murder myth maintain its vitality. Of note is that in May 1943, the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, sent several hundred copies of a book on Jewish ritual murder, which included an entire chapter on the Beilis trial, for distribution to the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile death squads that killed more than a million Jews in Eastern Europe. The tomes, Himmler explained to a top lieutenant, were important reading “above all to the men who are busy with the Jewish question.”