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

by Levin, Edmund

  In Poland, during and after World War II, there were signs that the Kiev case had survived in the collective memory. Residents of German-occupied Poland called the product rumored to be made from human fat in the Auschwitz concentration camp “Beilis Soap.” (Poles therefore took care to avoid the soap cakes distributed by the German authorities.)

  After the war, as the historian Jan T. Gross has documented in horrifying detail, Poles perpetrated pogroms that killed hundreds of the Jews who had managed to survive German extermination. In many cases, the violence was sparked by rumors of ritual murder. The first postwar pogrom was in the city of Rzeszow on June 12, 1945. No one was killed but a large number of Jews were beaten, Jewish property was vandalized, and two hundred Jews fled the city. According to a local newspaper account, the public was enraged by “the wildest rumors” of a ritual murder committed “by Jews who needed blood [transfusions, to fortify themselves] after returning from the camps.”

  The most notorious postwar pogrom in Poland took place on July 4, 1946, in the town of Kielce, where a mob killed forty-two Jews and left some eighty wounded. A Jewish delegation attempted to secure a statement condemning anti-Semitism from the bishop of Lublin, Stefan Wyszinski, later named a cardinal and primate of Poland. According to a report on the meeting, Wyszinski declined to issue a special condemnation of anti-Semitism and “during the discussion of how the crowd was agitated by the myth that Christian blood is necessary to make matzo, the bishop clarified that during the Beilis trial a lot of old and new Jewish books were assembled and the matter of blood was not definitively settled.” (It should be noted that another bishop, Teodor Kubina of Czestochowa, together with local officials, issued an uncompromising proclamation that began: “All statements about ritual murders are lies. Nobody … has ever been harmed by Jews for ritual purposes.”)

  In Russia, Jewish ritual murder reared up once more as a highly public issue—almost exactly eight decades after Mendel Beilis’s arrest in the middle of the night. The occasion was the discovery in a forest outside Sverdlovsk (as Ekaterinburg had been renamed) of several sets of buried skeletal remains, believed to be those of Tsar Nicholas II and his family. The excavation that commenced in mid-July 1991 was reminiscent of the botched handling of the Yuschinsky crime scene. Over the protests of a forensic archaeologist, ready with her brushes and tools, untrained investigators hurriedly grabbed at the hundreds of bones, many of which splintered or disintegrated entirely as they were stuffed into bags.

  After the Soviet Union collapsed a few months later, the new Russian government created a commission to establish the identities of the victims and plan an appropriate interment. DNA samples were taken from the remains and compared to samples from several living relatives of the imperial couple. In September 1995, the commission’s lead investigator announced his conclusion: the remains were, beyond all doubt, those of Nicholas and Alexandra, and three of their daughters, as well four others in their retinue who had been murdered along with them. (One of the two younger daughters—either Maria or Anastasia—and the boy Alexis were unaccounted for, fueling speculation they had escaped, though the evidence strongly suggested that the perpetrators had burned these bodies.)

  After the bodies were identified, the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church shocked authorities and the public by declaring that it could not accept the accuracy of the commission’s report. The Church asked for clarification on ten questions, two of which attracted widespread attention. The synod wanted to know: Had the tsar been decapitated after his death? And could the commission “confirm or refute the ritual character of the murder”?

  The notion that the massacre of the imperial family was a Jewish ritual crime had persisted since the early 1920s when it was propagated by anticommunist Russian propagandists and popularized in the West by the Times of London’s Russia correspondent, Robert Wilton, who wrote a lurid book on the subject. In this scenario, Jews were solely responsible for killing the tsar, his wife, and their children. They had cut off the head of the tsar and sent it to the Kremlin, and they had left behind, in Wilton’s words, “mysterious inscriptions in the death chamber.” When the White forces briefly captured the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg where the Romanovs had been killed, they found scrawled on the basement walls some runic-looking marks and two garbled lines of poetry in German by the German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine. The quotation was from a poem about the death of King Balthazar, the biblical figure who sees “the writing on the wall.” Belsazar—the correct rendering of Balthazar in German—was misspelled “Belsatzar.” Some might see the work, at worst, of a punning executioner and some idle doodling. But in the eyes of the Far Right, all the scribblings were “kabbalistic signs” pointing to the murders’ ritual character.

  The Holy Synod’s ghoulish inquiries in 1995 testified to the abiding obsession of extreme Russian nationalists with what one historian has called the “gothic version” of the murders. Critics argued that for the commission to address the ritual scenario was to dignify it. But the commission’s chairman, the noted democratic reformer Boris Nemtsov, opted to deal with it matter-of-factly. In January 1998, the commission’s chief investigator, V. N. Solovev, informed the synod of his unequivocal conclusion, which he later summed up in a newspaper interview: “The motives [for the murders] were of a political character and were in no way connected with secret religious cults.” Unsurprisingly, latter-day Black Hundreds, a rising force in postcommunist Russia, would not accept this conclusion; they insisted that the investigation was “fraudulent” and designed “to conceal the ritual character of the crime.” As for the Russian Orthodox Church, it merely refused to accept the identification of the remains, calling the results inconclusive. The Church’s position did not change even after additional tests reckoned that the odds of a coincidental match with Romanov DNA were more than a billion to one.

  When the imperial family’s remains were interred in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg in July 1998, Patriarch Aleksy and other high Church officials refused to attend. The priests presiding over the service did not utter the victims’ names; the ceremony was treated as a ritual that would be performed for unknowns. The refusal of the Church to acknowledge the identity of the remains could, of course, only encourage speculation about the nature of the murders, which continues in the far-right-wing media to this day. In the post-Soviet era, the sensational accounts of Wilton and the White Russians from the 1920s have been republished and embellished in new versions. One especially popular one, marketed as scholarly nonfiction, features a mysterious rabbi who supervises the ritual.

  Then there is the strange case of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the anticommunist hero and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature who died in 2008. Though a deeply conservative Russian nationalist, he in no way advocated for the truthfulness of the blood accusation. Yet, in one of his final works, Two Hundred Years Together, about the Russians’ relationship with the Jews, he struggles with the Beilis case. He begins with the right question: “How was it possible in the twentieth century, without a factually based indictment, to instigate such a trial that threatened an entire people?” But, as the Russian journalist and historian Semyon Reznik writes, while Solzhenitsyn makes it clear he “does not approve of those who conducted the Beilis case, he tries in every way he can to shield them, to obscure the clarity of the picture.”

  Solzhenitsyn writes that “Beilis was indicted, on the basis of dubious evidence, because he was a Jew.” The evidence, of course, was not “dubious” but better said to have been nonexistent or fabricated by the state. Solzhenitsyn’s account contains numerous other inaccuracies that invariably cast Beilis’s defenders in a bad light and make his prosecution seem, if not defensible, then a less evil act than it was. On major points he accepts the prosecution’s view of the evidence. Andrei Yushchinsky, he writes, “was killed in an unusual manner: forty-seven wounds were inflicted on him, with apparent knowledge of anatomy,” with wounds whose “apparent goal was to drain his blood
while alive.” All those allegations, of course, were contradicted by the defense experts—and in the matter of the perpetrators’ supposed anatomical knowledge, by an expert for the prosecution. It is surely indicative of the modern-day persistence of the blood accusation that one of the greatest Russian literary, political, and moral figures of the last century could not honestly come to terms with the case of Mendel Beilis.

  A Well-Tended Grave

  For decades, the grave in Section 34, Row 11, Plot No. 4 of the Lukianovka Cemetery in Kiev had been abandoned, lacking even a proper grave marker. The first sign of renewed interest in the site came in 2003 when a group of about fifteen men dressed in facsimiles of tsarist officers’ uniforms came from St. Petersburg, along with two Russian Orthodox priests, to pay their respects at the final resting place of Andrei Yushchinsky.

  Soon after that visit—without official permission, according to the cemetery’s director—neat new shrubbery appeared on the plot, as well as a new cross with two metal plates bearing inscriptions. In the decrepit cemetery, where many graves had turned into weed-filled sinkholes, Andrei’s plot now stood out as unusually well tended.

  The inscription on the first plate read:

  Here lie the remains of the saintly boy-martyr Andrei (Yushchinsky).

  Crowned with the martyr’s wreath in his thirteenth year, on 12 March 1911.

  Sainted, martyred, Andrei, pray to God for us.

  In calling Andrei a “martyr,” the inscription was inappropriate, since the poor boy’s murder, horrible though it was, had nothing to do with his faith. Beneath the first plate someone had affixed another one, bearing a much more plainspoken and provocative inscription:

  Andrei Yushchinsky, martyred by the Yids in 1911.

  In February 2004, after reports of this anti-Semitic act incited an uproar, the cemetery sought a court order to remove the plate—a legal necessity, according to the director—but within days someone had made off with the offensive plaque, rendering legal action unnecessary.

  Andrei’s grave site continued to attract the attention of the Russian and Ukrainian Far Right. In February 2006, the grave was renovated again, thanks to the efforts of a group from a large private Ukrainian university, the Inter-Regional Academy of Personnel Management, known by its Ukrainian acronym MAUP, which has been cited by the U.S. State Department and the Anti-Defamation League as a disseminator of anti-Semitic propaganda. The major addition was a rectangular marble tablet placed over the grave, inscribed with the text of the first question to the jury—about the forty-seven wounds and five glasses of blood—which, given the affirmative verdict, supposedly confirmed the existence of ritual murder. Local Jewish groups were outraged by the inscription, but because it was a quote from a court proceeding that was not overtly inflammatory, no legal basis could be found to have it removed. It remains there today.

  It would be mistaken to exaggerate the extent of anti-Semitism in Ukraine. Ukraine does not sponsor official anti-Semitism. When anti-Semitic incidents have occurred, the government has condemned them. Nonetheless, Andrei Yushchinsky’s grave site has become a place of pilgrimage for far-right true believers. Every year, on the anniversary of the murder, a sizeable and organized group comes to pay its respects to the Boy Martyr, a thirteen-year-old child whose memory is both celebrated and abused. Smaller groups of mourners make their way there as well. In springtime a visitor will find Andrei’s grave covered with fresh flowers.

  Acknowledgments

  I have many people to thank.

  My amazing agent, Renee Zuckerbrot, plucked me off the Internet to suggest I write “a book,” when I had no idea what that book would be, and then saw the potential in this story. Altie Karper acquired the book for Schocken and gave me consistent encouragement during the long process of researching and writing.

  Leonid Finberg, head of the Judaica Institute in Kiev, the go- to person for anyone doing research on Ukrainian Jewish history, was indispensable in helping me secure access to archival documents. He also provided me with my indefatigable research assistant, Olga Savchuk.

  Thanks also go to my other research assistants: Nicole Warren, who scouted out every possible mention of the case in blurry microfilms of Russian newspapers, and also read through the manuscript, making many useful comments; and Nataliya Rovenskaya, Kateryna Demchuk, Jane Gorjevsky, and Lydia Hamilton.

  Katia Shraga transcribed handwritten documents that even native Russians found impossible to read and imparted to me some of her skill.

  Professors Natan Meir and Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern provided very helpful research advice along the way. Professor Robert Weinberg was generous with his time, reading and commenting on drafts of several chapters.

  David Groff gave me the benefit of his immense editorial acumen throughout the writing of this book. Alexander Zaslavsky and Caroline Howard contributed many incisive and constructive comments on the manuscript.

  Jay Beilis, Mendel’s grandson, and his cousin Hilda Edelist were generous with their memories and information about their family and put me onto material I otherwise would not have found.

  Mark Stein, coeditor of a new edition of Mendel Beilis’s memoir, shared much interesting material.

  Carrie Friedman-Cohen located and translated Beilis’s lost memoir in the Yiddish newspaper Haynt and translated most of the Yiddish material in this book; Jessica Kirzane also contributed Yiddish translation work.

  Alex Ratnovsky, of the Yeshiva University library, provided indispensable assistance.

  My wife, Lilia, fulfilled multiple roles: graphic artist, Russian-language consultant, critical and sensitive reader. I owe her more than I can express.

  Source Notes

  The major source for information about the Mendel Beilis case is the three-volume trial transcript, which was printed daily in the newspaper Kievskaia Mysl’ and published in three volumes as Delo Beilisa: Stenographicheskii Otchet. These will be cited as: STEN I, II, and III. The transcript is a unique and extraordinary document, the product of a private effort, as Russian trial proceedings were not routinely transcribed in full.

  The transcript, however, was recognized at the time by both sides as being not entirely accurate. I have supplemented or used alternative versions of witness testimony as recorded by reporters for the newspapers Rech’, Kievskaia Mysl’, and Kievlianin and, occasionally, other sources.

  In 2005, the State Archive of the Kiev Region, Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Kievskoi Oblasti (GAKO), put out seven reels of microfilm with some five thousand pages of documents about the case. Dokumenty po delu Beilisa (The Beilis Case Papers) was published by the U.S. firm Eastview Information Services. This material is cited as “GAKO-DpdB” by reel number and in standard archival notation.

  I also obtained hundreds of pages of additional documents from the Kiev State Archive. This material is cited as “GAKO” in standard archival notion.

  After the February 1917 revolution, the Provisional Government convened an Extraordinary Commission to investigate the crimes of the tsarist regime, including the prosecution of Beilis. The testimony was published in Padenie Tsarskogo Rezhima (The Fall of the Tsarist Regime), cited as “Padenie.”

  Another indispensable source: a collection of depositions given to the Extraordinary Commission by key figures in the Beilis case, published in book form in 1999 as Delo Mendelia Beilisa: Materialy Chrezvychainoi sledstvennoi komissii Vremennogo pravitel’stva o sudebnom protsesse 1913 g. po obvineniiu v ritual’nom ubiistve (The Case of Mendel Beilis: Materials of the Extraordinary Investigative Commission of the Provisional Government about the Trial of 1913 on the Accusation of Ritual Murder.) This work is cited as Materialy Chrezvychainoi.

  Special mention must be made of the Russian jurist and historian Alexander Tager, author of Tsarskaia Rossiia i delo Beilisa (published in English as The Decay of Czarism: The Beiliss Trial), and two indispensable articles in the journal Krasnyi Arkhiv, collecting important documents about the case. His effort was heroic and his fate tragic, as he
perished in the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. His works are still the only source for much of what we know about the case.

  The sources for the personal experiences of Mendel Beilis are his autobiography, The Story of My Sufferings, and the multipart interview with him published in the Yiddish newspaper Haynt in November–December 1913, “Mayn Lebn in Turme un in Gerikht” (My Life in Prison and the Court). Where the accounts overlap, I have generally preferred the Haynt version, given its proximity to the events. Beilis also gave an interview to the Hearst papers, which published a multipart series in the spring of 1914. The material unfortunately contains so many obvious errors and exaggerations that I have used it very sparingly.