The Beilis Affair

Photo Credit: Saul Jay Singer

Only seven years after Alfred Dreyfus’s exoneration in 1906 in the notorious French Dreyfus Affair, Menachem Mendel Beilis (1874-1934) was tried in Russia for ritual murder in what was the most sensational court case of its time and undeniably one of the most bizarre cases ever tried in an allegedly civilized society.

The “Beilis Affair” was unusual in that while blood libels – the fabrication that originated in Western Europe in the 12^th and 13^th centuries that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood in baking Passover matzah – were historically primarily local affairs, this blood libel was the only one directed by a national government. The Beilis prosecution, which was endorsed by the Czarist government at every conceivable level, went up the chain of command from local functionaries to ministers and all the way to Czar Nicholas II. Ironically – and, perhaps, inexplicably – the Russian judicial system had been held in high esteem by the West, but the trial changed international perception and the deceit, immorality, and sheer incongruity of the case was a stark illumination of the coming end to the Romanov dynasty in Russia.

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The Black Hundreds, a notorious Russian antisemitic movement, distributed leaflets proclaiming that Beilis had committed a ritual murder and urging a massive revenge pogrom against the Jews.

Although the Kiev judges assigned the case were disinclined to review an action so utterly lacking in evidence, they were pressured by the highest levels of the imperial bureaucracy to bring the case to trial, and the vehemently antisemitic Union of Russian People pressured local law enforcement officials to fabricate an accusation of ritual murder.

Russian politicians, including particularly the Minister of Justice, quickly joined the conspiracy, as the government proceeded to manipulate every aspect of the trial to facilitate Beilis’s conviction. Documents declassified after the 1917 Russian Revolution conclusively prove the depth and scope of the plot to convict Beilis and to defame Judaism and the entire Jewish people, including rigging the jury and bribing and threatening witnesses. The Russian press was particularly reprehensible, as it launched a resolute and scandalous antisemitic crusade.

Little is known about Beilis before the Affair other than that he was raised in a Russian village, served in the Czar’s army, settled in Kiev around 1897, married his wife Esther, and was the father of five at the time of his arrest. Though born into an Orthodox chassidic family and educated in cheder, his Torah education was cut short by his conscription into the Czar’s army and he only knew the basics of Judaism, later writing in his memoir that “I did not have the opportunity to learn about Jewish observance in depth.” Nonetheless, he and Esther practiced traditional Judaism, sent their children to cheder, and followed many, but by no means all, observances. For example, he worked at his factory job on Shabbat because his employment demanded it but, as we shall see, his Sabbath violation played an important, albeit ironic, role in his trial defense and acquittal. He expressed great pride in being a Jew; asked by the judge at the beginning of the trial if he is Jewish, he roared: “Yes, I am a Jew!” and, as he later explained in his autobiography, “I did not recognize my own voice when I answered.”

The Affair began on March 12, 1911, when 12-year-old Andrei Yushchinsky, a Ukrainian boy, disappeared on his way to school and his mutilated body was found eight days later in a cave near a brick factory in Kiev, where Beilis served as superintendent. The child had received about fifty stab wounds, most likely with an awl, and initial suspicion fell on his mother and stepfather, who had reportedly been beating and badly mistreating him. With the police investigation at a dead end, and facing enormous public pressure to solve the murder, Beilis was arrested on July 21, 1911 after a street lamplighter reported that Yushchinsky had been kidnapped by a Jew.

Beilis was dragged out of his home in the presence of his wife and children; he was officially charged in January 1912 with the murder; and the trial was set for the following May, but the case against him proved so shamefully weak that the prosecution was forced to withdraw the charges so that it could prepare a new case. Still without any substantive evidence against him, and knowing well that their witnesses were dubious and unreliable – at best – the prosecutors turned their efforts to demonstrating that ritual murder had been the motive for the killing, rendering proving Beilis’ guilt as the perpetrator almost an afterthought.

Denied family visitation, Beilis sat rotting in his cell in horrific conditions for over two years, including having surgery performed on his infected feet by the prison physician without anesthesia. At one point, he contemplated suicide, but he ultimately decided to live and fight “because [his suicide] would leave a stain on the Jews” and “the Jew-haters would say that I did it because I wasn’t able to prove my innocence, or that the Jews did me in so that the truth [of the ritual murder] wouldn’t be exposed.” He later wrote in his memoir that whenever thoughts of suicide arose, he would remember a Mishna he had learned in the cheder of his youth: Eizehu gibor? Hakoveish et yitzro. (“Who is mighty? He who conquers his evil inclination.”)

His resolve to prove his innocence was such that when a Russian delegation entered his cell and advised him that he would be freed under a pardon to be issued on the 300^th anniversary of the reign of the Romanov dynasty, he heroically refused the pardon, declaring that he would never play a part in having false charges being brought against his fellow Jews and insisting that he would remain in his cell until he received a fair trial and was cleared of all charges.

The plotters would stop at nothing to bring Beilis to trial, including smearing and framing professional police investigators who were dedicated to apprehending the true murderer. The first Russian detective assigned to the case was fired, prosecuted, and jailed after he concluded that the murder had been committed by a Russian gang and that Beilis was innocent. The second chief investigator was Nikolay Krasovsky, the foremost detective in the Kiev Police Department, who persisted in his investigation in the face of significant government pressure to railroad Beilis. The Russian government not only fired Krasovsky, one of the true heroes of the story, but also prosecuted him for allegedly stealing eight cents from a prisoner nine years earlier (he was ultimately acquitted) and the government also discharged the prosecutor and the investigating magistrate, both of whom were determined to handle the Beilis Affair objectively and lawfully.

The trial began on September 25, 1913 – two days before Yom Kipper – and ran for 34 days until October 28, 1913. Beilis was represented pro bono by some of Russia’s most prominent defense lawyers, including lead attorneys Oscar Gruzenberg (the only Jew on Beilis’s defense team) and Vasily Alexievitch Maklakov, and Jews around the world expressed their appreciation for the lawyers’ dedication to standing up for Jews and defending Beilis. For example, exhibited here is a 1914 correspondence written (in Russian) to Maklakov from the representatives of the Vilnius Jewish Congregation thanking him for defending “law and truth and the honor of the Jewish people and of Russia during these sad times, when people full of hatred spread libels against the Jews.”

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It became readily apparent to everyone that Beilis became a defendant simply because he was Jewish and his home and factory happened to be near the place where the victim was found and that he was no more than a scapegoat, a hook upon which the Russian government and antisemitic haters sought to convict the entire Jewish people. As a result, the trial proved to have an enormous unifying effect among disparate – and sometimes warring – Jews who, faced with the serious threat to the entire nation, joined to do all they could to protest the vile perfidy of Russian “justice” in the case.

The case for Yushchinsky being the victim of a blood libel was nonsensical even in the first instance, as the defense proved from the autopsy reports, which were clear that the boy had been the victim of homicidal rage, or possibly revenge, rather than a deliberate ritual necessary for collecting blood. Moreover, the prosecution persisted in presenting witnesses and “evidence” that could not pass the laugh test. For example, one “scientific” analysis was presented by a prosecution expert, Kiev psychiatrist Professor Ivan Sikorsky (the father of aviation pioneer Igor Sikorsky, who invented the helicopter), who was considered an expert on religious fanatism and was a notorious antisemite. Sikorsky ludicrously testified not only that it was possible to determine the nationality of a murder based upon an examination of the victim’s body, but he also concluded definitively that Yushchinsky had been murdered by Jews.

But perhaps the most hysterical (but for the seriousness of the charges) among the prosecution “expert witnesses” was Justinas Pranaitis, a Catholic priest well-known for his antisemitic work Talmud Unmasked (1892), and who was presented as a “religious expert in Judaic rituals.” When Pranaitis testified that he had no doubts that Yushchinsky was the victim of a Jewish ritual murder, Beilis’s lawyers destroyed his credibility by proving that the priest was ignorant about even the most basic precepts of Jewish law. Asked on cross-examination by Beilis’s counsel where “Baba Batra lived” (“baba” means “elderly woman” in Russian) – a question equivalent to asking an American “who lived at the Gettysburg Address?” – Pranaitis testified that he did not know; trial attendees laughed uproariously when Beilis’s lawyers explained to this “great Talmudic expert” that Baba Batra is a Talmudic tractate. Another priest whose “expert testimony” the prosecution sought to introduce turned out to be a Jewish convert who admitted that he had never seen or heard any trace of ritual murder in his father’s Jewish house and that he had only heard about the bloody practice from Christians.

Defense experts, including two leading Russian professors and a renowned Russian philosopher, testified to the beauty of Jewish values, and the respected Rabbi Yaakov Mazeh, the official government rabbi of Moscow, delivered brilliant testimony displaying his encyclopedic knowledge of Jewish law, as he quoted and explained passages from the Torah, the Talmud, and other Jewish sources that conclusively establish that Jewish law not only prohibits spilling blood but, indeed, bans the consumption of any blood, even animal blood.

Most ironically, some of Beilis’s lawyers’ strongest arguments were based upon the fact that he was not an observant Jew. First, his alibi: he was working on Shabbat with his Gentile co-workers, who testified that he was with them at the factory at the time Yushchinsky was abducted, and his lawyers produced receipt slips signed by him that morning for a shipment of bricks at the very time when Yushchinsky was abducted. Second, it was common knowledge that Beilis was not a practicing observant Jew, making it very difficult for the czarist prosecutors to convince the jury that he was somehow part of a “fringe group” of ultra-observant Jews called “chassidim,” who had performed the “traditional Jewish blood libel ritual.” (In yet another irony, Beilis had not a clue as to what a “chassid” was; later asked if he was a chassid or a mitnaged, he replied “I am a Jew and I don’t know the difference between these two groups. We are all Jews.”)

One significant obstacle that the prosecution faced throughout the case was that Beilis was broadly respected, even beloved, by the Gentiles in his neighborhood, some of whom referred to him affectionately as “our Mendel,” and their high regard for him as an honest man was such that many non-Jews either refused to testify against him or even testified in his favor. Many in the non-Jewish community remembered that Beilis had regularly permitted funeral services to take a short-cut route to the cemetery through the grounds of the brick factory, when a nearby factory run by a Christian refused. The local priest, remembering that Beilis had sold him bricks for a Christian orphanage at a reduced price, had personally appealed to the authorities on his behalf during the Russian pogroms of 1905; according to an account by Kiev native Shalom Aleichem, “Beilis’s house was one of the few Jewish homes in the city to go untouched.” The priest similarly stood by Beilis at his trial, and Beilis later expressed heartfelt gratitude to all the Russian Gentiles who exhibited “real heroism, real sacrifice” in defending him and who persisted “because they knew I was innocent.”

Even the lamplighter – who, as it turned out, had maliciously implicated Beilis to obtain revenge against him for threatening to report him for stealing bricks from the factory – recanted in court and confessed that the Russian secret police had plied him with vodka to get him to incriminate Beilis, and even Yushchinsky’s mother refused to incriminate him.

Finally, the “impartial” trial judge, who remained determined to see Beilis convicted, issued a jury instruction that “This trial… has touched upon a matter which concerns the existence of the whole Russian people. There are people who drink our blood.” Nonetheless, the case was so outrageous and the prosecution so inept that even in antisemitic Russia, the jury – which the Russian government had packed with no less than seven members of the notorious Union of the Russian People – returned a not-guilty verdict after just over one hour of deliberations. (There exists some dispute as to the vote, with some authorities claiming that the verdict was unanimous, but it is now generally recognized that the result was 6-6 which, pursuant to Russian law, resulted in an acquittal.) However, many people forget that the jury nevertheless determined that Yushchinsky had been the victim of a ritual murder; thus, the prosecutors were feted by the Union of the Russian People and their supporters as great national heroes and, even today, the Beilis Affair remains critical to Russian and Ukrainian antisemites, who even today treat Yushchinsky’s gravesite as a holy shrine and make annual pilgrimages there.

Exhibited here is an original postcard with artwork by Mitchel Loeb printed by Progress Publishing Company, New York (circa 1913) that highlights the fact that, although Beilis was personally acquitted, the jury in the case found that there had been a ritual murder. The card depicts the “Jewish people” with a ball chain labeled “Blood Libel” and Czar Nicholas II saying: “Go, Mendel. You’re free! Rejoice with your American friends, but I won’t waste any time in getting even for your acquittal with your Russian brothers that you left behind.”

The caption beneath the Russian card depicting Beilis shown here cites his final remarks to the court:

Judges, in my defense I can say much, but I am tired, I have no strength, I cannot speak. You can see for yourself, Judges, that the jury found I am not guilty. I ask to be acquitted so that I might yet see my unfortunate children, who have waited for two and a half years.

The antisemitic policies of the Russian Empire were harshly criticized worldwide, and the verdict was broadly seen as a black eye for the Czarist government; in fact, the trial was to be the last of its kind, though, of course, the blood libel itself continues to this day. Nonetheless, even after the trial, the government doubled down and, in an effort to repair its image abroad, the Minister of Justice sponsored the publication of The Murder of Andrei Yushchinsky, which defended the Czar’s persecution of the Jews. As such, notwithstanding the verdict, Russian Jews were left with a feeling of hopelessness and the Beilis Affair may have led to some Jewish support for the Russian Revolution only a few years later. After the Revolution, when the Provisional Government prosecuted former Czarist ministers for crimes against the Russian people, the Beilis case was the first case it investigated, and the Revolutionary Tribunal convicted and executed several ministers.

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It is now almost universally believed that the killer was Vera Tcheberiak, a female gangster who was a member of a criminal gang with Yushchinsky’s mother, and/or one or more gang members. Yushchinsky had been in Vera’s lair and, when he witnessed a roomful of stolen goods and threatened to report the gang’s illegal activities to the authorities, he had to be murdered to assure his silence. Vera was executed by the Bolshevik firing squad in Kiev in 1919, preventing forever a comprehensive reconstruction of the murder.

Although Beilis’s long-term plans were to continue his previous life in Kiev, it quickly became obvious to him that this was not possible. Due to his great fame and the reverence after the trial, he received countless offers to make commercial appearances and the like, and he could have become a very wealthy man living off his fame, but he refused to exploit himself as a Jew and declined to cash in on his status as a Jewish victim. Thousands of visitors flocked to his home every day, but he suffered from persisting health problems, lost his job, could not find employment, and he began receiving death threats from the Black Hundreds.

Deciding that his future was in Eretz Yisrael, and relying upon promises of support from a few financial backers, he and his family made aliyah. His journey to Eretz Yisrael was broadly publicized, great preparations were made to receive him in Jaffa, Jerusalem, and the settlements, and he was met with massive crowds throughout his travels. There was a heated competition for his presence; the Jews of Jerusalem reminded him that they had prayed for him at the Kotel and argued that it would be an insult to them and the Holy City for him to settle in Tel Aviv, but he did, settling on a small farm purchased for his family by Baron Edmond Rothschild.

Unfortunately, the promises of support were not realized, particularly in the wake of World War I, when he was cut off from the funding he had left in Europe. More bad news followed after the war: during a visit to the United States in 1921 to raise money for a farmstead in Eretz Yisrael, he learned that his eldest son, Pinchas, having been traumatized by the entire Beilis Affair and struggling with his family’s continuing financial problems, had committed suicide. Though Beilis fared very poorly financially, he was determined to remain in his beloved Eretz Yisrael, but the situation became so dire that he was forced to bring his entire family to the United States, where he settled in New York (1921) and lived for the rest of his life.

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In 1925, Beilis self-published The Story of My Sufferings in Yiddish (it was later translated to English and Russian), in which he presented a comprehensive account of his experiences. Exhibited here is a truly rare and remarkable item, the title page of the book and its frontispiece page featuring a formal portrait of Beilis on which he has inscribed greetings to one Dr. Max Weinberg.

Ruminating on his life, Beilis marveled that “I lived to see the rotten czarist regime crumble… I lived to tell the whole story, and that is a miracle.” His funeral was attended by over 4,000 people and, in perhaps his greatest legacy, a poignant New York Times obituary reported that Jews “always believed that his conduct saved his countrymen from a pogrom.” Bernard Malamud later used Beilis’s story as the basis for his 1966 novel, The Fixer, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for Fiction. Some commentators (including Beilis’s family) make a highly credible case for the proposition that Malamud had plagiarized Beilis’s memoir and, although the author assured the Beilis family that he had made no attempt to portray Beilis or his wife, the Beilis case has become inextricably entwined with The Fixer narrative.

Beilis died suddenly in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.. When his hearse was taken from the Zion Memorial Chapel through the East Side to the Eldridge Street Synagogue, it was followed by thousands of Jews, four thousand of whom crammed their way into the synagogue, with an unmanageable throng of thousands of others flowing into the street. Cantor Samuel Kantarof chanted the Kail Maley Rachamim and Rabbi Idel Idelson, who conducted the services, declared that “Beilis’s name is holy to Jews throughout the world” and, pointing to Beilis’s weeping family, he added “Don’t think that only the family has lost a dear one. The Jewish people have lost a great man.”

The entire funeral was paid for by his friend Morris Kulok, a wealthy clothing manufacturer, philanthropists, and the president of Congregation Beth El in Borough Park, where he built a palatial mansion on Fifteenth Avenue. Beilis was buried at the Mount Carmel Cemetery in Glendale, Queens, which is also the burial place of Shalom Aleichem and Leo Frank, another famous victim of antisemitism.

More than a century after Beilis was first led into a Kiev courtroom, the Yushchinsky murder remains a rallying point for the extreme right fringe in Russia and Ukraine; sadly, the case is probably better remembered by these extreme antisemite haters than by Jews. In general, the Blood Libel today has its greatest mainstream acceptance in Arab Countries, particularly in the Mideast, where too many still perpetuate and publicize that notorious myth.