Blood Libel in Late Imperial Russia

Robert Weinberg

Description

The infamous trial of a Jew framed for the murder of a Christian boy

Watch a video of the author discussing the Mendel Beilis trial at the YIVO Institute.

On Sunday, March 20, 1911, children playing in a cave near Kiev made a gruesome discovery: the blood-soaked body of a partially clad boy. After right-wing groups asserted that the killing was a ritual murder, the police, with no direct evidence, arrested Menachem Mendel Beilis, a 39-year-old Jewish manager at a factory near the site of the crime. Beilis's trial in 1913 quickly became an international cause célèbre. The jury ultimately acquitted Beilis but held that the crime had the hallmarks of a ritual murder. Robert Weinberg's account of the Beilis Affair explores the reasons why the tsarist government framed Beilis, shedding light on the excesses of antisemitism in late Imperial Russia. Primary documents culled from the trial transcript, newspaper articles, Beilis's memoirs, and archival sources, many appearing in English for the first time, bring readers face to face with this notorious trial.

Acknowledgments
Dramatis Personae
Introduction: A Murder Without a Mystery
1. The Initial Investigation
2. The Case Against Beilis
3. The Trial
4. Summation and Verdict
Epilogue
Documents
Bibliography
Notes
Index

Sujets

• Jewish
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Jews
• Jewish studies
• General officer
• Russia
• General
• Russie

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 20 novembre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253011145
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

INDIANA-MICHIGAN SERIES IN RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN STUDIES
Alexander Rabinowitch and William G. Rosenberg, editors
B L ood Libe L
IN LATE IMPERIAL RUSSIA
The Ritual Murder Trial of Mendel Beilis
ROBERT WEINBERG
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
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© 2014 by Robert Weinberg All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences–Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48–1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-01099-5 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-253-01107-7 (paper) ISBN 978-0-253-01114-5 (e-book)
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The book is dedicated to Laurie and our son, Perry, for their unstinting support and love over the years .
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
Introduction: A Murder without a Mystery
1   The Initial Investigation
2   The Case against Beilis
3   The Trial
4   Summation and Verdict
Epilogue
DOCUMENTS
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
Acknowledgments
I owe heartfelt thanks to the following friends and colleagues for their comments on various incarnations of this book: Lisa Kirschenbaum, Adele Lindenmeyr, and Louise McReynolds. Gene Avrutin, Hillel Kieval, and Jarrod Tanny also read the manuscript, and I thank them for their suggestions on how to improve its content and analysis. In addition, Sibelan Forrester, Bruce Grant, and Marina Rojavin helped me with several particularly thorny translations, and Hanna Kozlowska worked wonders to obtain the image of a group of Jews collecting the blood from a Christian youth. I also want to express my gratitude to Janet Rabinowitch and Peter Froehlich of Indiana University Press for shepherding the book through its various production stages in a smooth and trouble-free manner. Swarthmore College generously provided support so I could take several trips to Russia and Ukraine and gave me time off from teaching so I could concentrate on writing. Lastly, I owe my greatest gratitude to Laurie Bernstein, who has been my biggest fan all these years and encouraged me every step of the way as I worked on this project. She read numerous versions of the manuscript, always paying painstaking attention to content, argumentation, analysis, and syntax. I attribute the strengths of the book to her keen editorial eye, just as I attribute its weaknesses to my limitations as a historian.
Dramatis Personae Menachem Mendel Beilis defendant Fyodor A. Boldyrev presiding judge Stepan Brazul'-Brushkovskii journalist Georgii G. Chaplinskii assistant prosecutor Vasilii Cheberiak father of Zhenia Cheberiak Vera V. Cheberiak mother of Zhenia Cheberiak Zhenia Cheberiak friend of Andrei Iushchinskii Ekaterina Diakonova friend of Vera Cheberiak Ksenia Diakonova
seamstress and friend of Vera Cheberiak Vasilii Fenenko investigating magistrate Vladimir Golubev university student Dmitri N. Grigorovich-Barskii defense attorney Oskar O. Gruzenberg defense attorney Andrei Iushchinskii victim Nikolai B. Karabchevskii defense attorney Amzor E. Karaev revolutionary Evtikhii Kirichenko police captain Ivan Kozachenko thief Nikolai A. Krasovskii head detective Aleksandr V. Liadov assistant minister of justice Vasilii A. Maklakov defense attorney Zinaida Malitskaia Cheberiak neighbor and owner of wine store Arnold D. Margolin lawyer Pavel Miffle former lover of Vera Cheberiak Evgenii F. Mishchuk police investigator Adam Polishchuk detective Father Justin Pranaitis Catholic priest Aleksandra Prikhodko mother of Andrei Iushchinskii Iuliana Shakhovskaia wife of lamplighter Kazimir S. Shakhovskii lamplighter Ivan G. Shcheglovitov minister of justice Aleksei S. Shmakov civil plaintiff Aleksandr F. Shredel head of gendarmes Ivan A. Sikorskii psychiatrist Oskar Iu. Vipper prosecutor Jonah Zaitsev founder of brick factory Mark Zaitsev
son of Jonah Zaitsev and current owner of brick factory Anna Zakharova (Wolf-Woman) homeless woman Grigorii G. Zamyslovskii civil plaintiff Aleskandr S. Zarudnyi defense attorney
Introduction: A Murder without a Mystery
On the morning of Sunday, March 20, 1911, 1 a group of children playing in the caves that dotted Kiev's Lukianovka district, a hilly suburb that overlooked the city, made a gruesome finding: the blood-soaked body of a partially clad boy. Propped up against a cave's wall in a sitting position, the corpse was riddled with about four dozen stab wounds to the head, neck, and torso, leaving the body drained of most of its blood. The boys’ clothes, both those he was wearing and those found scattered on the ground, were caked with blood.
The police who were summoned to the scene had no difficulty establishing the identity of the victim because his name was written inside the school notebooks lying nearby. Thirteen-year-old Andrei Iushchinskii had been reported missing by his mother Aleksandra Prikhodko earlier in the week. Last seen when he supposedly left for school on the morning of Saturday, March 12, Andrei had skipped class to visit his friend Zhenia Cheberiak, who lived near the caves several kilometers from Andrei's home in another suburb of Kiev. Joined by several neighborhood children, Andrei and Zhenia had been playing on the premises of a brick factory adjacent to the two-storied house where Zhenia's family occupied the top floor.
Police investigators initially suspected Andrei's family of the killing, having learned that his mother and stepfather abused him and that Andrei often left home to stay with his aunt, who helped pay for his education at a church school. But the police soon turned their attention to Vera V. Cheberiak, the thirty-year-old mother of Zhenia and ringleader of a gang of petty thieves who used her apartment to fence stolen goods. According to the initial investigations, the gang, evidently fearing that Andrei had told or would tell the police about its criminal activities, killed him.
Right-wing groups in Kiev, however, were quick to assert that the killing was in fact a ritual murder carried out by Jews. In accord with a longstanding myth that Jews needed Christian blood to bake matzo, antisemites in Kiev seized on the murder of Iushchinskii as “proof” of Judaism's malevolent and murderous nature. Vladimir Golubev, a student at Kiev University whose father taught at the major Russian Orthodox seminary in Kiev, led the public accusation, hounding the local prosecutor's office to pursue the murder as a ritual killing and threatening popular disorders. Working together, Golubev and the district attorney's office sought to find a Jew upon whom they could pin responsibility for Iushchinskii's death. Judicial authorities in Kiev received the go-ahead from the minister of justice in St. Petersburg, notwithstanding the finding of the detective originally assigned to the investigation that the murderers most likely inflicted many of the wounds after the boy was dead perhaps in order to make it seem like a ritual murder.
In mid-July the police detained Menachem Mendel Beilis, a thirty-nine-year-old Jewish manager at the brick factory near the cave where Iushchinskii's body was found. Beilis languished in jail until the fall of 1913, when he went on trial for the ritual murder of Iushchinskii. During those two years tsarist officials manufactured evidence and suborned perjury in an effort to build their case. By the time the trial started, the Beilis case had become a cause célèbre. The trial lasted over a month, from late September to the end of October, with some 200 witnesses testifying. The trial attracted the attention of people throughout the Russian Empire and abroad who showed a keen interest in the fate of Beilis. In the end, the jury acquitted Beilis, but they agreed with the prosecution that the crime displayed the hallmarks of a “ritual murder.” The ordeal of Beilis became known as the Beilis Affair, which has the dubious distinction of being the best-known and most publicized case of “blood libel” in the twentieth century. It was a murder without a mystery except for why officials in Kiev and St. Petersburg, including the ministers of justice and interior, railroaded an innocent man, who came close to being convicted for a crime he did not commit.

Kiev, 1911. Collection of Author.
My interest in the Beilis case was piqued shortly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, when I arrived in Moscow in February 1992 to conduct research in the Lenin Library. I noticed a small group of protestors holding signs demanding that the library hold onto a collection that was “a national resource” of the Russian people. As I soon learned, the demonstrators were upset with a 1991 decision of the Russian Supreme Court ordering the Lenin Library to relinquish some 12,000 books, nearly 400 manuscrip