Early on in Robert Weinberg’s riveting history of the 1913 Beilis blood libel trial, the author explains that his interest in the case began when he visited Moscow in 1992. He noticed a small group of protesters who were upset with a recent decision of the Russian Supreme Court which ordered the Lenin Library to relinquish some 12,000 books, manuscripts, and pamphlets that once comprised the library of the fifth Lubavitcher rebbe. Weinberg discovered that some of the protesters were clamoring for possession of the collection because they believed that the books and manuscripts in dispute held the secrets to the ritual blood libel.
On Sunday, March 20, 1911 the dead, blood-soaked body of a partially clad Christian boy was found in a cave near Kiev. Almost immediately anti-Semitic right wing groups, including the press, and anti-Semitic czarist officials, labeled the killing a ritual murder. Despite the lack of evidence, the police arrested Menachem Mendel Beilis, a thirty-nine year old manager of a factory near the scene of the crime. At the time of his arrest, Beilis was estranged from Judaism but, nevertheless, the Czarist prosecutors attempted to associate him with long held Christian beliefs that the Jews were bent on revenge against Christianity through the ritual murder of Christian children.
The canard that Jews engaged in ritual murder of Christians, particularly young girls and boys, dates back to the twelfth century in England when it was charged that Jews were said to have murdered a Christian youth in order to mock the Passion of Christ. During the nineteenth century the ritual murder accusation experienced a revival in Central Europe, culminating in seventy-nine ritual murder charges in the 1890s alone. The Beilis trial was the first and last of these ritual murder accusations in twentieth century Europe, although the Nazis did use ritual murder accusations against Jews in the pages of Der Sturmer. The trial took place in the waning days of Czarist Russia and quickly became an international event that brought together Jews and non- Jews alike in defense of Beilis. Although Beilis was acquitted of the crime, the jury also stated that the crime had the hallmarks of a ritual murder. Weinberg, who is a professor of history at Swarthmore College, not only provides a scholarly history of the events leading up to the ritual murder accusation but also includes an invaluable collection of documents taken from the trial record.
Weinberg notes that the significance of the Beilis Affair has relevance to the contemporary world situation. As we show concern about the revival of anti-Semitism in Ukraine, Weinberg reminds us that the grave of Andrei Iushchinskii, the murdered Christian boy, has become a shrine for nationalists and anti- Semites who view him as a martyr, a victim of a vast Jewish conspiracy to destroy the fabric of Russian and Ukrainian culture and society. Weinberg has culled documents from the trial transcripts, newspaper articles, and Beilis’s memoirs, many appearing for the first time in English, to bring us face to face with this notorious trial.
Additional Review
Review by Robert Moses Shapiro
This concisely written book forcefully tells the story of the outrageous ritual murder trial of Mendel Beilis in Kiev. Through careful review of published and unpublished sources — including police interrogations, court transcripts, photographs, newspaper articles, and political cartoons — the author lays out the process resulting in a trial during which the state prosecution attempted to convict the entire Jewish religion of the crime of ritual murder.
The hapless Mendel Beilis was imprisoned for two years before being brought to trial in 1913. The book details the circumstances of the victim’s death and the evidence that was found, suppressed, tendentiously interpreted, or manufactured by corrupt prosecutors and biased judges, while alleged experts and eyewitnesses repeatedly changed their testimony. The historical narrative of the case is punctuated with references to how it was tried in the Russian and foreign press.
The largely peasant jury in Kiev decided that ritual murder did exist, but that there was not enough evidence to convince a majority that Mendel Beilis was guilty of murder. This book enables readers to conduct their own investigation, not so much about whether Beilis was guilty or whether ritual murder was an authentic part of Judaism. What concerns the author is that readers should come to recognize the power of prejudice, hatred, fear, and suspicion, combined with state interest, to suppress challenges to traditional authority. This is a book that will likely serve well in many classrooms. Bibliography, facsimiles, index, maps, notes, photographs, sketches.
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