Jews in urban settlements, the indispensable role that they played in
the regional economy, and the fact that the vast majority of the popu-
lation felt self- confident in their cultural distinctiveness vis- à- vis their neighbors.34
In the East European borderlands, a large territory that extended
from the Baltic regions to the Black Sea, diverse groups of people usu-
ally chose to live among their own types. Segregation did not mean that
populations lived in isolation from everyone else. In the borderlands,
ethnic boundaries were highly permeable. Since early modern times,
residents routinely met and socialized in courtyards, streets, homes, and
taverns. While ethnic groups did not always exhibit esteem or affection
toward one another, people’s lives intersected on a daily basis.35 In this
cultural landscape, neighbors— that is, those individuals from diverse
religious and cultural backgrounds who lived side- by- side with one
another in small- town settings— usually developed pragmatic relation-
ships with one another based on distinct economic conditions and
residential patterns in which they lived and operated. This does not
intrODuctiOn
11
mean that Jews had always lived in harmonious coexistence with their
neighbors or that quarrels over the most trivial matters never got out
of control. But the fact that Jews and their neighbors worked out their
differences suggests that, at least in most instances, people continued to
adopt practices that allowed them to live together in a state of relative
tranquility.36
How do we explain this striking paradox? How is it possible for Jews
to be simultaneously the victims of such vicious accusations and to be
so integrated into the economy of the state and to feel so at home? For
starters, ritual murder cases were always sporadic occurrences. Even if
an exhaustive investigation of provincial archives unearths more cases,
this would not change the empirical fact that the number was very
small. It is important, therefore, not to exaggerate the significance of
the trials or their contribution to Jews’ sense of vulnerability and pow-
erlessness. In the Russian Empire, the allegations never materialized
into a full- blown panic along the lines of the early modern witch-
hunts in France or Germany, or even Poland. Nevertheless, the fact
that the blood libel popped up from time to time and that so many
people continued to maintain that Jews were capable of committing
the crime suggests that a well- established folk culture helped legitimize
the narrative.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the imperial Russian
state attempted to eradicate superstition— the belief in the power of sor-
cery, miraculous cures, and spirit possession to shape daily existence—
without much success.37 Well into the twentieth century, these cultural
beliefs and practices continued to offer convenient explanations for
basic questions regarding life, death, and afterlife, while offering pro-
tection against numerous worldly dangers. The boundaries between
religious and magical beliefs were difficult to distinguish with any cer-
tainty. That folk medicine and the supernatural played an important
role in Jewish daily life only heightened the fantastical charge made
during a ritually charged time of the year. Thus, at a time when spoken
spells brought illnesses to enemies or warded off evil spirits, when gath-
ering ceremonies enhanced the healing properties of herbs, and when
churches, cemeteries, barns, and bathhouses were associated with popu-
lar magic and divination, there was nothing peculiar about the idea that
Jews required Christian blood for religious ritual services. If, according
12
12
the Velizh affair
to Belarusian folk traditions, witches preyed on unsuspecting children,
why could not Jews kill little children for their blood?38
In the last years of the old regime, teams of ethnographers traveled
to provincial towns and villages in hopes of unlocking the mysteries of
indigenous civilizations. They conducted interviews, snapped photo-
graphs, and collected artifacts of daily life. Some worked on Russian
Orthodox peasants, others on Jews, and various others on populations
in the distant corners of the empire. Very few sources allow historians to
penetrate the worlds these people inhabited. I am lucky in this respect.
The Velizh archive offers a unique window into the multiple factors
that did not only cause ruptures and conflicts in everyday life. These
documents also allow us to observe the social and cultural worlds of a
multiethnic population that had coexisted for hundreds of years. This
extraordinary collection allows us to catch an unprecedented glimpse of
small- town life in Eastern Europe: to overhear people mingling with one
another on dusty streets and inside homes and taverns, to see snapshots
of the clothes people wore and the food they consumed, and above all,
to learn something of the dark fantasies, fears, and preoccupations of
a community that rarely appear in the historical record.39 A cache of
intercepted letters reveals much of the pain, misery, and frustration of
prison life. Many other documents help illuminate how ordinary men
and women experienced the varieties of emotional life.40 Coming to
grips with these emotions— anger, despair, sadness, pain, frustration,
and disgust— requires that we pay attention not only to words and
voices but also to the facial expressions, gestures, and psychological
states of ordinary people.41 Every sound, gesture, and grimace the Jews
made served as important clues to their guilt or innocence.
1
F
•
edor Goes for a Walk
like mOst Other christians in Velizh, Emel’ian Ivanov spent between
sunset on Holy Saturday and the early hours of Easter Day at church,
celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Having come home tired and
hungry from the paschal vigil, Emel’ian proceeded to eat a modest lunch
with his wife, Agafia Prokof’eva. After finishing the meal, the couple lay
down for a nap— Emel’ian on the bed and Agafia on the stove. In no
time, their son Fedor ran inside the cottage and asked his mother for a red Easter egg. Agafia begged her son to eat it, but Fedor replied that he was
not hungry. Instead, he rolled the egg back and forth on the floor until it cracked into small pieces and then went to play outside with his cousin.
Dressed in a black striped caftan, black leather shoes, and a faded light blue silk kerchief, Fedor went out around eleven o’clock in the morning, when
all the other Christian residents were home resting after the long night.1
Legally classified as a state peasant, Emel’ian spent twenty- five years
as a conscript in the Russian army. For eighteen years, he served as a
musketeer, traveling to distant corners of the empire on assignment.
After suffering an unspecified injury, he was transferred to a special
regiment for invalids to complete his remaining years of service. The
burdens of the work prevented most soldiers from starting a
family,
but Emel’ian was lucky in this regard. As soon as he arrived in Velizh,
he met and married Agafia Prokof’eva, who came from the village of
13
14
A hand- drawn map of Velizh, with the probable path of Fedor’s walk marked
in the bottom right- hand corner. Perezhitoe 3 (1911)
А
The Great Synagogue
Б
The Holy Spirit Uniate Church
Г
Mirka Aronson’s house
Д
marketplace and town hall
Е
house where prisoners were confined, 1830– 1835
И
Evzik and Khanna Tsetlin’s house
К
Catholic church
М
town jail
Н
St. Il’insk Uniate Church
О
place where Fedor’s body was found
У
St. Michael’s Cemetery
Ф
Jewish cemetery
Х
Emel’ian Ivanov’s house
T
houses where prisoners were confined until 1830
16
16
the Velizh affair
Usviaty. The couple had four children, three sons— two of whom died
prematurely at birth— and a daughter. After Emel’ian retired from
active service, the entire family continued to live in the soldiers’ bar-
racks at the edge of town on Vitebsk Road. Although free from social
control from their former masters, retired soldiers generally had a dif-
ficult time reintegrating themselves in civilian society. Most soldiers
lived in poverty and wandered from place to place looking for work;
the more fortunate like Emel’ian eked out a living by working as day
laborers or petty artisans.2
On Easter Sunday, the parents waited for their son to return from his
walk. Fedor never came home that day, and for two days and nights, a
small group of friends and family members unsuccessfully searched the
town and its environs for the boy. On the third day, while Emel’ian and
Agafia were home resting after the midday meal, a stranger knocked on
the door. From the testimony of several witnesses in the case, we know
that the caller was a beggar woman named Maria Terenteeva. As soon as
Agafia opened the door, Terenteeva declared that she would be able to
locate the missing boy. She asked for a burning candle and, after placing
the candle flame in a cold pot of water, revealed that Fedor was still alive, locked inside the cellar of Mirka Aronson’s large brick house. Although
there was lots of food and drink there, Fedor was not given anything to
eat or drink. Terenteeva went on to say that she intended to rescue the
boy that night, but was afraid that evil might already have struck and
that he would die the moment she came to rescue him.3
Emel’ian dismissed the revelations as nonsense. “You’re not fortune-
telling but lying,” Emel’ian told the stranger. “I’ve seen how sorcerers
tell fortunes.” Yet the more he thought about his son, the more anxious
he had become. Emel’ian wanted to go see him himself, but Terenteeva
insisted that his wife should go in his place. So he instructed Agafia,
along with her sister Kharitina, to walk to the marketplace, the very
center of town, where Aronson’s house was located. If Agafia sensed
the boy was inside, then she would go to the village of Sentiury to talk
with Anna Eremeeva, a twelve- year- old girl with psychic powers. But
the moment Agafia stepped inside the courtyard, she decided to leave,
fearing that someone might mistake her for a thief. Later that evening,
when the sisters reached Sentiury, Agafia begged the young girl to tell
her about her son. After much prodding, Anna relented: “I’ve been
feDOr gOes fOr a walk
17
inside the house where they’re keeping your son. He’s extremely weak.
If you want to see him, then beware, he will die this very night.”4
By the time Agafia had come home and shared this news with her
husband, three police officers were busy conducting a criminal investi-
gation. Earlier that day, Emel’ian had informed the Velizh police that
his son had disappeared without a trace. Numerous witnesses were
questioned in the case while the officers searched for Fedor. But long
before they completed the investigation, rumors began to circulate all
over town that the Jews had killed the little boy.
For four straight days, the police conducted an exhaustive search of
the town and its environs. Finally, on April 28, 1823, unable to uncover a
single lead, they suspended the investigation and declared the boy miss-
ing. The sudden loss of Fedor must have dealt a severe blow to his par-
ents. Although the judicial records offer no hint of Agafia Prokof’eva’s
state of mind, emotions were running high when Maria Terenteeva
appeared once again on the doorstep. “Why did [the officers] stop
the search?” Terenteeva asked abruptly. Then, to Agafia’s amazement,
Terenteeva related just how the boy had disappeared. A Jewish woman
by the name of Khanna Tsetlina had walked up to Fedor while he stood
on the bridge. After giving the boy a piece of sugar, she escorted him
directly to Evzik Tsetlin’s courtyard, where he remained until someone
transferred him to Mirka Aronson’s home under cover of darkness.
Terenteeva was confident that she would be able to locate the body and
invited Agafia to accompany her to the cemetery. But as soon as she
stated those words, Terenteeva ran out the door, not to be seen again
that night. When her husband returned home, Agafia recounted the
day’s events, but Emel’ian refused to believe that Jews had abducted
his son.5
Just as the rumors were gathering steam, a most unexpected discov-
ery added fuel to the fire. On May 2, the day after Terenteeva invited
Agafia to the cemetery, Vasilii Kokhanskii’s horse broke free. Kokhanskii
took his dog to search for the missing horse. They walked one third of a
mile to the thick marsh at the edge of town when the dog suddenly ran
ahead, barking loudly and uncontrollably. Initially Kokhanskii thought
they had found the horse, but he quickly realized that the dog was bark-
ing at a dead boy who was lying on his back with his “body punctured
in numerous places.” Kokhanskii remembered that Emel’ian Ivanov’s
18
18
the Velizh affair
son had been missing for several days and went to share the unfortunate
news with his neighbor.6
Early the next morning, a delegation of four officials inspected the
scene of the crime and produced a detailed report. First, they observed,
the body was found in overgrown shrubby grass in a swampy forest less
than half a mile from the center of town and no more than half a mile
from the parents’ home. Second, the body lay around seventy- seven
yards from Shchetinskaia Road, a dirt road that could be taken to the
center of town by way of three cross streets. Finally, and most important,
they detected fresh footprints on the right side of the dirt road leading
inside the fores
t and directly to the boy’s body. Based on this evidence,
the officials hypothesized that as many as five people had transported
the boy in a spring britzka, a horse- drawn carriage, with forged metal
wheels. In fact, they were certain that the perpetrators had parked the
carriage on the side of the road and then dumped the body in the
shrubby grass. They were not able to determine the exact route the car-
riage had taken, for its tracks had been smeared by the traffic traveling
back and forth on the dirt road over the course of several days. But since
none of the people who lived nearby had witnessed suspicious persons
(that is, Jews) leaving the forest in a spring britzka, they concluded that the perpetrators had returned to town. Unable to uncover any other
evidence, they set themselves the tasks of questioning two of the most
important witnesses in the case, Maria Terenteeva and Anna Eremeeva,
and inspecting Mirka Aronson’s home for clues that might help them
solve the murder.7
The boy died a slow and painful death. When Inspector Lukashevich
began the investigation, the autopsy report, prepared by the town doc-
tor, Levin, had already revealed that little Fedor was stabbed numerous
times with blunt nails. The entire body was punctured with little round
holes that were no more than a third of an inch in depth: five on the
right hand, positioned evenly from the elbow to the tip of the hand;
three on the left hand; four on the top of the head and around the left
ear; one directly above the right knee; and another on the back. The skin
on Fedor’s feet, arms, stomach, and head had hardened and turned a
burned yellow or red color, as though someone had vigorously scrubbed
the boy’s body with a coarse cloth or brush. A piece of cloth was used to
restrict the circulation of the blood to the feet and knees, both of which
feDOr gOes fOr a walk
19
had turned dark blue, perhaps even black, from the trauma. The lips
were pressed firmly against the teeth, while the nose appeared to have
been smashed in violently. The dark crimson bruise on the back of the
neck signified that cloth or rope was used to tie the boy’s mouth. The
internal organs, including the stomach and the intestines, were com-
The Velizh Affair Page 4