The Velizh Affair

by Eugene M. Avrutin

murder.23

  As for the spring britzka, several witnesses had seen two mysterious

  Jews riding in such a carriage on Friday, April 27. One neighbor testi-

  fied that around eight in the morning, amid heavy rain, she noticed

  two Jews riding around town. Early that morning, another neighbor

  was sitting by the window when she saw an open britzka pass by. No

  one in Velizh had ever seen the Jews before, but it turned out they were

  Shmerka Berlin’s distant relatives. A middle- aged bearded man by the

  name of Iosel’ Glikman and his fifteen- year- old son had come to Velizh

  for the very first time from the town Uly to purchase hay. Glikman

  and his son had parked the britzka in a neighboring courtyard and

  walked around the fence to Berlin’s home, where they stayed until May

  1. Authorities immediately suspected that Shmerka and Hirsh Berlin

  had used Glikman’s spring britzka to transfer the boy’s body to the

  forest, and so they proceeded to question Glikman, the Berlin family,

  and numerous other town residents. But Glikman refuted accusations

  that he was involved in the murder, testifying that his britzka did not

  have forged metal wheels and that he had borrowed the horses from the

  nobleman he was working for at the time. Shmerka and Hirsh Berlin

  provided solid testimony, as well, and none of the other witnesses said

  anything to cast doubt on Glikman’s self- proclaimed innocence.24

  The investigation of Fedor’s death lasted nearly twelve months. The

  result was not an extraordinarily long judicial process or a particularly

  startling resolution to the case. The Velizh case followed the three basic

  stages of the inquisitorial process: a lengthy criminal investigation at the local level, the trial, and the review of the sentence by the highest court in the province. If convicted of blood sacrifice, the Russian government

  would not hesitate to impose the harshest penalties upon Jews for what

  it considered to be a most barbaric crime. Punishment could include

  eternal exile, knouting, beating by bastinadoes, and bodily mutilation.25

  Although the rumors circulating around town were vicious and cruel,

  the investigators did not rush to judgment. In the nineteenth century,

  the Russian government did not discredit the blood libel directly, as did

  many other European states, but it nevertheless maintained a policy of

  restraint.

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  the Velizh affair

  On March 6, 1817, in response to a blood libel investigation in

  Grodno, Count Aleksandr Golitsyn had distributed a circular to pro-

  vincial governors that called for more demanding standards of evidence

  and greater skepticism of the alleged crime. It declared:

  In view of the fact that in several provinces acquired from Poland,

  cases still occur in which the Jews are falsely accused of murder-

  ing Christian children for the alleged purpose of obtaining blood,

  his Imperial Majesty, taking into consideration that similar accusa-

  tions have on previous numerous occasions been refuted by impartial

  investigations and royal charters, has been graciously pleased to con-

  vey to those at the head of the governments his Sovereign will: that

  henceforward the Jews shall not be charged with murdering Christian

  children, without any evidence and purely as a result of the supersti-

  tious belief that they are in need of Christian blood.26

  In the event of a blood libel accusation, imperial law stipulated that Jews would have the same legal right to a fair trial as any other subject of the empire of his or her social standing accused of murder.

  The authorities in Velizh worked systematical y through the volu-

  minous documentary evidence, attempting to carry out the investiga-

  tion according to the strict standards of the law. Fourteen months to

  the day after Fedor disappeared, the appellate court handed down its

  verdicts. Although the court did not discount the possibility that Daria

  Kasachevskaia and especially Maria Terenteeva had invented their sen-

  sational tales to mask their own roles in the murder, it did not dismiss

  their testimony either. Based on a thorough review of all the mate-

  rial and moral evidence, Khanna Tsetlina was formally acquitted, but

  the police were nevertheless instructed to closely supervise her actions

  and behavior. Mirka Aronson and her household were cleared of any

  wrongdoing, as a thorough search of the home had failed to uncover

  anything remotely suspicious, although Aronson’s son- in- law, Shmerka

  Berlin, was reprimanded for “spreading false rumors about the boy’s

  death.” In fact, the only person severely punished in the case was Maria

  Terenteeva: to atone for her licentious way of life, she was instructed to

  appear for admonition before an official representative of the Catholic-

  Uniate Council.27

  feDOr gOes fOr a walk

  29

  The acquittal of the Jews did not mean that the judges, criminal

  investigators, and provincial bureaucrats presiding over the case were

  enlightened skeptics, but only the fact that a ritual murder case could

  not be proved at law. The Russian government may have elevated judi-

  cial standards, but it did not erase the crime of ritual murder from the

  law books. In the imperial Russian setting, the decisive turning point

  in acquitting Jews of blood sacrifice had more to do with the empirical

  demands of legal caution and documentary evidence than with enlight-

  ened skepticism. The doubt that plagued officials in Velizh, in other

  words, had less to do with systematic philosophical doubt than with

  the simple fact that there was not enough evidence to substantiate the

  crime with certainty.28

  In the final analysis, we will never know what exactly happened

  to Fedor— whether he drowned accidently, was ruthlessly murdered,

  or died from some other cause— or who stabbed him fourteen times.

  On November 22, 1824, the most powerful court in Vitebsk province

  reviewed the case and wrote off Fedor’s tragic death to the “will of

  God.”29 Whatever the reason may have been, the documentary evidence

  suggests that a small- town quarrel ultimately led to the ritual mur-

  der accusation. Most likely, the beggar woman Maria Terenteeva took

  advantage of the boy’s death (or perhaps killed him herself) to get back

  at Khanna Tsetlina for her refusal of charity. The culture of giving— the

  teachings and beliefs about offering support to those in need— played

  an important role in both Jewish and Russian communal traditions.30

  In imperial Russia, as in the early modern world, where mutual aid

  provided a safety net for the misfortunate and needy, refusing charity

  signified a breach of neighborly duty. The act of denying food, drink,

  money, or other charity typically caused the individual who had been

  turned away to feel angry and resentful. When a personal misfortune

  subsequently happened to the person who had acted selfishly, the latter

  would often suspect that the beggar had cast a magic spell against them

  for their callous behavior.

  Across most of Western and Central Europe, the overwhelming

  majority of witch cases conformed to the pattern
that took place in

  Velizh— involving one neighbor’s refusal to give a handout to another

  neighbor— although in our case the internal logic was reversed and the

  end result was a charge of ritual murder against a neighbor who refused

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  the Velizh affair

  to offer charity. To put it in slightly different terms, it was usually the very person who failed to perform a social duty who would accuse the

  person they had turned away of witchcraft. In contrast to the typical

  witch case scenario, then, Terenteeva represents the “victim” who took

  matters into her own hands to get back at her well- to- do neighbor

  Tsetlina for failing to fulfill a social obligation.31

  If an ordinary neighborhood dispute explains why one neighbor

  accused another neighbor of murdering a little boy, we are still left

  with a puzzle. Why did almost every Christian resident interviewed

  in Velizh respond by saying that Jews were capable of committing the

  ritual crime? The answer has less to do with what is often referred to as

  anti- Semitism or with economic rivalries (although we should be careful

  not to dismiss the twin factors altogether) than with cosmologies of the

  time. Ritual murder accusations proved profoundly durable because of

  their capacity to mobilize fears and express popular worldviews. Most

  people in towns like Velizh believed in the tale not so much because of

  an ingrained hatred of Jews, but more often than not, because it meshed

  well with a wide repertoire of communally shared beliefs and practices.

  2

  S •

  mall- Town Life

  all acrOss the emPire, chilD desertion, infanticide, and infant

  mortality were commonplace. Freak accidents resulted in all sorts of

  untimely deaths. Children could die by drowning or asphyxiation, or

  burn to death in a campfire or in an iron stove inside the home. They

  could be run over by horses, cows, and goats; left out in the elements

  for too long; crushed to death by household items; fall inside a well; or

  eat poisonous leaves, berries, or mushrooms. In Novgorod province, a

  three- year- old boy bled to death after he fell on a knife and punctured

  his throat. In Kursk province, the ceiling of a hut collapsed, crushing

  another peasant boy to death instantaneously. Elsewhere, two child-

  ren, playing a harmless game of hide- and- seek, suffocated to death

  when they enclosed themselves in a chest and failed to open the latch.

  The spring and summer months— when children played outdoors

  unsupervised— witnessed a disproportionate number of deaths. In

  Orlov province, a three- year- old boy stumbled into a puddle of ice

  water and promptly drowned. Not too far away, a monstrous wind

  blew over a seven- year- old boy into a river just as he was crossing a

  bridge. As soon as the “season turns and it becomes too cold to play

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  the Velizh affair

  outside,” the Journal of the Ministry of the Interior observed, “accidents occur less frequently, especially in the water, the most frequent cause

  of death.”1

  It was not unusual for newborn babies to be abandoned or mur-

  dered. In most cases, this was how young displaced women handled

  illegitimate or unwanted pregnancies. Less frequently, as in Iaroslav

  and Saratov provinces, a father could slash the throat of a nine-

  month- old infant boy or inadvertently stab his son with a knife in a

  fit of jealousy and blind rage.2 Beginning in the eighteenth century,

  the Russian government allocated substantial resources to deal with

  child abandonment, infanticide, and senseless killings. New initia-

  tives saved the lives of children and needy mothers and increased

  the punishment for killing a legitimate child. Instructional manuals

  alerted parents how best to care for children. Hospitals, foundling

  homes, and almshouses provided refuge for the poor, ill, crippled,

  insane, and orphaned.3

  In spite of the growing public interest in the sanctity of children’s

  lives, the most destitute regions continued to suffer. In Vitebsk province, hundreds of young children died each year in the nineteenth century.

  The most common explanations were neglect, pregnancy complications,

  and lack of proper medical attention. Other reasons were more trau-

  matic and violent: infants were suffocated, drowned, strangled by their

  mothers, or, on more than infrequent occasions, eaten alive by boars

  and other wild animals. Corpses were found routinely in animal sheds,

  barnyards, courtyards, warehouses, and cellars. They could also turn up

  in woods, fields, swamps, forests, creeks, and rivers— some of the most

  convenient places to dispose of dead bodies.4

  The death of a young Christian boy was, in other words, not uncom-

  mon in the life of a small provincial town like Velizh. The geography

  of the region proved particularly unforgiving. Much of the land in

  the vicinity of the town is wooded and contains large swamps that

  are impossible to traverse on foot. While passing through the western

  borderlands, the English traveler Robert Johnson remembered that

  the journey from the Russian interior to Belarus gradually became less

  hilly and picturesque. “The country suddenly loses that hilly irregular-

  ity, which so bounds in the vicinity of Smolensk.”5 Although he did

  small-tOwn life

  33

  not think the country presented any “remarkable feature,” the physi-

  cian Edward Morton recalled with some fondness how the road passed

  through the thick White Russian forest, “undulating, very romanti-

  cally, among the trees.”6 Lined with fir, oak, and birch trees, Vitebsk

  province was filled with large marshy areas and as many as 2,509 fresh-

  water lakes of different sizes.7 An impressive number of rivers and

  creeks connected the lowland area. Johnson was struck by the fact that

  the extreme flat, open land “stretched as far as the eye could reach.”8

  Historical- demographic evidence suggests that Slavic populations

  had the highest rates of infant and childhood mortality in the Russian

  Empire. In the late nineteenth century, only about half of Russian

  Orthodox children survived to their fifth birthday. In Moscow and

  Saratov provinces, 51.6 percent of children died by age five, while

  in Tula and Nizhnii Novgorod the mortality rate was even higher,

  at 52.4 and 53.8 percent. Nearly one- third of Russians born in the

  Great Russian provinces died before reaching their first birthday.

  The rates were lower in the western and southeastern provinces and

  spiked in the central and northeastern parts of European Russia. Jews,

  by contrast, enjoyed the lowest rate of childhood mortality of any

  confession, and an astonishingly high population growth. Research

  has shown that culture, and not environment, best explains why

  Jewish communities had better success in keeping their children alive.

  Receptive attitudes toward modern medicine, in addition to personal

  hygiene, child care practices, and systems of support within the com-

  munity, accounted for more sanitary living conditions for Jews. All


  these factors contributed not only to the divergence in mortality

  rates; they also shaped the day- to- day interactions between Jews and

  their neighbors.9

  Velizh (to paraphrase Langston Hughes) was one of those miserable

  in- between places, just large enough to be formally classified a town.10

  It belonged to a zone known for its confessional diversity, economic

  troubles, paramilitary violence, and fluidity of borders. In 1772, after

  the first partition of the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth, Russia

  acquired a territory of forty thousand square miles, roughly the size

  of Kentucky. The region had long been a safe haven for runaway serfs,

  criminals, smugglers, and illegal migrants. One of Catherine’s first

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  the Velizh affair

  proclamations was to stabilize it by dividing the land into two admin-

  istrative provinces, Mogilev and Vitebsk.11 Velizh was a typical military-

  administrative border town, always situated on the periphery. In the

  nineteenth century, it sat on the eastern edge of the Pale of Settlement.

  In the twentieth century, it experienced wars, occupations, and mass

  annihilation as armies conquered and reconquered the land. Today

  Velizh, a purely Russian town, sits less than eighteen miles from the

  Belarusian border. The last Jewish inhabitant died in 1973.12

  Under the Polish- Lithuanian regime, Jews faced numerous restric-

  tions on their residence. Some cities, such as Warsaw and Lublin,

  did not tolerate Jews within their city limits at all, while others,

  such as Wilno (Vil’na) and Kowno (Kovno), restricted where Jews

  could live. As a result of the extensive regulations outlined in the

  town charters, Jews in pre- partition Poland- Lithuania were forced to

  cluster in easily identifiable neighborhoods, districts, or streets.13 At

  the turn of the nineteenth century, tsarist authorities dropped most

  of the burdensome statutes from the law books and permitted Jews

  to live, engage in trade, and build synagogues and schools wherever

  they wished inside the boundaries of the Pale of Settlement, provided

  they observed the general laws on movement and residence.14 But

  long after the partitions of the commonwealth, Jews continued to

  live in easily identifiable streets or neighborhoods, most of which