wrote, “no other decision than the one embodied in the ruling could have
been reached.” Yet however powerful the evidence may have been in the
Jews’ favor, Nicholas was wary of dismissing the charge outright. “I do not have and indeed cannot have the inner conviction,” he continued, “that the
murder has not been committed by Jews.” Numerous examples from dif-
ferent times and places around the world revealed that “among Jews there
probably exist fanatics or sectarians who consider Christian blood neces-
sary for their rites.” In the tsar’s eyes, Jews were as capable of committing ritual child murder as the Skoptsy, the most despised religious sect of all, were of performing ritual castration. Without suggesting that this custom
was common to all Jews, Nicholas did not discount the idea that “there
may be among them fanatics just as horrible as among us Christians.”
Leaving open the possibility of ritual intent, the opinion cast a lingering shadow over all future blood accusations in the Russian Empire.1
The reluctance of the judicial apparatus to prohibit ritual murder tri-
als meant that further accusations would need to be settled in the court-
room. In fact, less than twelve months after the State Council’s ruling,
the matter reached St. Petersburg once again. This case concerned Fekla
153
154
154
the Velizh affair
Selezneva, a twenty- three- year- old serf from the village of Borisovo in
Minsk province. Selezneva ran away from her husband on November 10,
1833, and took on the journey her twelve- year- old cousin. In due time,
Selezneva’s landlord managed to track her down. When he inquired
about the girl’s whereabouts, Selezneva first declared that she was hid-
ing out in “a trusted place” but eventually revealed that the Jew Orko
Sabun had strangled her to death so that “he could rub [the blood] on
his child’s eyes and lips.” The girl’s naked body was found in a barn
hidden under a pile of straw. The documentary evidence suggests that
Selezneva and Sabun had a history together, perhaps even had engaged
in intimate relations. The peasant woman testified, at one point, that
they “fornicated all night long” after Sabun strangled the girl to death
in the middle of the night. Sabun, for his part, could not keep his story
straight. None of his alibis vouched for him; some went so far as to claim
that “he might have killed her himself.”
The case was heard first by two courts at the provincial level and
then by the Senate before it reached the State Council. On January 13,
1836, the council convicted Selezneva of murdering the girl but did not
implicate Sabun directly in the crime— though it did punish him for
lying and taking in a runaway serf, for which he received forty blows of
the knout and permanent exile to Siberia. One question that the court
decided not to address at the time was whether Jews needed Christian
blood for their religious rites and rituals.2
That Nicholas’s regime was actively unmasking radical Christian
sects for their savage heresies only heightened suspicion against Jewish
perversion. In the 1830s, the most powerful judicial and administrative
bodies in the empire considered two more sensational cases. The events
in Tel’shi, Kovno province, began in 1827, at the height of the mass
suspicions in Velizh, and ended officially only in 1838, when the Senate
exonerated twenty- eight Jews charged with ritual murder.3 The second
case concerned three Jews who were accused of severing a peasant’s
tongue in Zaslav, Volynia province. Prokop Kazan testified that he was
“overtaken” by the Jews the moment he came out of the woods:
First one Jew came over and started to talk with me as I was walking
along the road and then another one and finally a third one. I didn’t
suspect that they would do anything malicious to me, so I answered
ePilOgue
155
their questions. Then, all of a sudden one Jew pounced on me from
behind and threw me down on the ground, at which point the other
two Jews joined in. They crushed my chest and choked me so fiercely
that I must have stuck my tongue out when I lost conscience. When
I finally came around, I found myself on my knees, with my head
facing the ground. One of the Jews was holding my head up with
his hands, while another one placed a cup underneath my mouth to
collect the blood, which was flowing in a heavy stream.4
As soon as the Jews had finished their deed, they took off in a spring
britzka with the blood and twelve silver rubles. Kazan explained that
he stumbled upon the silver rubles in the marketplace at the town fair
and that the Jews stole the money from him. The Senate characterized
Kazan’s explanation as “wildly fantastic.” The medical assessment of the
body confirmed that the tongue had been cut off by a sharp object but
failed to establish that it was forcibly severed when the incident had
allegedly occurred.
Tsar Nicholas I was wel known for his fears of hidden plots and
conspiracies. To achieve dominance over his expansive realm, the regime
defended against pernicious forces of revolution. In the aftermath of
the Decembrist uprising of 1825, the judicial system carried out harsh
investigations of social disorders that threatened to undermine the
emperor’s absolute power. Most alleged state criminals were tried swiftly
in military tribunals. Nicholas’s militarized regime used the knout (a
three- tailed whip with metal talons), the lash (a three- tailed whip with
braided leather knots), and birch rods as the chief instruments to punish
criminals. The average yearly number of exiles and penal laborers sent to
Siberia increased nearly twofold, from 4,570 from 1819 to 1823 to 7,719
from 1823 to 1860. In addition to rebels, political dissidents, and vaga-
bonds, the regime targeted for relocation petty thieves, violent drunks,
“barbarous Asiatics,” hardened criminals, and a host of schismatic sects.5
The intense preoccupation with socially dangerous elements—
including Jewish ritual murder— occurred in a climate of concern with
heresy and fanaticism. The Ministry of the Interior kept meticulous
records of schismatic sects. The most viciously prosecuted sect— the
Skoptsy— was punished for crimes against faith, systematically deported
to Siberia, and kept under close police watch.6 For hundreds of years,
156
156
the Velizh affair
Russia’s courts grouped heresy, along with witchcraft and treason, as the
highest crime. They believed that heretics and witches possessed an ele-
ment of evil power and so were often sentenced to death by execution.
Russian officials continued to prosecute dissenting sects with extreme
ferocity, but the second quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed
a dramatic shift in judicial thinking. Judges began to voice increasing
reluctance to hear cases concerning witchcraft. What accounted for this
change? Why did criminal courts refuse to prosecute people accused of
controlling the supernatural by magical means as witches or sorcerers
and punish sectarians for heresies? What specific evidence helped estab-
lish the facts of the crime?
One of the most important reasons for the shift had to do with the
cultural authority of scientific observation. Beginning in the 1830s, med-
ical inspections of the human body acquired privileged status within the
system of criminal proofs. Under the rules of evidence, the physician’s
testimony carried decisive weight in determining the character of the
crime. Medical experts provided a wealth of clinical details that helped
unmask the invisible threats lurking within. Doctors’ expert testimony
played a decisive role in the types of crimes the state deemed especially
pernicious. The Skoptsy’s “savage zealotry,” for example, could be eas-
ily recognized by scars, shrunken genitals, removal of testicles, excised
nipples, and sparse body hair. By contrast, the possession of herbs,
incantations, recipes for herbal potions, or magical powders no longer
sufficed to establish the phenomenon of witchcraft. By offering medi-
cal diagnosis such as hysteria or melancholia for aberrant or irrational
behavior, doctors helped challenge the notion that witchcraft was real.7
Significantly, the power afforded to forensic science, statistics, and
ethnographic observation played an important role in perpetuating the
ritual murder charge. The stab wounds on a corpse established Jews’
demonic blood rituals in much the same way that bodily signs docu-
mented the Skoptsy’s ritual perversions. In all the instances that Jews
were charged with ritual murder, social- scientific observation struc-
tured the terms of the criminal investigation. Scientific knowledge was
employed in the service of empire not only to direct a new positive
course for Russia but also to carve out a better, purer world— to weed
out harmful or unreliable elements from public view.8 Nicholas’s polic-
ing tactics coincided with an ambitious program of surveying Russia’s
ePilOgue
157
social and economic conditions to resolve the empire’s problems and
deficiencies. A new generation of men, enrolled in elite schools and anx-
ious to build successful careers in the civil service, strove to understand the complexities of Russian life. Lev A. Perovskii, the minister of internal affairs under Nicholas I, looked to the social sciences as a gateway
to formulating imperial policy. In an effort to expand his expertise of
non- Russian populations, Perovskii commissioned ethnographic stud-
ies of heresy in all its savage forms and deviations, including its Jewish
component. In 1841, Perovskii appointed Vladimir Dal’ and Nikolai
Nadezhdin as officials of the special order of his personal chancellery.
Both men worked on a variety of different projects reserved for the
minister’s personal attention, including serving on a committee that was
charged with investigating dangerous schismatic sects.9
In this capacity, Dal’ produced two reports, both issued in tiny print
runs in 1844, dedicated to exposing the fanatical secrets of blood rituals.
One was on the Skoptsy (the authorship was eventually attributed to
Nadezhdin after Nicholas refused to accept it for publication because of
Dal’s Lutheran origins).10 The other work, entitled An Inquiry into the Killing of Christian Children and the Use of Their Blood, was devoted to Jewish ritual murder. The text incorporated materials from the Ministry
of the Interior archive and some well- known accusatory works printed
in eighteenth- century Poland, with much space devoted to the Velizh
case. Dal’ left no doubt that blood sacrifice was a fact of Jewish life. In every place where Jews are tolerated, he wrote, “corpses of babies have
been found from time to time, always in the same mutilated condition
or at least with similar signs of violence and death. Just as true is that
these signs have attested to a premeditated and deliberate atrocity— the
painful murder of Christian children.”11 A great deal of legal and med-
ical evidence helped substantiate this reality, not least of which, Dal’
noted, were the external marks on the dead bodies, confirming in each
instance that the killings were the result of cruel and unusual premedi-
tated Jewish savagery.
In the 1860s and 1870s, when the issue of Jewish criminality first
became a topic of public discussion, conservative journalists and
expert witnesses turned to Dal’s work to substantiate the charge.12 The
defrocked Catholic priest Ippolit Liutostanskii, for instance, was one of
a number of hacks who took the dangers of blood sacrifice to another
158
158
the Velizh affair
level. In the highly sensational book The Question of the Use by Jewish Sectarians of Christian Blood for Religious Purposes, published in 1876, Liutostanskii recycled Dal’s language to single out a small group of
fanatics for engaging in anti- Christian acts of sacrilege and desecra-
tion. “Jews who acquire only the external trappings of European— and,
consequently, of Christian— civilization, sitting down at the table of
humane enlightenment, not only are blameless of this custom, but don’t
even know about it.”13 It did not take long for a committed group of
publicists, commentators, and politicians to link sectarian fanaticism
directly with the Hasidic movement. “It is certain,” the influential Polish ethnographer Oscar Kolberg explained, “that there exists among [Jews]
a fanatical sect that craves such wild sacrifices,” an accusation that would play out in the mass circulation press, with forces lining up on all sides
of the political divide.14
The Velizh case had the makings of sensational, deeply divisive drama
and might have erupted into a cause célèbre, along the lines of the ritual
murder case in Damascus (1840), the Dreyfus affair in France (1894–
1906), or the sensational trial of Mendel Beilis in 1913 for the murder of
a Gentile youth in Kiev two years earlier. But before Tsar Alexander II
and his advisers redesigned the legal system, the secret workings of the
chancellery concealed every stage of the judicial process.15 During the
reign of Nicholas I, the publication of transcripts, legal commentaries,
and speeches was forbidden, nor was the courtroom the site of social
spectacle to a thrill- seeking public. The inquisitorial chamber— the
principal site of the investigative drama— was shut to public scrutiny.
As a result, news was not able to spread to well- placed emissaries who
enjoyed political influence in the international arena and could mobi-
lize a vast network of resources and political connections in the face of
crisis.16 The closed nature of the judicial process meant that the Velizh
case was decided locally, firmly outside the apprehensive gaze of public
opinion.
A product of the Great Reform era, the open, adversarial courtroom
made a new social spectacle of the Jewish ritual murder charge. The
indictment of nine Georgian Jews in the 1878 ghastly murder of Sara
Iosifova Modebadze in Kutaisi resulted in the first blood libel accusa-
tion tried before a jury of peers, where all aspects of the case were made
public, from writte
n testimony to cross- examinations and the verdict
ePilOgue
159
itself. In the end, two of Russia’s leading defense attorneys debunked the
evidence, and the trial ended with the full acquittal of the Jewish defen-
dants on March 13, 1879.17 Kutaisi turned out to be the first of six sen-
sational ritual murder cases in Europe, the last of which was the Beilis
case of 1911– 1913, tried in the open courtroom. The dramatic court-
room scenes were structured by powerful rules of expert knowledge.18
Supported by scientific evidence and medical observation, the legal
prosecution of Jews generated mass publicity, even as shared assump-
tions in popular magic and mysticism, to say nothing of conspiratorial
fears, continued to influence conceptions of Jewish criminality. For the
mass of populations in the Russian Empire, it was entirely within the
realm of perceived wisdom that Jews could commit the crime at any
time and place.
160
aPPendix
Jewish Prisoners Held in the Town of Velizh
Name
Approximate Age
Date Arrested
Slava Berlina
52
April 8, 1826
Khanna Tsetlina
47
April 8, 1826
Itsko Nakhimovskii
32
April 15, 1826
Abram Glushkov
30
April 15, 1826
Iosel’ Turnovskii
64
April 15, 1826
Shmerka Berlin
50s
June 20, 1826
Evzik Tsetlin
49
June 20, 1826
Hirsh Berlin
28
February 28, 1827
Orlik Devirts
53
February 28, 1827
Iankel’ Hirsh Aronson
19
February 28, 1827
Iosel’- Zavel’ Mirlas
50
June 28, 1827
Shmerka Aronson
48
July 11, 1827
Basia Aronson
37
July 11, 1827
Noson Berlin
38
July 11, 1827
Meir Berlin
46
July 11, 1827
Fratka Devirts
46
July 11, 1827
Ruman Nakhimovskii
46
July 11, 1827
The Velizh Affair Page 24