The Velizh Affair
Page 29
“Syny Rakhili,” 132– 141.
21. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 19, ll. 8– 13ob, 65– 68ob, 69– 69ob, 76– 81ob, 109– 116, 234– 237ob (petitions from Hirsh Berkovich Brouda to the Senate).
22. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 19, ll. 10ob, 12ob (petition from Brouda to the Senate)
23. D. J. B. Trim, “ ‘If a prince use tyrannie towards his people’: Interventions in Early Modern Europe,” in Simms and Trim, Humanitarian Intervention, 41.
nOtes tO Pages 109–114
187
24. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 19, ll. 65– 68ob (petition from Brouda to the Senate).
25. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 19, l, 111 (petition from Brouda to the Senate).
26. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 19, ll. 110– 110ob (petition from Brouda to the Senate).
27. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 1, ll. 385– 386 (complaint from the Velizh kahal to the police, May 12, 1826).
28. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 19, l. 114 (petition from Brouda to the Senate).
29. Quoted in Trim, “ ‘If a prince use tyrannie towards his people’: Interventions in Early Modern Europe,” in Simms and Trim, Humanitarian Intervention, 35.
30. Green, “Old Networks, New Connections: The Emergence of the Jewish International,” in Religious Internationals in the Modern World, 53– 81; and Trim, “ ‘If a prince use tyrannie towards his people’: Interventions in Early Modern Europe,”
in Simms and Trim, Humanitarian Intervention, 65. For a sweeping examination of “humanity before human rights,” see Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 12– 43.
31. Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus Affair: “Ritual Murder,” Politics, and the Jews in 1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 9.
32. Abigail Green, Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 180.
33. Quoted in Green, Moses Montefiore, 179, 181.
34. On the correspondence between Montefiore and Kiselev, see Iulii Gessen, “Iz sorokovykh godov: Graf P. Kiselev i Moisei Montefiore,” Perezhitoe 4 (1913): 149–
180; and Louis Loewe, ed., Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, 2 vols.
(London: Jewish Historical Society of England, 1983), 2: 359– 384. For a recent treatment, see Lara Lempertiene, “Sir Moses Montefiore’s 1846 Visit to Vilna and Its Reflection in Local Maskilic Literature,” East European Jewish Affairs 41, no. 3
(2011): 181– 188.
35. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 25, l. 37; and RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 2, l. 1392.
36. Simon Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland: From the Earliest Times until the Present Day, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1916– 1920), 2: 13– 45.
37. Richard S. Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 237.
38. Valerie Kivelson, “Muscovite ‘Citizenship’: Rights without Freedom,” The Journal of Modern History 74, no. 3 (2002): 481.
39. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 2, ll. 1229– 1230ob (April 27, 1827).
40. Kivelson, “Muscovite ‘Citizenship’,” 481.
41. For a perceptive analysis of the workings of Russian legal culture, see Valerie Kivelson, Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land and Its Meanings in Seventeenth- Century Russia
18
188
nOtes tO Pages 114–119
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 50– 55; and Jane Burbank, “An Imperial Rights Regime: Law and Citizenship in the Russian Empire,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7, no. 3 (2006): 397– 431. On the Chancellery for Receipt of Petitions, see Eugene M. Avrutin, Jews and the Imperial State: Identification Politics in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 16– 17; and Barbara Alpern Engel, Breaking the Ties That Bound: The Politics of Marital Strife in Late Imperial Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 18– 29.
42. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 2, ll. 1235– 1236.
43. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 19, ll. 6– 7ob (communication from Khovanskii to the Senate, January 12, 1827). Khovanskii filed a similar report on September 22, 1827 (RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 19, ll. 233– 233ob).
44. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 2, ll. 1236– 1239.
45. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 2, l. 1240.
Chapter 6
1. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 3, ll. 1644– 1645, 1647ob.
2. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 3, ll. 1702– 1703; and NIAB, op. 1297, op. 1, d. 1253, l. 14.
3. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 4, ll. 2855– 2855ob.
4. Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 49– 51.
5. My thinking on the power of conspiracies draws on the work of Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, “Transparent Fictions; or, The Conspiracies of a Liberal Imagination: An Afterword,” in Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order, ed. Harry G. West and Todd Sanders (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 290.
6. John P. LeDonne, “Russian Governors General, 1775–
1825: Territorial or
Functional Administration?” Cahiers du monde russe 42, no. 1 (2001): 8– 9.
7. Nancy Shields Kollmann, Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and LeDonne, “Russian Governors General, 1775– 1825,” 8– 9.
8. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, ll. 2142– 2145 (a list of detailed questions the Senate asked the governor- general).
9. On July 5, 1827, in a communication to Governor- General Khovanskii, Strakhov explained that it was nearly impossible to come up with an exact date when the commission hoped to wrap up its work (RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 3, ll.
1644– 1645, 1647ob).
10. Iulii Gessen, Velizhskaia drama: Iz istorii obvineniia evreev v ritual’nykh prestupleniiakh (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia A. G. Rozena, 1904), 64.
11. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 3, ll. 2291– 2306; RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 4, ll. 2876– 2877; and RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 12, ll. 698– 744.
nOtes tO Pages 120–128
189
12. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 25, l. 212– 214.
13. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 25, l. 215.
14. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 25, ll. 217– 218.
15. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 25, l. 218; and NIAB, f. 1297, op. 1, d. 3717, ll.
79– 104.
16. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 25, l. 219.
17. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 25, ll. 220– 226, 235– 236.
18. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 12, ll. 293– 308.
19. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 25, ll. 237– 238.
20. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 25, l. 239.
21. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 25, ll. 240– 241.
22. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 25, ll. 242– 243.
23. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 15, ll. 342ob– 410.
24. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 25, ll. 247– 249.
25. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 25, ll. 251– 252.
26. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 25, ll. 253– 257.
27. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 25, ll. 258– 260.
28. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 14, ll. 231– 265ob.
29. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 25, ll. 264– 265.
30. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 25, l. 266.
31. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 25, ll. 269– 270.
&nbs
p; 32. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 25, l. 272.
33. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 25, ll. 280– 281.
34. On the symbolic role of the host, see Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 194.
35. Michael Ostling, “Imagined Crimes, Real Victims: Hermeneutical Witches
and Jews in Early Modern Poland,” in Ritual Murder in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Beyond: New Histories of an Old Accusation, ed. Eugene M. Avrutin, Jonathan Dekel- Chen, and Robert Weinberg (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2017), 18– 38. For the broader context, see Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 23, 30.
36. R. Po- chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 12; and David Biale, Blood and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol Between Jews and Christians (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 112– 113.
37. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 25, ll. 281– 285.
38. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 25, ll. 286– 289, 295.
39. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 25, ll. 289, 293.
40. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 16, ll. 229– 254; and RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 17, ll. 353– 414.
190
190
nOtes tO Pages 128–135
41. This paragraph draws on Magda Teter’s excellent analysis of theft and defilement of sacred property in early modern Poland. See Sinners on Trial: Jews and Sacrilege after the Reformation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 40– 62.
42. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 25, ll. 299– 304.
43. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 25, l. 300.
44. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 25, ll. 303– 304.
45. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 25, ll. 309– 311.
46. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 25, ll. 312– 313.
47. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 25, ll. 316– 317, 321, 327.
48. Gessen, Velizhskaia drama, 97– 98. The Tel’shi case eventually reached the Senate and was officially resolved in 1838 in Jews’ favor. See Darius Staliunas, Enemies for a Day: Antisemitism and Anti- Jewish Violence in Lithuania under the Tsars (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2015), 28– 32.
49. See, for example, the collection of essays edited by West and Sanders, Transparency and Conspiracy.
50. Thomas Robisheaux, The Last Witch of Langenburg: Murder in a German Village (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009), 156– 159.
51. Brian P. Levack, The Witch-
Hunt in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed.
(London: Longman, 1995), 21– 22.
52. Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), 52, 146– 147, 188.
Chapter 7
1. Edward Peters, Torture, expanded edition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 68.
2. Timothy Brook, Jérôme Bourgon, and Gregory Blue, Death by a Thousand Cuts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 9, 46– 48.
3. Valerie Kivelson, Desperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 206– 208.
4. Nancy Shields Kollmann, Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 134– 135.
5. Kollmann, Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia, 258– 279, 421– 423.
See also Jonathan W. Daly, “Criminal Punishment and Europeanization in Late Imperial Russia,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 47, no. 3 (2000): 341– 362; and Abby M. Schrader, “Containing the Spectacle of Punishment: The Russian
Autocracy and the Abolition of the Knout, 1817– 1845,” Slavic Review 56, no. 4
(1997): 613– 644.
6. Quoted in Peters, Torture, 96.
7. John P. LeDonne, “Criminal Investigations before the Great Reforms.” Russian History 1, no. 2 (1974): 111.
8. On sadism and demonstration of power in the interrogation chamber, see Kivelson, Desperate Magic, 204– 205; William Schulz, ed., The Phenomenon of Torture: Readings
nOtes tO Pages 135–139
191
and Commentary (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 155– 191; and Richard A. Leo, Police Interrogation and American Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
9. For a description of contemporary psychological torture practices, which are eerily similar to those conducted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Almerindo E. Ojeda, ed., The Trauma of Psychological Torture (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008); and William Schulz, ed., The Phenomenon of Torture.
10. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 1, l. 781ob.
11. On prison writings, see Elizabeth Foyster, “Prisoners Writing Home: The Functions of Their Letters c. 1680– 1800,” Journal of Social History 47, no. 4 (2014): 943– 967; and Philip Priestley, Victorian Prison Lives: English Prison Biography, 1830– 1914
(London: Methuen, 1985).
12. On Maria Kovaleva’s suicide, see NIAB, f. 1297, op. 1, d. 3717, ll. 79– 104
(November 20, 1829).
13. On Ivan Cherniavskii’s suicide, see RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 6, ll. 4563–
4572; and GARF, f. 109, 4 ekspeditsiia, op. 221, d. 11, kn. 6, ll. 16– 18 (accessed at CAHJP).
14. Brian P. Levack, “The Decline and End of Witchcraft Prosecutions,” in Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 7.
15. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 1, l. 615.
16. Pawel Maciejko, The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement, 1755– 1816 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 94, 96.
17. The inquisitorial commission commissioned translations of passages from select books and pamphlets (RGIA, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 20, ll. 278– 288, 317– 318; and chast’ 21, ll. 403, 405– 411, 414– 415, 494– 495). Some of these texts were published by the Senate and are currently preserved at the Russian National Library, St.
Petersburg. See “Zakliuchenie po proizvodstvu v Velizhe sledstviiu deistvitel’no li soldatskii syn Emel’ianov umershchvlen Evreiami,” parts B– E (n.d., n.p.).
18. This paragraph draws on Maciejko, The Mixed Multitude, 103– 126. On Bishop Kajetan Sołtyk, see Richard Butterwick, The Polish Revolution and the Catholic Church, 1788– 1792 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 28– 30.
19. Maciejko, The Mixed Multitude, 103– 126.
20. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 1, ll. 783ob– 784ob (memorandum, Strakhov to Khovanskii, November 17, 1826).
21. Robert Walsh, Narrative of a Journey from Constantinople to England (London: Frederick Westley and A. H. Davis, 1828), 12– 13. For the Russian translation, see RGIA, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 20, ll. 317– 318; and “Zakliuchenie po proizvodstvu v Velizhe sledstviiu,” part G.
22. On the publication history of Neophytos’s pamphlet, see Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus Affair: “Ritual Murder,” Politics, and the Jews in 1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 264.
192
192
nOtes tO Pages 139–142
23. John D. Klier, “The Origins of the ‘Blood Libel’ in Russia,” Newsletter of the Study Group on Eighteenth- Century Russia: Newsletter 14 (1986): 17– 19.
24. On demonologies, see the classic work by Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
A useful summary is provided by Gerhild Scholz Williams, “Demonologies,” in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial Ame
rica, ed. Brian P. Levack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 69– 83.
25. Daniil A. Khvol’son, a convert to Russian Orthodoxy and a leading authority on the Jewish question, went to great lengths to document the baptized Jews who stood in defense of blood libel accusations. See Khvol’son’s O nekotorykh srednevekovykh obvineniiakh protiv evreev: Istoricheskoe izsledovanie po istochnikam (St.
Petersburg: Tipografiia Tsederbauma i Goldenbliuma, 1880), 300– 322.
26. Maciejko, The Mixed Multitude, 99– 102; and R. Po- Chia Hsia, Trent 1475: Stories of a Ritual Murder Trial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 95– 104. In his influential work on the Jewish uses of Christian blood, which was first published in 1876, the defrocked Catholic priest, Ippolit Liutostanskii, attempted to bolster his claim with fraudulent citations from Maimonides as well. See John D. Klier, Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 425.
27. Moshe Halbertal, Maimonides: Life and Thought, trans. Joel Linsider (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 11. See also Joel L. Kraemer, Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization’s Greatest Minds (New York: Doubleday, 2008).
28. David Biale, Blood and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol between Jews and Christians (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 21.
29. Biale, Blood and Belief, 42.
30. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 25, ll. 373– 381.
31. Grudinskii’s fantasies anticipated the conspiratorial theories of Iakov Brafman, author of the notorious Book of the Kahal, and various other publicists, journalists, and writers writing on the topic in the second half of the nineteenth century.
For a balanced reading of Brafman, see Klier, Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 1855– 1881, 262– 283.
32. Marcin Wodzinski, “Blood and the Hasidim: On the History of Ritual Murder Accusations in Nineteenth- Century Poland,” Polin 22 (2009): 281; and Victoria Khiterer, “The Social and Economic History of Jews in Kiev before 1917” (PhD
diss., Brandeis University, 2008), 84– 85.
33. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 8, ll. 6074– 6077; and RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 21, ll. 405– 411.