A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel

by Levin, Edmund

  But the defense had its own vulnerabilities. The major one, in Gruzenberg’s view, had been entirely avoidable—namely, Margolin’s decision to meet secretly with Vera Cheberyak. He had always believed that, in doing this, Margolin had acted foolishly and recklessly. Now his opinion was confirmed by the vigor of their opponents’ attacks upon Margolin. The prosecution devoted a whole section of the indictment to the disastrous Kharkov adventure and Vera Cheberyak’s charge that, during a meeting at which Margolin was present, she had been offered forty thousand rubles to confess to Andrei’s murder. Margolin, having been forced to resign as defense counsel, would have to testify as a witness, which in a sense would put the defense itself on trial. Margolin had given the prosecution raw material it could use to spin stories about a Jewish conspiracy dedicated to shrouding the truth.

  Gruzenberg might have felt a bit heartened had he known that two members of the judicial panel that approved the indictment wrote a minority opinion, not made public at the time, arguing that the case should be quashed. N. Kamentsev was the chairman of the panel, composed of members of the Kiev Judicial Chamber, the region’s highest court. L. Ryzhov was the panel’s rapporteur, assigned to examine the evidence and deliver a report to the panel. Thus, the two members most familiar with the record of the investigation had found the case laid out in the indictment “unconvincing in its totality,” its supposed facts “hardly trustworthy,” and had contended that no reasonable jury could base a guilty verdict upon it. In conclusion, they wrote: “The investigation of Mendel Beilis should be terminated.” But these courageous jurists were outvoted seven to two.

  On May 25, the day after the indictment of Mendel Beilis became public, Tsar Nicholas made his gala entrance into Moscow, parading down Tverskoy Boulevard on horseback. He rode alone, twenty yards in advance of his Cossack guardsmen, dismounted on reaching Red Square, and strode across it, passing through the Spassky or Savior’s Gate into the Kremlin. He had reached the final destination of his pilgrimage in honor of his ancestor Michael, the first Romanov tsar.

  Prime Minister Vladimir Kokovtsov was struck by “the absence of any real enthusiasm and the comparatively small crowds” that had greeted the tsar during his journey around Russia. The same impression of public apathy troubled others as well. Anna Vyrubova, the empress Alexandra’s closest confidante, remarked on “the undemonstrative masses of people” at the opening festivities in St. Petersburg. “No enthusiasm was evident anywhere,” lamented a senior court official in a personal letter. “We clearly live in those times when faith and love for the Tsar and fatherland have died out.”

  Nicholas, however, expressed only satisfaction at the popular response he received. He had been inspired by his journey through the real Russia that he so deeply loved. The tour had first taken him and Alexandra to the medieval towns of Vladimir and Suzdal, wellsprings of Russian civilization, east of Moscow, and then north to the upper Volga region. There they had sailed down the river to Kostroma, the city where the sixteen-year-old Michael Romanov had learned of his selection by the Assembly of the Land as the new tsar. At the Kostroma monastery, the abbess Martha blessed Nicholas using the very same Mother-of-God icon with which Michael had been blessed in 1613.

  Notwithstanding any apathy his ministers and courtiers might have perceived, the celebrations reinforced Nicholas’s belief in his divine mission. “Now you can see what cowards those state ministers are,” Alexandra told a lady-in-waiting after her husband had bowed his head to the final, massive gathering at the Kremlin. “They are constantly frightening the emperor with threats of revolution and here—you see it yourself—we need merely to show ourselves and at once their hearts are ours.” Prime Minster Kokovtsov recalled in his memoirs that from this time forward Nicholas became more and more convinced that he could do everything by himself “because the people were with Him, knew and understood Him, and were blindly devoted to Him.”

  In this jubilee year, Nicholas had resolved to reestablish the full measure of his autocratic power. The public adulation that he perceived only bolstered his confidence in his mystic mission. He regretted the democratic concessions he had made in 1905. He would do his best to take them back and restore the natural order. Nicholas now considered dissolving the Duma or stripping it permanently of its very modest legislative power. That fall he wrote his interior minister that a bold move to emasculate the Duma would be “in the Russian spirit.” In the end, Nicholas’s wiser advisers prevented him from taking these extreme measures. But the tsar was still bent on demonstrating, in every way possible, his rejection of Western democratic and legal norms that he believed were alien to his people.

  Given the open and zealous chauvinism of the monarch himself, the prosecution of Mendel Beilis amounted to a powerfully symbolic act. “The belief or non-belief in ritual murder,” the historian Richard Wortman argues, “drew a clear line between those who shared [the tsar’s] views and those who hoped to set the Russian monarchy on a Western course”—the course he had rejected. Moreover, as the trial would make clear, the case served to undermine the courts, the one Russian institution that, in principle, fully conformed to Western standards (thanks to reforms introduced by his grandfather Alexander II) and for which Nicholas therefore felt contempt. And, finally, the case signaled the tsar’s belief that the Black Hundreds, and the officials allied with them against the upstart Jews, were in harmony with the “Russian spirit.”

  The tsar had resolved to rule exclusively according to the divine, purely Russian dictates of what he called his “inner voice.” The cult of the seventeenth century, and the imperative to purify the autocracy of any Western taint, would obsess Nicholas until the final day of his reign as Russia’s last tsar.

  By the spring of 1913, the European movement in support of Mendel Beilis was gathering strength. The previous year had seen petitions signed by illustrious men who were filled with moral indignation but offered little factual evidence to refute the ritual murder charge. Now some of the world’s most eminent physicians were taking up Beilis’s cause.

  The new season saw the publication in Germany of a book of medical opinions by fourteen specialists from across Western Europe who would go on to present their conclusions at an international conference in London at the end of July. Their prime target was their once respected colleague, now a star witness for the prosecution, Professor Ivan Sikorsky. One after the other, the doctors vented their ridicule. Professor Ernst Ziemke, dean of the College of Medical Jurisprudence in Kiel, Germany, declared, “He without a doubt … is governed by considerations arising from unbridled fantasy …” “One does not know what to be more surprised by, the naivete or the tendentiousness,” said Professor August Forel of Zurich. Professors Julius Wagner-Jauregg (a future Nobel laureate in medicine) and Heinrich Obersteiner of Vienna wrote, “On becoming acquainted with his conclusions it even seems doubtful that the author is a psychiatrist at all.” All were outraged that Sikorsky had exploited his legitimate scientific reputation for despicable ends. Sikorsky was rebuked by the London conference as well as by congresses of physicians in Vienna and St. Petersburg in the fall.

  Perhaps the most valuable report supporting Beilis’s cause was delivered by three British physicians who focused not so much on Sikorsky or the mythical nature of the charge as on a simple question: What story did the four dozen wounds on Andrei’s body tell? Drs. Augustus J. Pepper, William Henry Willcox, and Charles A. Mercier forcefully made a key anatomical point: “The wounds inflicted by the killers were not of the sort that would cause strong external bleeding.” If such bleeding were the goal, “a completely different kind of weapon would have been used.” A killer who wanted to drain a body of blood and collect it in a vessel would hardly go about it with an awl that could inflict only puncture wounds. The obvious weapon of choice would be a knife that could neatly open up a vein or an artery. (Such a method, they pointed out, was, after all, well known to the Jews: the Jewish butcher, or shoket, severed vessels in the neck with an extreme
ly sharp blade.) “It appears to us quite impossible that the boy was killed for the purpose of collecting blood,” the doctors concluded. The crime was nothing more than a “coarse, brutal murder, committed by a person of unsound mind.”

  In the United States, the effort in support of Mendel Beilis got off to an oddly slow start. With nearly three million Jews, America was second only to Russia in Jewish population. The American Jewish community, by all rights, should have been the natural leader in the worldwide movement to free Beilis. The country’s most influential Jewish organization, the American Jewish Committee, had been founded in the wake of the pogroms of 1905–1906 out of concern for the plight of Russian Jewry. In January 1911, the committee had undertaken its unprecedented public campaign, led by the financier Jacob Schiff, to persuade the U.S. government to abrogate the Russo-American Treaty of 1832 governing commercial relations between the two countries. The pretext of the campaign was that American Jews were subject to discrimination by Russia in the issuance of visas, but it was clear to all that its real purpose was to punish Russia for the way it treated its own Jews and pressure the imperial government to grant them equal rights. Within a year, the effort succeeded in convincing a reluctant President William Howard Taft to abrogate the treaty, over the objections of the State Department. The victory heralded the arrival of American Jews as an effective interest group that, when it chose to, could compete on an equal footing with other ethnic lobbies at the highest levels.

  Yet right up to the trial in the fall of 1913, the American Jewish leadership failed to take action in the Beilis affair. An editorial in America’s oldest Yiddish paper, Yidishes Tageblat (Yiddish Daily News), lamented, “The blood libel in Kiev is shocking in and of itself; however, in addition, it has also emphasized our powerlessness and to what extent we lack real leadership and an acceptable plan of action.” It was indeed true that Jewish political power in America was still nascent, with the treaty abrogation campaign an exceptional effort and singular success. A few Jews served in the House of Representatives in 1913, but the country had no Jewish politicians of national stature. In the first decades of the twentieth century American Jewish leaders were still wary of acting as an ethnic interest group and rarely lobbied for specific legislation. America’s Jews sought to be seen as Americans first. Jewish leaders were highly ambivalent, for example, about Zionism—the ideal of creating a Jewish state. Schiff was especially adamant that participation in the Zionist movement was irreconcilable with being a good American. (His attitude and that of other Jewish leaders would begin to change by the end of World War I.) Louis Marshall, the committee’s president and a prominent attorney, was cautious about taking up Jewish causes without profound and prolonged consideration. He was often heard to say about his fellow Jews something of this sort: “We are always talking too much about Jews, Jews, Jews, and we are making a Jewish question of almost everything that occurs.”

  Jewish leaders were just as wary, or perhaps even more so, of being perceived as interfering in domestic affairs as in foreign ones. By remarkable coincidence, in fact, in the summer and fall of 1913, the American Jewish community was coming to grips with a homegrown case of a Jew wrongly accused of a child’s murder. The case of Leo Frank was a study in the committee’s hesitancy to intervene.

  Leo Frank was sometimes called the “American Dreyfus,” but a Russian observer perhaps more aptly called him the “American Beilis.” The superintendent of an Atlanta pencil factory, Frank was accused of murdering a thirteen-year-old employee, Mary Phagan. Unlike Beilis, Frank was from a well-to-do family and, as a prominent member of the Jewish community, served as the president of the Atlanta chapter of the B’nai B’rith. Beyond the difference in their socioeconomic status, the cases of the two men were quite similar, even eerily so: flimsy circumstantial evidence, unreliable witnesses, outrageously prejudicial state conduct, fear of mob violence, and a star witness for the prosecution who was a leading suspect in the murder. (The case even had its own Krasovsky in the world-famous private detective William Burns.) In August 1913, after a monthlong trial, Frank was convicted and sentenced to death. Anti-Semitism was only one factor in the conviction. Class and regional resentment also played a role. The prosecution portrayed Frank, a New Yorker with an Ivy League education, as a rich northerner who preyed on poor southern womanhood. Anti-Semitism came to the fore after the verdict was handed down when a rabble-rousing Georgia politician, Tom Watson, organized a bigoted campaign against Frank’s appeal, demanding that “the filthy, perverted Jew of New York” be put to death. The Frank case shocked America’s Jews and led to the formation of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith.

  The American Jewish Committee turned its attention to the Frank case only after the verdict was delivered. Jacob Schiff was in favor of involving the group in the case and starting a defense fund for the appeal. Louis Marshall was opposed to public action on the not unreasonable grounds that perceived Jewish interference could only harm Frank’s chances in court. In the fall of 1913, the committee decided for the time being to work behind the scenes, soliciting contributions for the defense and attempting to persuade southern newspaper editors to run articles questioning Frank’s guilt. The next year, Marshall changed his mind and took charge of the defense, arguing Frank’s case, unsuccessfully, before the Supreme Court. In August 1915, after Georgia governor John Slaton commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment, Frank was kidnapped from prison and lynched by a group of vigilantes among whom were many prominent Georgia citizens, including a former governor.

  In the fall of 1913, that horrific final act lay two years in the future. As committee members pondered the Beilis and Frank cases, they were similarly hesitant about how to handle them. The record of the one committee leadership meeting devoted to the Beilis case, held only when the trial was nearly over, captures the scattered state of their thinking. Judge Mayer Sulzberger, the committee’s first president, argued against casting any campaign as rallying to the support of an individual. “The entire issue,” he held, “was one between the Russian government and the Jewish nation.” The only correct strategy, in his view, was to “leave Beilis out of the picture altogether.” Beilis the man must be completely absent from any campaign to save him. (Exactly what he meant by this in practice is not clear.) He cautioned that the tsarist regime’s enemies were not necessarily allies in this matter. “The Russian Revolutionists,” in his view, “would undoubtedly prefer that Beilis should be convicted,” as it would allow them to accuse the regime of “a new crime.” All present thought it advisable to lay the groundwork for public action in the event Beilis was convicted. But only Rabbi Judah Magnes, one of the era’s great Jewish organizers, expressed the opinion that the broad mass of American Jews should be more outspoken about the Beilis case. The Jews ought to be given a chance to express themselves,” he argued. “In this country, the Jews have been very quiet in this matter.” By which he appeared to mean, too quiet.

  Ordinary Jews, in fact, were deeply interested in the case, as evidenced by the rush of numerous Yiddish theater troupes, including Kramer’s Comedy Theater, to stage plays about it in time for the trial. “It seems that we can expect a theatrical Mendel Beilis epidemic,” the New York–based Yiddish newspaper, Di Varhayt (The Truth) reported disapprovingly two weeks before the trial began. The eruption of dramas started with the smaller theaters, vaudeville houses, and music halls, where spectators might be treated to a Beilis performing a duet with Gruzenberg in jail, and by a Vera Cheberyak who broke out into a song and dance routine. At least two dramatizations of the Beilis story included a romantic subplot involving Beilis’s daughter and one of his attorneys (though in real life the eldest daughter was only five years old).

  The “epidemic” quickly infected the most prominent Yiddish actors and producers, with six major productions announced in New York alone, and with others scheduled in Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, and other cities. The shows competed in their presumption, each one contendi
ng that it had the “true” or “real” Beilis rendition. The People’s Theater in Chicago boasted that its Mendl Beylis, der idisher martirer (Mendel Beilis, the Jewish Martyr) was “the greatest sensation, the greatest drama of the twentieth century.” Jacob Adler, known as “the Great Eagle” and the most celebrated Yiddish actor of his generation (and father of the famous method-acting coach, Stella Adler) also betrayed no modesty. “The voice of the people is the voice of God,” the advertisement for his theater declared. “The people want me, Jacob Adler, to play Mendel Beilis.”

  Di Varhayt, dismayed at all the tastelessness, tut-tutted at the “sin of trying to make a few dollars” off serious events that should not be staged. In the coming weeks, that sentiment would be expressed dozens of times over in the Yiddish press, which was virtually unanimous in expressing horror and shame at what it saw as the exploitation of a tragedy for the Jewish people. But however crude and crass the Beilis shows were, they amounted to the first mass expressions of outrage in America against the barbarous spectacle in Kiev. It would take some time for any Jewish leaders to match the interest and sense of urgency of the common folk.

  In July, Beilis received word that after more than a year of delays, the court had finally set a new trial date: the twenty-fifth of September. He had a wait of more than two months ahead of him, but having a definite day to look forward to settled his mind. “It is this not knowing why, when and what that is the worst and most fearful thing, the thinking and waiting every day, every minute for liberation, and the same thing for entire years, day after day, one night after another—this is terrible, this is unbearable, one can simply become insane,” he recalled. In the weeks before the trial, he felt better physically. He ate better, somehow swallowing more of the prison food. Even on the nights leading up to the trial, when he might have been nervous, he slept soundly.