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

by Levin, Edmund

  The penultimate witness for the prosecution was Dr. Ivan Sikorsky, professor emeritus of psychiatry at St. Vladimir University in Kiev. If not for Sikorsky, the ritual-murder case against Mendel Beilis would almost certainly never have been brought. After Andrei’s murder, the authorities had asked Sikorsky to review the evidence and try to draw conclusions about the killer or killers. (Later in the century Sikorsky might have been called a “profiler.”) In May 1911, two and half months before Beilis’s arrest, he rendered his expert assessment: the “psychological basis” of the crime was “the racial revenge and vendetta of the sons of Jacob.” The terrible deed, he contended, was typical of child murders committed by Jews throughout the ages.

  Dr. Sikorsky was, by far, the prosecution’s most distinguished expert. He was a scientist of international reputation—or, at least, had been until he became involved in the Beilis case: he was under assault by his colleagues at home and in Western Europe, condemned and derided as a man who had sacrificed his professional honor to superstition and religious hatred.

  Dr. Sikorsky’s illness in the spring of the previous year occasioned the initial postponement of the trial, nearly driving Beilis out of his mind. Now, a year and a half later, on the trial’s twenty-fourth day, Sikorsky remained a very ill old man. His personal physician was in attendance in the courtroom and he was allowed to sit in a chair to testify. Nabokov also noted “signs of mental deterioration,” an assessment widely shared.

  The doctor initially testified more or less coherently. “The murder of Andrei Yushchinsky,” he began, “differs from ordinary murders, but is extraordinarily similar to those unusual murders which have been noted from time to time even into our day. I have in mind the murders of children by means of bloodletting while the victims are alive.” He noted a number of “secondary signs” that Andrei’s murder shared with others of its kind. There was the season in which the crime was committed—spring; the age of the victim—around twelve or thirteen years old; the lack of any clear motive for the crime; the leaving of the body unburied and uncovered; and the number of wounds. He asserted the wounds were often a multiple a seven—“that is, 14, 21, 49 etc.”—and added the further qualifier “approximately.” Andrei’s wounds were officially reckoned at forty-seven—in other words, “approximately” forty-nine. Contradicting every other expert, even the prosecution’s own Dr. Kosorotov, Dr. Sikorsky maintained that Andrei’s killers had conducted the butchery and bloodletting “skillfully,” showing a knowledge of anatomy. Finally, it was characteristic of such crimes that “there appears some kind of unseen hand”—a Jewish conspiracy—“which tries to direct the investigator on a false path.” In sum, he said the evidence clearly suggested that the murder of Andrei Yushchinsky had been “committed by fanatics from among the Jews.” Child murder by this nation’s “community of killers,” he told the court, “is no invention, no myth, no imaginary product of the Middle Ages, but a criminal reality of the twentieth century.”

  Now the professor began to ramble. “Their capital,” meaning Jewish money, “is thrown around so as to persecute those who would unmask them. Those who want to fight this evil must be prepared to face enormous monetary force.” The judge told Sikorsky to confine himself to psychiatric expertise, but the witness persisted. “Talmudism, Jewish capital, the Jewish press, all arm themselves, unify themselves, for the struggle with the unmaskers.” Stranger things started coming out of the professor’s mouth. “Russian society has reached a dead end, from which it has to be brought out. Bankers, doctors, sexual psychopaths, go around like a pack of dogs.”

  Dimitry Grigorovich-Barsky initiated a fusillade of defense objections by proclaiming, “This is definitely not expert testimony.” Taking note of the objection, the judge again cautioned the professor to confine himself to psychiatry, to no effect.

  “We protest against all of this,” Karabchevsky told the judge a few minutes later.

  Zamyslovsky, taking the opportunity to provoke the defense, declared, “Servants of the Jews!”

  “We are serving justice, not the Jews,” Karabchevsky shot back.

  After Zamyslovsky repeated his insult, Zarudny rose to object to the entirety of Sikorsky’s testimony. “I am defending only the accused, I am not defending the Jews, but at this moment I am defending the Russian court,” he told the judge.

  “The Russian court has no need of your defense,” Boldryev replied. He allowed Sikorsky to testify essentially unimpeded.

  But in his cross-examination, Karabchevsky honed in on Sikorsky’s fundamental weakness with a crafty question to which he must have known the answer.

  “Could you tell us from where you obtained these words, so we can check them?” he asked, regarding one quotation the professor had adduced.

  “That was published in a book entitled The Damascus Ritual Murders,” he responded, and then volunteered ingenuously, “which I believe was prepared by Mr. Shmakov.” The supposed expert was relying on the work of one of the very prosecutors who had been questioning him.

  “Ah, by Mr. Shmakov!” Karabchevsky declared. “I have no more questions!”

  Yet the attacks by the defense apparently did not undermine Sikorsky to the jury. As they listened in on the jurors’ conversations, police spies had picked up something encouraging. An agent reported to headquarters in St. Petersburg, “Sikorsky’s expert testimony, according to the gendarmes, made a strong impression on the jurors, convincing them of the existence of ritual murder.” At the same time, though, the agent reported a worrisome sign. The jury had noticed the odd hollowness at the center of the case. “How can we judge Beilis,” jurors were heard to say, “when they do not even mention him?”

  As the trial edged toward its conclusion, Mendel Beilis would go utterly unmentioned during three days of testimony critical for the state. With experts opining on the Jewish religion and its relation to ritual murder, the prosecution sought to convince the jury that killings like Andrei’s were a reality deeply rooted in Jewish history and theology.

  The final witness for the prosecution, and its only purported expert on Judaism, would be the priest from Tashkent, Justin Pranaitis. The prosecution moved to acquaint the jury with one of the texts on which he would rely, The Book of the Monk Neophyte, said to have been written in Romania in the early nineteenth century. Its author describes himself as a Jewish convert to Christianity who took monastic orders and assumed the name Neophyte. He asserts an intimate and intricate knowledge of his people’s secret rites. Lengthy excerpts of The Book of Neophyte were read into the record as the jury listened:

  A curse was pronounced upon [the Jewish people] by the prophet Moses who said: the Lord will strike you with the boils of Egypt in the buttocks, and the horrible scab and itch from which you will not heal … We clearly see that the damnation has been fulfilled … since all European Jews have a scab on the buttocks, all Asian ones have mange on the head, all African ones have boils on the legs, and the Americans have a disease of the eyes, that is suffer from trachoma, as a result of which they are ugly and stupid. The wicked rabbis found a medicinal remedy that consists of curing the afflicted with Christian blood…

  All Jews, Neophyte attested, are obligated to kill Christians for three reasons:

  a) the extraordinary hatred which they bear toward Christians, and the assumption that, in committing such a murder, they are making a sacrifice to God … b) the numerous magical actions which the Jews perform with the blood itself, c) and also the uncertainty of the rabbis as to whether Jesus was the son of Mary, the true Messiah, and whether, given this circumstance, they might be saved by sprinkling themselves with the aforementioned blood.

  He also reveals that the Jews put Christian blood to a remarkable number of other uses.

  At the beginning of each season, from the air there appears on [the Jews’] food some sort of blood which they call “tekifa,” and if a Jew eats this food he will immediately die…

  The wicked rabbis … smear a steel fork with the blood o
f a Christian martyr, putting it on the top of the food, so that the above-mentioned blood from the air does not fall upon this food…

  When Jews marry, they have a custom that the young people fast the whole day … and in the evening after the ceremony, a rabbi comes … and gives them both, the bride and groom, a boiled egg, sprinkled instead of salt with the ash of a burned rag that has been dipped in the blood of a Christian martyr…

  On their Passover, preparing matzo with many devilish Jews … they put a little of the powder with the blood of the Christian martyr on one piece of matzo. And on the day they begin their Passover … every Jew, even the smallest of them, is obliged to eat a part of it…

  Beilis’s attorney Vasily Maklakov, considered one of the Duma’s greatest orators, knew beforehand about the reading of the Book of Neophyte, yet still seemed dumbfounded about how to respond to such obvious absurdity. He quoted derisively from the text and then declared sarcastically to the jury, “So this is the ‘scholarly’ work on which the prosecution is basing the indictment.” If a juror did not find it self-refuting, then what, really, could the defense do?

  Father Justin Pranaitis, a clean-shaven old man in a black cassock, with a full head of steel gray hair, spoke very softly, from time to time muttering an execration, such as: “The extermination of Christians is the main goal of the Jewish Talmudists’ existence. Toward that end are directed all prayers, all deeds.” Such epigrammatic moments were exceptional during his eleven hours of meandering testimony. Pranaitis embarked on a lecture clotted with references to Jewish texts—the Talmud, the Shulkhan Arukh, the Gemara, the Mishnah, the Tosefta, and the Zohar—personages such as the ancient Jewish historian Josephus Flavius and the Baal Shem Tov (the founder of Hasidism), and contemporary Christian defenders of the Jews. Judge Boldyrev, exasperated, repeatedly warned him to hew to his expertise. But nothing could restrain his digressions, including one on the origin of playing cards, in particular the Jack of Diamonds.

  The prosecution was itself largely to blame for encouraging Pranaitis’s maddening detours, by organizing the testimony around twenty-nine theological questions, some of them obscure in the extreme. (For example, Question 19: “What effort did the Frankists make to reveal human sacrifice among the Jews during the dispute in Lvov in 1759?”) As for the murder of Andrei Yushchinsky, Pranaitis had only one directly relevant thing to say: he pointed to a group of thirteen wounds on Andrei’s right temple, as representing the Hebrew word “echad” (“one,” as in “God is One”), to which the Kabbalah gave a numerical value of thirteen.

  Why not look at the total number of wounds, the defense argued. Moreover, the true number of wounds on Andrei’s right temple was, in all likelihood, not thirteen, but fourteen. An autopsy photograph seemed to show thirteen punctures at first glance but, on closer inspection, the defense experts showed that one of the puncture marks was a double wound—the weapon had struck in nearly the same place twice. Even Kosorotov, the prosecution’s own expert, agreed that the true count was very possibly fourteen.

  The prosecution had a far greater problem than the attack on their witness’s numerology. Once Father Pranaitis departed from his prepared opening statement, he seemed lost. This became evident under questioning by the prosecution itself. Shmakov would formulate a question, often citing a lengthy textual quotation, and Pranaitis would invariably respond with, “I don’t know,” “I don’t remember,” “I can’t explain,” or silence. To Nabokov, Pranaitis resembled a seminary student failing an exam: “Sweating, wiping his brow, looking with wide frightened eyes at his tormentors”—that is, the very prosecutors who had called him as a witness—“Pranaitis’s whole figure expressed physical suffering.” Shmakov grew openly angry at his foundering witness; Beilis’s supporters began smiling and sometimes even burst into laughter.

  The defense, oddly, did a better job of eliciting answers from the witness. Father Pranaitis had mentioned an eighteenth-century Jewish convert named Serafimovich who had attested to the ritual killings of Christians. “Would you please tell us,” Gruzenberg asked, “does he not say that when they [the Jews] drew the blood of a [Christian] child, that it ran white as milk?”

  “Yes,” Pranaitis answered, “that is the case, though why it was white, I cannot say.”

  Karabchevsky took over, initiating an exchange about ritual-murder trials of the Middle Ages. “How were those trials conducted? With the use of torture?”

  “Yes, there was severe torture,” he responded, “but due to this torture one can say that the truth was revealed. Of course, this is not good, but if a person will not confess, you have to torture him.”

  A reporter at the trial, Benzion Katz, who was editor of Russia’s only regularly published Hebrew-language newspaper, Ha-Zeman (The Time), approached Karabchevsky with additional ammunition to discredit Pranaitis. He had evidence that the priest was not just highly ignorant but a fraud. The man who had once attempted to pass off a worthless painting as an Old Master had passed off others’ work as his own. He had plagiarized The Talmud Unmasked and The Jewish Blood Secret from other anti-Semitic pseudo-scholars, even copying their typographical errors. This was why he had such trouble answering simple questions.

  Katz was confident that Pranaitis, contrary to his claims, was wholly ignorant of Semitic languages. He proposed a ploy to destroy Pranaitis’s credibility beyond all doubt. The attorneys would ask the priest to translate the headings of a number of Talmudic tractates, or sections, that he himself had mentioned, as well as a trick question that would definitively expose his ignorance.

  “Maybe he will answer correctly, and then your ploy will backfire,” Karabchevsky objected. Gruzenberg agreed, but eventually Katz won the pair’s agreement to the plan. The defense first presented its experts on Judaism, including two non-Jewish scholars: Professors P. K. Kokovtsov of the University of St. Petersburg, one of Russia’s most distinguished Hebraists; and I. G. Troitsky, of the St. Petersburg Theological Seminary; as well as the chief rabbi of Moscow, Jacob Mazeh. Kokovtsov testified in detail about the ancient Jewish prohibition against ingesting blood, which required the most careful butchering to drain the fluid completely from slaughtered animals. Food that came into contact with blood was considered unclean and not fit to eat. The idea that any Jew would ingest blood in the name of his religion was utterly absurd. A less likely foundation for a Jewish sect could hardly be imagined. Kokovtsov cracked that, if he heard some Jews were caught with an exsanguinated corpse, he “would sooner believe they were preparing to eat it than consume its blood.”

  After a recess, Pranaitis was recalled to the stand.

  “In your testimony,” Karabchevsky asked him, “it seems you mentioned the tractate Hulin. Is there such a thing?”

  “I don’t remember,” Pranaitis replied.

  “But you know the tractate Hulin? How do you translate that title? What is it about?”

  Pranaitis was silent.

  “You can’t say anything?”

  There was no response.

  “Let’s go on. What about Makshirin? What does that mean?”

  “That’s liquid,” Pranaitis responded. The response was vaguely on target—the tractate deals with the circumstances under which contact with liquid renders food unclean.

  Shmakov jumped up to object. “The defense is giving the witness an examination. That is unacceptable.”

  Judge Boldyrev overruled the objection. He had little choice. He could not forbid the defense from asking the witness to clarify the meaning of terms he himself had used. “You cited the tractate Yevamot?”

  “I will not answer.”

  “And Eruvin?”

  Silence.

  Karabchevsky’s final question, devised by Benzion Katz, was, “Where did Baba Bathra live and what was she famous for?”

  Baba Bathra (“The Lower Gate”) is not a person but a Talmudic tractate dealing with the rights and responsibilities of property owners. “Baba” means “old woman” in Russian, so the defense cou
nted on Pranaitis’s falling into the trap. As the historian Maurice Samuel put it, the question was similar to asking, “Who lived at the Gettysburg address?”

  Pranaitis responded, “I don’t know.”

  Several Jewish spectators burst into laughter and Benzion Katz himself began laughing so uncontrollably that he was ejected from the courtroom, which did not trouble him at all. “Many congratulated me,” he later recalled, “for having brought Pranaitis to his knees.”

  The two police agents reporting on the trial to St. Petersburg both agreed that Pranaitis’s testimony had been a fiasco. The priest had demonstrated “ignorance of the texts,” “insufficient familiarity with Hebrew writings,” and, generally, no more than “dilettantish” knowledge. In sum, “he looked as if he could not answer the simplest questions.” One additional aspect of Pranaitis’s pitiful testimony is of note. Zamyslovsky asked the priest at one point, “You have not found papal bulls which would directly condemn the accusation that the Jews commit ritual murder, is that correct?”

  “Yes,” Pranaitis responded. “There are no such bulls.” In his pretrial testimony the priest had further contended that any such purported bulls were forgeries. Both statements were false. In fact, several popes had condemned the blood accusation, beginning with Innocent IV in 1247. But the papal declarations could be introduced by the defense only if the Vatican authenticated them for the Russian court. To secure the authentication, the British journalist and Jewish activist Lucien Wolf drafted a letter in the name of Lord Lionel Rothschild to the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Merry del Val. For some reason, the letter was sent off only as the trial began. The cardinal replied eleven days later with a letter attesting to the accuracy of a report written in 1756 by Cardinal Lorenzo Ganganelli—the future Pope Clement XIV—which quoted papal pronouncements against the blood accusation, and generally cast extreme doubt on the charge. The secretary of state’s response arrived promptly enough to be of use to the defense—if the defense had seen it. But the state made sure the defense would not be able to introduce evidence that would be too awkward for the Catholic Pranaitis to dismiss. Forwarding the letter to Kiev was the responsibility of the Russian ambassador to the Vatican, Dimitry Nelidov. He made sure it would not arrive in time. In a letter to foreign minister Sazonov shortly after the trial, the ambassador expressed his displeasure at the “readiness of the Curia [the papal court]…to please the Jews” and boasted that the cardinal’s missive “could have no significance, since it would arrive in Kiev after the verdict.”