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

by Levin, Edmund

  Ambassador Nelidov’s letter is one of the most remarkable in the archives for another reason. In the left margin of the first page, in blue pencil, is a vertical slash flanked by two dots. This was the personal mark Tsar Nicholas had a habit of inscribing on briefing materials he had read. Documentary evidence of the tsar’s involvement in the Beilis case is scant. The record does indicate that he was briefed on it a number of times. This mark is the clearest indication of how closely the tsar must have been following the case and his awareness of the tactics of his minions.

  By the time the summations began on the trial’s twenty-ninth day, Mendel Beilis was in declining health. He had fainted repeatedly during the proceedings and a physician had found him to be suffering from “anemia of the brain” brought on by the strain. The endless days of testimony had also been hard on the jurors, two of whom had needed medical attention.

  With eight attorneys participating—three for the prosecution and five for the defense—the summations would take up five days of the trial. Then the judge would read his charge to the jury and send the twelve men off to deliberate. A great deal was left to endure. Still, in less than a week, Mendel Beilis might finally know his fate.

  State prosecutor Oskar Vipper was the first to address the jurors. Officially, he was the only prosecutor in the trial, with his two colleagues technically representing only the mother of the victim. When Vipper spoke, he spoke for the state.

  Why, he asked, was the world so interested in this case? Surely, there was only one reason. “If a non-Jew, a Russian, were accused of this crime,” he continued, “would there be such a commotion?” Surely not. The world had taken notice only because Mendel Beilis, a Jew, “sits in the dock and we have the audacity to accuse him … of committing this evil deed out of fanatical motives.” Recently another trial had attracted such attention, he said. “One has only to recall the Dreyfus case—how a single person was accused of treason and the whole world was concerned about him only because he was a Jew.”

  Vipper denied indicting the Jewish people as a whole. “Once and for all, nothing of the sort is true,” he proclaimed. “We are accusing only a single fanatic.” But he did not shrink from accusing the Jews as a whole of attempting to cover up the truth. From the very beginning of the case “all means were used to confuse and obscure” the investigation. He had no doubt the Jews were behind these efforts. “Some kind of unseen hand, in all likelihood, raining down gold,” was at work. If evidence was lacking—if the Lamplighters or the Wolf Woman did not say what was needed—the primary reason was a Jewish conspiracy to suppress it.

  Vipper struck the note of helplessness that characterizes many anti-Semitic screeds against Jews. “I will say candidly—let people criticize me for this if they wish—that I personally feel that I am in the power of the Jews, in the power of Jewish opinion, in the power of the Jewish press.” That the Jews lacked legal rights was of no consequence. “In fact they rule our world,” he proclaimed. “We feel ourselves under their yoke.”

  In the seventh hour of an oration lasting some ten hours, when jurors and spectators must have been nodding off at his recapitulation of trial testimony, Vipper surprised the courtroom. He was adding a new name to his list of unindicted accomplices. The list—which included the hay and straw dealer Shneyerson, with his suspiciously “noble” Jewish surname, and included nearly every Jew at the Zaitsev factory—was already rather long. He now found room in it for Vera Cheberyak.

  Could Vera Cheberyak have been involved in Andrei’s murder? Vipper could not rule it out. She and Beilis, he maintained, were “apparently well-acquainted.” Now Beilis’s cow ambled into his argument. “When the question of the cow was raised here,” he told the jury, “I attached to it, as indeed I still do, substantial significance.” The animal, he hinted, served as the excuse for frequent contact between Cheberyak and the defendant. “She went to buy milk from him,” he said, adding suggestively, “as she herself did not deny.” Vera Cheberyak could well have been complicit in Andrei’s death, Vipper declared. “Just like other witnesses,” such as Shneyerson, “she could possibly take her place in the prisoner’s dock.” This gambit by the prosecutor was a bid to outflank the defense, which had put Cheberyak’s guilt at the center of its strategy. Whether it would persuade or confuse the jurors remained to be seen.

  By the end his summation, Vipper could barely be heard. An anxious man, he was now in a state of nervous exhaustion, which he oddly admitted to the jury before making his final plea. Beilis, despite his ill health, remained attentive throughout the daylong speech. When Vipper called on the jury to “look at this fanatic who committed this evil deed with his own hands” and “pronounce the verdict upon him that he deserves,” he did not visibly react.

  Civil prosecutor Georgy Zamyslovsky delivered his summation the next day. By all accounts his performance was far superior to that of Vipper. He projected confidence. His well-constructed and straightforward oration focused on convincing the jury, although he did spin out an extended metaphor about ultraviolet rays: just as there was an invisible spectrum, so, too, there were “ultraviolet clues” that could not be seen but were nonetheless present. In the main, though, he attempted to rely on the factual record. He presented the jurors with a stark choice: either Cheberyak or Beilis. Nabokov gave Zamyslovsky high marks. He feared the speech might be quite effective “should the jurors, in the end, give in to subtle, competent hypnosis, which counted on their ignorance and racial prejudice.”

  Civil prosecutor Alexei Shmakov spoke for five and a half hours, in a feverishly incoherent speech that leapfrogged from overly detailed recapitulations of the evidence to obscure digressions and back again. He treated the jurors to a defense of the ancient Greek sophist Apion before moving on to Vera Cheberyak, dismissing as a “legend” that she was involved in the murder. Soon, however, he insisted, like Vipper, that Beilis and Cheberyak might have been accomplices. “Why not Beilis and Vera?” he asked. “That is perfectly possible.” Then he told the whole story of the Jewish holiday of Purim despite Judge Boldyrev’s repeated warnings that it was irrelevant. The jury, if it was paying attention, learned much about the Persian grand vizier, Haman; the Jewish heroine, Esther; and the tasty Purim treat known as Hamentaschen, which Shmakov insisted the Jews sometimes made with human blood. He, too, spoke a great deal of the “unseen hand” and the worldwide Jewish conspiracy, with its “horrific, overwhelming weapon—the press.”

  On the afternoon of the thirty-first day—October 23, 1913—Vasily Maklakov gave the first summation for the defense. Of the five members of the defense team, he possessed the most powerful intellect. He had an unusual talent for arguing questions from both sides and getting into the minds of those he might be inclined to despise. Perhaps most important, as a speaker, he was direct and plainspoken.

  Maklakov began by imploring the jury to focus solely on the defendant. He would not seek to disprove the blood accusation against the Jews. He only wanted them to disregard it as wholly irrelevant to their one and only responsibility: deciding the defendant’s guilt or innocence. He even went so far as to concede that fanatics might arise anywhere, and “perhaps … there could have been some among the Jews.” But it was not for the jurors to settle a dispute that had been going on for centuries. They would need all their wisdom simply to decide the case before them.

  “The prosecution says it is convinced Beilis is guilty,” he continued. At this point, Beilis broke down. He was given a glass of water and Maklakov proceeded.

  Maklakov liked to assume a jury’s common sense and rely on logic and the law. He conceded that the jurors had the right to question the credibility of some defense witnesses, so he would clear the stage of anyone about whom they might have doubts. “I will rely only on what is totally reliable, on what the prosecutors themselves acknowledge to be true,” he told them. Gone were Ekaterina Diakanova and her masked man; Zinaida Malitskaya and her claim that she had heard Andrei and his killers scuffling overhead; and eve
n, for now, Detective Krasovsky. But what remained was a strikingly convincing case against Vera Cheberyak.

  “After Andrei disappeared, when people were looking for him everywhere, when there were notices in the newspapers, she uttered not a word about seeing him on that fateful day, March 12,” he told the jury, “She alone held the key to helping find Andrei, but she did not show anyone that key.” He posed a series of questions. “Why did she so diligently hide all this?…What so worried her that she forbade Zhenya to speak?…Why, if she was innocent, did it occur to her that people would suspect her of the child’s murder?”

  He then moved on to the centerpiece of his oration. “And now,” he told the jury, “we come to the most frightening and mysterious episode in this case—the death of her son.”

  The courtroom was about to be transfixed by his dramatic recounting of Zhenya Cheberyak’s deathbed scene. Maklakov began with one of his characteristic lawyerly concessions to gain the jurors’ confidence. Some, such as Detective Krasovsky, had accused Vera Cheberyak of wanting her children dead. That was not true, he said.

  But together with that natural love of a mother for her children there was another feeling in her, a feeling of horror and fear for herself … The unfortunate Cheberyak had to think at that moment not of saving her son, nor of giving him peace. She did not dare to cry at the detectives, “Get out of here, this is death, this is God’s business.” She could not do that. She was afraid. She wanted to use her dying son. She asked him: “Zhenya, say that I had nothing to do with it.” And what did Zhenya answer? “Mama, leave me alone, it hurts.” The dying boy did not fulfill her request. He did not say what would have been so easy for him to say. If only it had been true, he could have told the detectives, “Leave my mother alone, I myself saw Beilis drag Andrusha to the brick kiln.” Why did he not say that? And when he wanted to speak, this unfortunate mother, as witnesses have testified, kissed him to prevent him from speaking. Before he died, she gave him the Judas kiss so that he would not speak.

  At those words, the spectators drew in their breath and shifted in their seats. At least one juror was seen to wipe away a tear. Maklakov went on to a give an elegant accounting of the prosecution’s flaws, posing a series of questions that answered themselves. Would anyone, even a group of fanatics, grab a child in broad daylight in front of several witnesses? Even if one accepted that scenario, why did none of the children who were supposedly with Andrei immediately tell their parents? Why did not all of Lukianovka immediately know what had happened? The answer was obvious: “No one knew about it, simply because it never happened. The whole story was the invention of Cheberyak.”

  In a keen psychological move, Maklakov appealed to the jurors’ national pride. Imagine, he asked,

  all of Lukianovka, knowing that their child, a Christian child, had been dragged off to the brick kiln by a Jew and then found dead in a cave … If what the prosecutor described had really happened … then all of Lukianovka would have arisen. These simple Russian people would have risen up, fearing no one, and we would not have had to sit in judgment of Beilis. There would be nothing left of the Zaitsev factory. There would be nothing left of Beilis. There would be no trial.

  Unspoken was the message that the jurors themselves were the kind of men who surely would have joined in avenging the poor Christian boy’s murder. Maklakov then moved nimbly to appeal to the jurors’ basic sense of fairness. “You have been told in various ways,” he said, “that the Jews are our enemies, that they do not consider us [non-Jews] to be human beings, and they [the prosecutors] are inviting you to have the same feelings toward them. Do not give in to that invitation.” The jurors were free to convict Beilis if they believed the evidence warranted it. But he implored them to consider only the evidence, and nothing else, and refuse to be accomplices in “the suicide of the Russian justice system” by succumbing to an attempt to stir up their hatred.

  Oskar Gruzenberg, the only Jew on the defense team, spoke next. He felt, with some reason, that he had to explain himself as a Jew before he did anything else. “Ritual murder,” he began, “the use of human blood … a frightful accusation, frightful words, which had been buried long ago. But they are powerful and enduring, as you have heard, and now rise from the grave.” He then turned to his personal beliefs. “If I for one minute thought that Jewish teachings allowed the use of human blood—I say this clearly, knowing that these words will become known to Jews throughout the world—that not for one minute would I consider it possible to remain a Jew. I am deeply convinced, I have no doubt, that there are no such crimes among us and there cannot be.” Returning to his funereal metaphor, he declared “these accusations, rising from the graveyard, drag us back to it, where they have been exhumed from thousand-year-old tombs long ago crumbled to dust.”

  Though not as elegantly as Maklakov, Gruzenberg went on to do an excellent job of detailing the numerous flaws, lapses, inconsistencies, and omissions in the prosecution’s case. How could the prosecutors defend Vera Cheberyak as innocent of murder and then just a short time later label her as a possible accomplice? If she was a suspect, why did the authorities not take the most elementary steps to investigate her? If the prosecution was so sure that Shneyerson was involved, why was he not sitting in the dock with Beilis? The prosecution maintained that Andrei’s blood was needed for the dedication of a prayer house being built by the Zaitsevs. If so, why did the Zaitsevs not stand accused as well? Gruzenberg’s relentlessly logical dissection of the prosecution’s case took up most of his six-hour oration. In closing, however, Gruzenberg returned to a declamatory mode.

  I firmly hope that Beilis will not be allowed to perish … But if I am wrong, what of it? Hardly two hundred years have passed since our forefathers were burned at the stake for similar charges. Without complaint, with a prayer on their lips, they went to their unjust punishment. How are you, Beilis, better than they? So, too, ought you to go. In your days of suffering at hard labor, when you are seized by despair and grief, take heart, Beilis. Repeat often the words of the prayer uttered by the dying. “Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.” Terrible is your destruction. But more terrible still is the very possibility of such accusations here [in this court], made under the cover of reason, conscience and the law.

  Was this melodramatic conclusion—however moving to the Jews in the courtroom and those who read it in newspapers around the world—helpful to Mendel Beilis? Maklakov argued that any attempt by the attorneys to defend the Jews as a group, or argue generally against the existence of ritual murder, was misguided and even risked the life of their client. “Gruzenberg held the opinion that world Jewry sat in the dock and it was necessary to defend not only Beilis but the Jews as a whole,” he recalled decades later, while “I was always on the side of defending only Beilis, and not the Jews.” He may have been exaggerating their differences. In his memoirs, Gruzenberg agreed with Maklakov that “in court there should be only one goal”—to prove the defendant’s innocence, but in his summation, to a degree, he departed from that principle. Perhaps Maurice Samuel’s judgment—that “the more eloquent he became, the more futile it sounded”—is too harsh. Gruzenberg argued in his memoirs that he considered it his “duty” to say certain things of broader importance in his address to the jury and “took the liberty” of saying them. But the wisdom of taking that liberty could be questioned.

  On the thirty-second day of the trial Alexander Zarudny and Nikolai Karabchevsky delivered the final summations for the defense. Zarudny’s was unfortunate. Instead of letting their experts’ words speak for themselves and dismissing the blood accusation as nonsense, he decided to play Shmakov’s opponent regarding the minutiae of things Jewish. The Temple in Jerusalem, for example, was not illuminated by thirteen candles, as Shmakov held (there were not even candles in biblical times) but with a seven-branched oil-lit candelabrum, and the prosecutor was thoroughly wrongheaded about the Jewish ritual of circumcision. Zarudny’s broader sentiments were irreproachable an
d sometimes eloquently expressed. “The court is a kind of temple,” he told the jury. “As in a temple, one prays for one’s enemies, one must judge even them with complete impartiality, without any prejudice.” But the fine sentiments were lost in the thicket of allusions to the “the 248 positive commandments,” “the Seven Noahide Laws,” and “Exodus 37, verses 17 through 23.”

  The final summation belonged to Nikolai Karabchevsky. It would be easy to judge his oration as harshly as Zarudny’s. He failed to tailor his grandiloquent style to the mostly uneducated jury. He spoke of the prosecution’s attempt to prove its case “by means of the negative system of formal proofs.” He used words like “axiom,” “idyll,” “extraterritorially,” and “casus.” Yet he did reinforce many of the points made by Gruzenberg and Maklakov—for example, the matter of Andrei’s missing coat. The prosecution itself conceded that all the evidence suggested that it had been left at the Cheberyaks’ house. Why had Vera Cheberyak not told anyone about it? “You cannot get away from the coat,” Karabchevsky emphasized. “Against Beilis there is, strictly speaking, no evidence,” he went on to say. And not to be underestimated is the tremendous presence Karabchevsky projected, which everyone, including Beilis, found so striking. Some said that a performance by Karabchevsky had to be experienced firsthand; perhaps his summation in the Beilis case made a greater impression on the jury than the words on the page suggest.