A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (34 page)

Pranaitis, a graduate of the St. Petersburg Theological Seminary, had once even been considered for an appointment as a bishop. Still, despite his credentials, the prosecution had reason to be uneasy about him. In December 1912, after Pranaitis had been deposed in the
Beilis case, the government’s Department of Religious Affairs circulated a memorandum advertising “
disagreeable” information about his past. In 1894, Pranaitis took a painting to the St. Petersburg workshop of a craftsman named Avanzo to have its frame gilded. After the painting suffered accidental damage, Pranaitis claimed it was the work of the Spanish master Murillo and the property of a Roman Catholic cardinal; he demanded three thousand rubles as compensation. He and the trusting Avanzo settled on a payment of a thousand rubles. But it soon was exposed that Pranaitis had made up the story. The painting was no Old Master, and Pranaitis was going to pocket the money himself. He was apparently not criminally charged, but he was banished from the capital to a provincial parish. In 1902 he ended up in Tashkent, in the Central Asian region then called Turkestan, where he angered the authorities with what they regarded as unlawful proselytizing using “rather cunning methods.” The regional governor-general’s office found that his “fanaticism could incite religious and national enmity between Russians and Poles in Turkestan.”

Pranaitis was a flawed choice for testifying to the truth of the blood accusation, but the state could find no better alternative. Liutostansky, then in his late seventies, was still alive, but the prosecution must have judged him too seedy. It had no choice but to overlook the sins of the priest from Tashkent.

In the
indictment, the prosecution was careful to limit the blood accusation to Jewish “fanatics” and unenlightened Jews, and not seek to condemn the entire Jewish people outright. The conventional line of sophisticated Russian anti-Semites, this distinction was transparently deceptive. Judeophobes most often pointed their finger at the Hasids, from whose supposedly backward ranks the bloodthirsty fanatics
came. But accusing the Hasids was little different from condemning Jews as a group. The Hasids were not merely a sect of Judaism; they constituted one of its two major branches in Eastern
Europe, with millions of adherents. Moreover, if such a large portion of Jewry was inclined toward ritual murder, the question naturally arose: How could the so-called sophisticated Jews not know about it? As much as the state would deny it, at the Beilis
trial
all Jews would stand in the dock.

As for the remainder of the indictment, the defense could feel somewhat relieved. The prosecution was still relying on the contradictory, admittedly drunken testimony of the Lamplighter couple, the Shakhovskys. The major new contributions to the prosecution’s case were the testimony of a notorious criminal, Vera Cheberyak; her daughter, Ludmila; and Beilis’s ex-cellmate, the informer Kozachenko—which is to say, a sociopath, her frightened child who had obviously been coached into providing a false eyewitness account, and a lowlife police informer. All three would surely be vulnerable on examination in court.

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 extremely 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.”