A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (46 page)

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:

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

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

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.”