A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (47 page)

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 counted 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.”

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 even, 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.