A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (48 page)

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,

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.

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 and 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.

On the thirty-third day of the trial, after rebuttals that added nothing of importance, the judge gave Mendel Beilis the final word.

“
Defendant Beilis,” he asked, “do you have anything to tell the gentlemen of the jury?”

Beilis stood up quickly. “Gentlemen of the jury,” he said, speaking rapidly in his Yiddish-inflected Russian and looking directly at them, “I could say much in my defense. I am tired. I have no strength to say what I could. You can see that I am innocent. I ask you to acquit me so that I can see my poor children who have been waiting for me for two and a half years.”

Then Beilis was taken back to prison. He lay down on his cot knowing this might be his last night of captivity or the prelude to a life of hard labor.

The trial was nearly over, but far away, in America,
Jewish leaders were still arguing over how, and how vocally, to help Mendel Beilis. Three days earlier the noted Reform rabbi
Max Heller had taken the American Jewish leadership to task for its inaction. “Has the Jewish people ever afforded the world a more doleful and piteous spectacle of disunion and disorder than what it is presenting just now?” he asked in an article entitled “Statesmanship,” published in the
American Israelite
. He may have had in mind the nation’s leading Jewish lobbying organization, the American Jewish Committee, whose executive body first met about the case only on the thirty-second day of the trial—that is, the day before the end of summations. The only significant action the committee had taken to help Beilis was to organize the open letter to Tsar Nicholas from a group of prominent Christian clergymen. As they met, the committee’s leaders felt reason to be optimistic; their
State Department sources were saying the Russian government
believed Beilis would be acquitted. Still, they agreed it was prudent to have a plan of action should he be convicted. After discussing how they might pressure the Wilson administration into appealing to the Russian government, they came to no consensus.

Jewish organized labor and the thriving socialist movement had also been slow to organize in Beilis’s defense. Midway through the trial,
Abraham Cahan, the editor of the leading Yiddish newspaper,
Forverts
(Forward), had berated a New York gathering of twelve hundred socialists for being so preoccupied with local issues that they “ignore the evil-doing in Russia.” Only on the thirty-third day did a group of predominantly Jewish, or Jewish-led, unions—including the furriers, laundry, and millinery workers, as well as socialist movement chapters—decide to organize a protest. But the hour for protests had passed.

October 28, 1913.
At eight a.m., Mendel Beilis was taken to the prison office and handed over to his security detail. As usual before departing, this crew strip-searched him. Beilis endured the degrading routine without complaint. But then, just as his convoy was about to depart, the deputy warden demanded that the prison guards search Beilis as well. Beilis removed everything but his undershirt, which he had always been allowed to retain when searched. But now the deputy warden demanded he remove every piece of clothing. The needless humiliation sent Beilis into a rage. He tore off the undershirt, ripped it to pieces, and threw it in the guard’s face. The deputy warden pulled out his pistol and aimed it at him with such a wild look in his eyes that it seemed to Beilis he might really pull the trigger. Had this been any other insolent prisoner, shooting him would have been nothing out of the ordinary. Luckily, a courthouse security officer grabbed the pistol from the deputy warden’s hand. After the head warden came in and chastised Beilis for “starting trouble,” the convoy finally headed off.

Beilis found
St. Sophia Square filled with mounted police and surrounded by
Cossacks on foot. The authorities would allow no crowd that could cause trouble to gather in the square. The thousand people or so who came to await the verdict had to squeeze onto the sidewalks, pressing themselves against the buildings around the square’s perimeter. Judging by press reports, the throng was entirely pro-Beilis or else
held their tongues. Supporters of the prosecution gathered at the other end of the square, in
St. Sophia Cathedral, where Vladimir Golubev’s right-wing youth group,
Double Headed Eagle, held a requiem for Andrei.

Once court was in session, the prosecution formally moved to put into effect its insurance policy.
The jury’s first charge would be to decide, irrespective of
Beilis’s guilt, the manner in which the crime had been committed and its location. “Has it been proven,” the charge read,

The question did not mention the word “ritual” or “religious.” The jury could avoid ruling on the killers’ motivation, but the wording served the purposes of the supporters of the blood accusation well enough. “Complete loss of blood” suggested that the intention had been to drain it from the body. Measuring the blood in “glasses” was suggestive of collecting and consuming it. The description of the crime accorded with the prosecution’s contention that the killers had waited for some time so as to let the blood flow out, and only then finished the boy off. And, of course, placing the location of the crime at the Jewish-owned Zaitsev factory implied Jewish culpability.

The second question concerned the guilt or innocence of the defendant. The wording was almost exactly the same as the first question except that it began, “Is the defendant Menahem Mendel Tevyev Beilis guilty of having conspired with others unknown … in a plan motivated by religious fanaticism, to deprive thirteen-year-old Andrei Yushchinsky of his life …” Here the jury
was
asked to rule on motivation. Still,
the prosecution avoided the word “ritual.” It did not need to push the jury on this point. The phrase “religious fanaticism” was sufficient. If
Beilis was found guilty, no one would doubt that he had been convicted of ritual murder.