A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (52 page)

The
strangest fate belonged to
Vasily Shulgin. He fled Russia after the revolution, ending up in Yugoslavia. In 1944, during World War II, he was captured by Soviet forces, taken back to Russia, and sentenced to a long prison term for his anti-Soviet activity. Upon being freed in 1956 he, at least outwardly, became a Soviet patriot, penning an ardently pro-communist piece of propaganda,
Letters to Russian Emigres.
In 1965, he appeared in a fascinating
documentary,
Before the Court of History,
in which he recounted the story of the abdication of Tsar Nicholas in the very railway car where the historic event occurred. Shulgin died in 1976 in the city of Vladimir at the age of ninety-eight.

As for the trial’s exonerated defendant, within weeks of the verdict Mendel Beilis came to realize that his notoriety would make life in Russia impossible. No one could guarantee his safety or that of his family. In the spring of 1914, the Beilises immigrated to Palestine, where, to Mendel’s delight, he immediately felt at home. “The land of Israel had an
invigorating effect on me,” he wrote in his
memoirs. “It gave me new life and new hope.” He loved the hills and the fields and just breathing the air. And he felt something new: a sense of freedom. “I saw for the first time a race of proud,
uncringing Jews,” he wrote, “who lived life openly and unafraid.” His first few months in Palestine may have been the happiest of his life.

But the outbreak of World War I disrupted this idyll, as
Great Britain and the Ottoman Empire fought for control of the Holy Land. The Beilis family was forced to move from the town of Petah Tikva when Ottoman forces drove them out and
destroyed their home. To
his parents’ great distress, their son Pinchas, barely seventeen, joined the Ottoman army because it was fighting the Russians. He soon deserted, putting himself at risk of execution. Beilis, meanwhile, grew short of money as he failed to find a way to make a decent living in wartime Palestine, and promises of help from the Jewish community always seemed to fall through. The Beilises were struck by personal tragedy when Pinchas, having survived the war,
committed
suicide. In 1922, hoping to improve his fortunes, Beilis reluctantly decided to move to America. The family settled in the Bronx. People in America still remembered him. He was feted in Chicago by social reformer
Jane
Addams and in Cincinnati by a “Mr. Manischewitz”—one of the five Manischewitz brothers, the most famous
matzo makers in the world. But in America, too, he could not thrive. He was willing to do any kind of work, but people were reluctant to give the famous Beilis too menial a job. He found himself all but unemployable. He tried his hand in a printing business and at selling life insurance but failed. His memoirs,
The Story of My Sufferings,
self-published in 1925 with the help of Arnold Margolin and others in the American Jewish community, sold reasonably well, bringing in some money. Beilis could have made a fortune had he moved to America in 1913 and taken up offers to capitalize on his renown (for example, a $40,000 offer from Hearst’s
New York American
for a twenty-week speaking tour). He had no regrets, though, telling the
Jewish Daily Bulletin
in 1933 that he could never do anything that “involved my
exploiting myself as a Jew and as a Jewish victim of an unjust and cruel persecution. So I refused. And I would still refuse today.” Yet twenty years of struggle did wear him down. By the early 1930s his main means of support was peddling his book door to door, which exhausted him. “I am
not yet sixty,” he told an interviewer the year before his
death, “but it’s as though I’ve lived through a thousand years.” When he died in 1934, four thousand people attended his funeral, a final manifestation of the fame that he had tried to avoid and had found such an awful burden.

In Russia, for a few years after the verdict, “Beilis” became a
derogatory epithet for “Jew.” Somewhat more strangely, during World War I
some Russians nicknamed German zeppelins “
Beilises,” because Jews were supposedly pro-German traitors. (Jews were also sometimes called “Vilyush,” a mocking diminutive of Kaiser Wilhelm.)

Within a decade or so, however, Mendel Beilis, once one of the most famous people on earth, had largely faded from memory in Russia and in the world. But the blood accusation did not disappear. It lived on—predominantly outside of Russia.

Its survival in the West should not have been surprising. In the Western condemnation of the Beilis
trial there had arguably been no small element of hypocrisy. During the trial, prosecutor Oskar
Vipper had complained to the jury:

Vipper’s complaint was defensible. The Beilis affair could be seen as the climax of a wave of
ritual murder cases in Eastern and Central Europe, the majority of which, as noted earlier, arose in Germany and
Austria-Hungary.
Between the early 1880s and 1913 there were at least as many recorded cases—approximately a hundred—as there had been in the previous seven hundred years (“cases” being defined here as accusations that were investigated or at least received considerable popular attention).

The last actual ritual-murder trial outside of Eastern Europe occurred in the
Prussian town of
Konitz, in 1900. The victim was an eighteen-year-old student, Ernst Winter, who had been neatly dismembered, his body parts scattered throughout the town, wrapped in packing paper. The case sparked
anti-Semitic riots—the town’s synagogue was set on fire and Jewish homes vandalized—though thankfully no one was killed. A Jewish butcher and his son,
Adolph and Moritz Lewy, were charged in the murder. They turned out to have solid alibis and the charge was dismissed. A third Jew was tried and acquitted. (Moritz Lewy, however, was convicted of perjury for denying that he knew the victim, based on extremely flimsy evidence. The kaiser, in his mercy, cut the four-year sentence in half.)

Historians have reached no consensus on the precise reasons for the revival of the blood accusation with a half-dozen full-fledged trials in Europe in the latter part of the nineteenth century. But the wave was undoubtedly linked to the rise of modern anti-Semitism that culminated in some of the worst horrors of the twentieth century. Jew-hatred was now the province of “experts” who could testify in court. As the historian
David Biale writes, “a
folkloric belief that had remained relatively underground in central Europe after the Reformation was now given a certain bogus dignity as ‘scientific.’ ” The blood accusation’s revival, then, was arguably a warning sign. In reaction to the Beilis affair, Russia’s European critics might have done well to look inward, for the trial could be seen as a symptom, to borrow Vasily Maklakov’s words, of a “dangerous internal illness” afflicting the heart of Europe itself. During the trial, in fact, Vipper was quite explicit in confessing that he had been inspired by certain recent European trials.

In the decades after his trial, Mendel Beilis never entirely lost his place in history. He was reliably mentioned in any tract on Jewish ritual murder or its refutation. In 1926, the official newspaper of Germany’s rising Nazi Party,
Volkischer Beobachter
, devoted a six-part series to the Beilis affair, calling it a “test of strength between the Russian state and people and the Jews.” In the 1930s,
Julius Streicher, editor of the infamous Nazi weekly
Der Sturmer,
energetically propagandized for the ritual-murder charge, devoting special issues to the subject that listed Beilis in the pantheon of Jewish child-killers. “Look at the path which the Jewish people has traversed for millennia,” Streicher declared at a Nazi rally. “
Everywhere murder, everywhere mass murder!” The Nazi regime itself, it is true, never adopted the blood accusation as a major part of its official propaganda. There were no Nazi versions of the Beilis trial. Still, as Biale has argued, the blood accusation was more important to the Nazi cause than it might initially appear. Thanks to the efforts of Streicher and others, the charge “
lurked in the background, providing additional mythic ammunition” that aided in “the demonization of the Jews…[making] it easier for the Nazis to isolate their victims and then deport them to their deaths.” As the most notorious example of its kind, the Beilis case surely helped the ritual-murder myth maintain its vitality. Of note is that in May 1943, the head of the SS,
Heinrich Himmler, sent several hundred copies of a book on Jewish ritual murder, which included an entire chapter on the Beilis trial,
for distribution to the
Einsatzgruppen,
the mobile death squads that killed more than a million Jews in Eastern
Europe. The tomes,
Himmler explained to a top lieutenant, were important reading “above all to the men who are busy with the Jewish question.”

In
Poland, during and after
World War II, there were signs that the Kiev case had survived in the collective memory. Residents of German-occupied Poland called the product rumored to be made from human fat in the Auschwitz concentration camp “
Beilis Soap.” (Poles therefore took care to avoid the soap cakes distributed by the German authorities.)

After the war, as the historian
Jan T. Gross has documented in horrifying detail, Poles perpetrated
pogroms that killed hundreds of the Jews who had managed to survive German extermination. In many cases, the violence was sparked by rumors of
ritual murder. The first postwar pogrom was in the city of
Rzeszow on June 12, 1945. No one was killed but a large number of Jews were beaten, Jewish property was vandalized, and two hundred Jews fled the city. According to a local newspaper account, the public was enraged by “the wildest rumors” of a ritual murder committed “by Jews who needed blood [transfusions, to fortify themselves] after returning from the camps.”

The most notorious postwar pogrom in Poland took place on July 4, 1946, in the town of Kielce, where a mob killed forty-two Jews and left some eighty wounded. A Jewish delegation attempted to secure a statement condemning anti-Semitism from the bishop of Lublin,
Stefan Wyszinski, later named a cardinal and primate of Poland. According to a report on the meeting,
Wyszinski declined to issue a special condemnation of anti-Semitism and “during the discussion of how the crowd was agitated by the myth that Christian blood is necessary to make
matzo, the bishop clarified that during the Beilis trial a lot of old and new Jewish books were assembled and the matter of blood was not definitively settled.” (It should be noted that another bishop,
Teodor Kubina of Czestochowa, together with local officials, issued an uncompromising proclamation that began: “All statements about ritual murders are lies. Nobody … has ever been harmed by Jews for ritual purposes.”)

In Russia, Jewish ritual murder reared up once more as a highly public issue—almost exactly eight decades after Mendel Beilis’s arrest in the middle of the night. The occasion was the discovery in a
forest outside Sverdlovsk (as Ekaterinburg had been renamed) of several sets of buried skeletal remains, believed to be those of Tsar Nicholas II and his family.
The excavation that commenced in mid-July 1991 was reminiscent of the botched handling of the Yuschinsky crime scene. Over the protests of a forensic archaeologist, ready with her brushes and tools, untrained investigators hurriedly grabbed at the hundreds of bones, many of which splintered or disintegrated entirely as they were stuffed into bags.

After the
Soviet Union collapsed a few months later, the new Russian government
created a commission to establish the identities of the victims and plan an appropriate interment. DNA samples were taken from the remains and compared to samples from several living relatives of the imperial couple. In September 1995, the commission’s lead investigator announced his conclusion: the remains were, beyond all doubt, those of Nicholas and Alexandra, and three of their daughters, as well four others in their retinue who had been murdered along with them. (One of the two younger daughters—either Maria or Anastasia—and the boy
Alexis were unaccounted for, fueling speculation they had escaped, though the evidence strongly suggested that the perpetrators had burned these bodies.)

After the bodies were identified, the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church shocked authorities and the public by declaring that it could not accept the accuracy of the commission’s report.
The Church asked for clarification on ten questions, two of which attracted widespread attention. The synod wanted to know: Had the tsar been decapitated after his death? And could the commission “confirm or refute the ritual character of the murder”?

The notion that the massacre of the imperial family was a
Jewish ritual crime had persisted since the early 1920s when it was propagated by anticommunist Russian propagandists and popularized in the West by the
Times
of London’s Russia correspondent,
Robert Wilton, who wrote a lurid book on the subject. In this scenario, Jews were solely responsible for killing the tsar, his wife, and their children. They had cut off the head of the tsar and sent it to the Kremlin, and they had left behind, in Wilton’s words, “mysterious inscriptions in the death chamber.” When the White forces briefly captured the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg where the Romanovs had been killed, they found scrawled on the basement walls some runic-looking marks and two garbled lines
of poetry in German by the German Jewish poet
Heinrich Heine. The quotation was from a poem about the death of
King Balthazar, the biblical figure who sees “the writing on the wall.” Belsazar—the correct rendering of Balthazar in German—was misspelled “Belsa
tzar.
” Some might see the work, at worst, of a punning executioner and some idle doodling. But in the eyes of the Far Right, all the scribblings were “kabbalistic signs” pointing to the murders’ ritual character.

The Holy Synod’s ghoulish inquiries in 1995 testified to the abiding obsession of extreme Russian nationalists with what one historian has called the “gothic version” of the murders. Critics argued that for the commission to address the ritual scenario was to dignify it. But the commission’s chairman, the noted democratic reformer Boris Nemtsov, opted to deal with it matter-of-factly. In January 1998, the commission’s chief investigator,
V. N. Solovev, informed the synod of his unequivocal conclusion, which he later summed up in a newspaper interview: “
The motives [for the murders] were of a political character and were in no way connected with secret religious cults.” Unsurprisingly, latter-day
Black Hundreds, a rising force in postcommunist Russia, would not accept this conclusion; they insisted that the investigation was “fraudulent” and designed “to conceal the ritual character of the crime.” As for the Russian Orthodox Church, it merely refused to accept the identification of the remains, calling the results inconclusive. The Church’s position did not change even after additional tests reckoned that the odds of a coincidental match with Romanov DNA were more than a billion to one.