A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (7 page)

If Pavlovich represented the Black Hundreds’
criminal element, Golubev, the son of a professor at a Kiev religious academy, characterized its more reputable contingent. Fanatically sincere in his anti-Semitic beliefs, he was, in his way, a man of principle. One historian has called him a kind of “
Black Hundred idealist.” Once, when he learned that a railroad was owned largely by Jews, he refused to buy a ticket and demonstratively walked several dozen miles along the tracks. After Andrei’s body was found, Golubev became obsessed with the case and launched an independent investigation. He was certain that a Jew had committed the crime, and he would not rest until he found a Jew whom the authorities would agree to charge. He even slept overnight once in the cave, which had served as such a fine natural morgue for Andrei; his enemies said he did it on a bet, but perhaps he was hoping for some paranormal insight into the crime.

His efforts would be rewarded. “Student Golubev,” as he was invariably called, was the freshest incarnation of an eight-hundred-year-old archetype: the dogged Christian detective who perceives in an unsolved murder a monstrous Jewish plot.

Golubev was taking on the role originated in the twelfth century by the Welsh monk
Thomas of Monmouth. Around the year 1149, Thomas
took it upon himself to investigate the unsolved murder of
William of Norwich, a twelve-year-old apprentice skinner who had been found dead five years earlier, on the day before Easter in 1144. It was Thomas who laid the foundation for the medieval and modern myth of Jewish ritual murder. The origin of the myth can, rather astoundingly, be pinpointed to a specific time and place and an individual instigating mind. The foundational moment came in 1150, when Thomas published the first portion of his
The Life and Miracles of Saint William the Martyr of Norwich
. Thomas, as historian
Gavin Langmuir has written, “
did not alter the course of battles, politics or the economy. He solved no philosophical or theological problems.” Yet he created a myth that burrowed deeply into the Western mind “and caused, directly or indirectly, far more deaths than William’s murderer could ever have dreamt of committing.”

According to Thomas’s account, the week before Easter in 1144, a man claiming to be the archdeacon’s cook came to young William’s mother asking permission for the boy to work in his kitchen. Taking some money from the supposed cook, the mother allowed her son to be led away. Five days later the boy’s body was found in the woods outside the city. The boy’s uncle, who was a priest, rose before the local church synod to accuse the city’s Jews of the crime, but this charge met with skepticism from local notables, including the bishop of Norwich, the church prior, and the sheriff. Still, the people of Norwich grew angry at the city’s Jews, and the sheriff gathered them in the castle to assure their safety. The danger passed. No Jews, nor anyone else, were charged. Poor William, said like Andrei to be a “neglected” and “poor ragged little fellow” when alive, lay increasingly forgotten in his churchyard grave.

When Thomas arrived in Norwich he became obsessed with solving the mystery of William’s murder, and he determined to prove that the boy was a martyr whose spirit could perform miracles. Like Golubev, his twentieth-century Russian avatar, Thomas was motivated by a dangerous mixture of true belief and personal ambition. As the propagator of the cult of a new martyr, and the caretaker of the boy’s sacred relics (for Thomas parlayed his advocacy into a position as sacristan of William’s shrine), he would acquire dramatically enhanced prestige.

In
The Life and Miracles of Saint William,
Thomas introduced the novel idea of ritual murder as a Jewish Passover rite. He also
pioneered the sophistry, the twisting of evidence, and the calculated obtuseness that would mark all subsequent accusations of Jewish
ritual murder. Thomas set an example for the ages by producing eyewitnesses who, long after the crime, came forward with vivid stories implicating the Jews (“… 
a certain poor maid-servant … through the chink in the door … managed to see the boy …”); in his caustic railing against the skeptics who refused to accept the victim as a true martyr (their “saucy cavils” irked him); and by accusing the Jews of bribing the authorities (“giving a hundred marks to the sheriff they were rid of their fear”).

But the most notorious and fraught motif he introduced, after the accusation of ritual murder itself, is the character of the apostate Jew who publicly reveals his people’s clandestine and insidious rite, one that is justified by their scripture. Thomas hears “from the lips” of a converted Jew, a monk named
Theobald, how the Jews of Spain gather every year in the French city of
Narbonne (which was, in fact, an important center of Jewish learning and leadership) to plot the annual sacrifice demanded by their ancient texts.

Theobald disclosed to Thomas that the Jews believe that without the shedding of Christian blood they cannot obtain their freedom or ever even have hope of returning to the land of their fathers from which they had been exiled. Therefore they have to sacrifice a Christian somewhere in the world “in scorn and contempt of Christ.” The Jewish elders assembled in Narbonne cast lots for all the countries of the world where Jews lived, and in 1144, the lot fell on Norwich. All the synagogues in England then gave their consent that the deed be carried out there. According to Thomas, the truth of Theobald’s words—“uttered by one who was a converted enemy, and had been privy to the secrets of our enemies”—were beyond doubt. Thomas did not succeed in having any Jews charged with the crime. But he did elevate William into a martyr murdered by the Jews. The ritual-murder myth spread throughout England and worked its way into the heart of the culture, as evidenced by “The Prioress’s Tale,”
Geoffrey
Chaucer’s story of the martyrdom of a pious seven-year-old child “of Christian blood”:

The notion that the Jews actually required human blood for their
rituals arose when the myth spread to the Continent. The blood accusation, in its full form, emerged in the German town of
Fulda in 1235. On Christmas day of that year, while a miller and his wife were at church, their mill burned down with their five sons inside. The Jews of Fulda were accused of slaughtering the children before the blaze was set and draining off their blood into waxed bags, to utilize it in some sort of ritual or medicine. On December 28, 1235, thirty-four Jews in Fulda were killed—by the town’s outraged citizens, according to one account, or by crusaders, in another version of the incident—and became the first known victims of the blood accusation. The authors of the calumny that Jews need human blood for ritual purposes remain unknown. But it is likely the blood accusation sprang from the creative imaginations of some Fulda inhabitants or passing crusaders in 1235, who were inspired to embroider the original slander of Thomas of Monmouth.

The governing powers of Europe quickly understood the danger that the emergent myth presented to the state. Frederick II, the Holy Roman emperor, sought to stamp out the inflammatory accusation and the public’s wrath against the Jews; like Thomas of Monmouth, he turned for help to Jewish apostates, but with the opposite purpose. In 1236, just months after the Fulda massacre, he convened an assembly of Jewish converts to Christianity from across Europe. They found that none of the Jews’ sacred texts indicated they were “greedy for human blood.” Accepting their judgment, Frederick declared the Jews of Fulda to be exonerated and forbade anyone from ever again making such a charge. His imperial edict was followed in 1247 by a
papal bull from Innocent IV, declaring the blood accusation to be false. But once the potent fiction had lodged in people’s minds, not even the Vicar of Christ, in all his purported infallibility, had the power to stop its spread.

Golubev did not know of his debt to Thomas of Monmouth (who was by then an obscure figure even to scholars, not having earned the renown he surely craved). But Golubev was likely acquainted with the works of anti-Semitic pseudo-scholarship then circulating in Russia, and so would have been familiar with the five slaughtered brothers of Fulda;
Andreas of Rinn, supposedly killed by the Jews on the “Judenstein” or Jew-Stone in 1462; and
Simon of Trent, a murdered boy whose case codified the blood accusation’s essentials in 1475, establishing the
motif of Christian blood being used to bake Passover
matzo. Golubev also undoubtedly knew of the most notorious cases of the past three decades, nearly all of which originated to the west of Russia.

The blood accusation in the case of Andrei
Yushchinsky would soon cause the tsarist regime to be condemned in the West for its shocking retrogression to a medieval mentality of prejudice and vengeance. Yet nearly forgotten amid the outrage was that some of the most “civilized” parts of Europe had recently witnessed the largest outbreak of ritual murder charges in three centuries. According to the
most reliable count, for the decade from 1891 to 1900, there were seventy-nine significant ritual murder cases in Europe where specific allegations were made to the authorities or at least gained wide popular currency. Only five cases took place in the Russian Empire. The majority were in
Austria-Hungary (thirty-six) and Germany (fifteen). Men like Golubev knew the most notorious of them like a catechism. A handful had come to trial.
Kutaisi (Georgia, part of the Russian Empire) 1879: nine Jews, tried in the murder of a six-year-old girl. Tisza-Eszlar (Hungary) 1882: a Jewish synagogue sexton, tried in the murder of a fourteen-year-old servant girl. Xanten (
Prussia) 1891: a Jewish butcher, accused of killing a five-year-old-boy, whose throat had been slit ear-to-ear. Polna (Bohemia) 1899: a twenty-two-year-old cobbler’s apprentice, tried in the murder of a nineteen-year-old seamstress.
Konitz (Prussia) 1900: a Jewish butcher and an animal skinner, accused in the killing and dismembering of an eighteen-year-old gymnasium student.

As Golubev combed the area around the cave for clues and canvassed the Lukianovka neighborhood for witnesses, he must have been conscious of his potential place in history. With the ambiguous exception of Polna (where the defendant was convicted, but the state officially rejected the ritual motive), in every recent case the Jewish suspects had, frustratingly, been exonerated. Moreover, these cases had been treated primarily as local matters. In modern times, no ritual murder case had had the unmitigated support of a European central government. Golubev sought to change the legacy of the modern blood accusation: he would enlist the highest authorities in the empire behind his cause, including, he hoped, the sovereign himself.

Within months, Golubev’s amateur sleuthing would have a decisive impact on the official investigation. At this point, however, the authorities were pressuring the young hothead to refrain from inciting
violence. Careful not to offend him or his comrades, they cajoled him into promising, on his honor, that he would do nothing to instigate attacks on the Jews, at least through the end of the summer. The deputy head of the Kiev
Okhrana, or secret police, reported in mid-April that “everything has turned out all right.
Golubev has quieted down. They have decided to postpone their action until the Sovereign’s departure from Kiev [that is, after the tsar’s planned visit in August]…(B)eating the Yids … they’ve postponed until fall.”

But even though Golubev had been “quieted down,” the
threat of a pogrom still felt real, both to Kiev’s Jews and to the government. The pages of the right-wing press were filled with venomous screeds declaring that the four dozen wounds on the “boy martyr” were clearly the work of Jews who were part of a powerful cabal that had duped inept investigators or, more likely, bought them off.

The government and the extreme right both contended for control over the case.
On April 18, the minister of justice,
Ivan Shcheglovitov, asked Prime Minister Stolypin to pay it special attention; he also met with the tsar, possibly briefing him on it for the first time. On the same day, the justice minister also sent a telegram to Kiev, removing the case from the purview of the local police and prosecutor and putting it under the personal supervision of
Grigory Chaplinsky, prosecutor of the Kiev Judicial Chamber (a post somewhat analogous to that of a U.S. state attorney general). The justice minister instructed Chaplinsky to deliver regular, detailed reports; the local murder case would now be followed in its minutest details at the highest levels of the government.

Also on April 18, the extreme right proceeded with a plan to shame and threaten the government in the most public forum: the State Duma. The right-wing deputies met secretly to discuss passing a resolution that would demand the government explain why it was not treating Andrei’s killing as a
ritual murder.

On the afternoon of Saturday, April 23, came the first serious acts of anti-Jewish violence connected with the Yushchinsky murder.
Black Hundred thugs began attacking Jews on the street at random in the largely Jewish suburb of Nikolskaya Slobodka on the left bank of the Dnieper, where Andrei had lived. “The entire Sabbath day … the ‘Unionists’ [members of the
Union of Russian People] took a ‘stroll’…pulling ‘pranks’ on all the Jews that they encountered,” reported the Kiev correspondent of the Yiddish newspaper
Haynt
. “These ‘jokes’
often ended sadly, many Jews ending up bandaged … Many Jews … hide in their attics or even escape over the Dnieper to Kiev.” But the city of Kiev itself soon felt unsafe. “Various dark rumors have begun to spread,”
Haynt
reported, “one worse than the other” about impending revenge being taken on the Jews for Andrei’s murder. Kiev’s Jews—at least “those who take an interest in other things besides sugar and the stock exchange,” sniped the reporter—were seized by fear of a full-fledged pogrom.

The jibe was directed at the Jewish denizens of the city’s famous stock exchange, who remained preoccupied with their furious buying and selling of sugar-backed notes and securities (Kiev, despite much poverty, was something of a beet boomtown) before heading off to relax at the card tables, the one place where
Jews and Gentiles could mix easily. But even the stock traders must have paused to take notice when, on April 29, the far-right faction introduced its resolution on the Duma floor charging the Kiev administration with obstructing the Yushchinsky investigation. The authorities were wasting time going down false paths, persecuting the poor boy’s mother, the resolution declared, “instead of addressing the question of the fanatical Jewish sect whose members committed the murder.” By Black Hundred standards, the tone of the document was measured.
N. E.
Markov, the Black Hundred leader who commissioned the “
Ritual Murder” article, mounted the Duma rostrum to make his group’s demands, and threats, entirely clear. Markov was in every sense an outsize figure. Enormously tall, with dark, curly hair, he was said to bear a resemblance to the six-foot-eight-inch tsar Peter the Great, earning him the nickname “the
Bronze Horseman,” after the statue of Peter in
St. Petersburg immortalized in Alexander Pushkin’s poem. Even compared with his fellow rightists, his
views were extreme: he was among a minority that seriously raised the question of expelling all of Russia’s Jews.