The Beilis affair
A brickworks clerk sat two years under a blood libel. The jury answered two questions at once: the killing was as the prosecution described it—and Beilis is not guilty. Both sides declared victory.
On 20 March 1911 the body of twelve-year-old Andrei Yushchinsky was found in a cave at Lukianivka in Kiev. The investigation led towards a gang that dealt in stolen goods, but the Black Hundred press called the killing ritual, and the inquiry was turned. On 22 July Menachem Mendel Beilis was arrested, a clerk at Zaitsev's brick factory in Podil—a man with no connection to the case beyond the factory being Jewish and standing nearby.
He sat under investigation for more than two years. The trial ran in Kiev from 25 September to 28 October 1913 and was in the full sense not a trial of Beilis: the prosecution set out to prove not his guilt but the existence among Jews of a custom of taking blood. Against this testified Jewish scholars and Russian ones alike—among them professors of Hebrew and physicians who went through the wounds by the autopsy record.
The verdict was double, and this must be said plainly. The jury was put two questions. To the first—was the killing done as the prosecution described, with the draining of blood at the factory—they answered yes. To the second, was Beilis guilty—no. Beilis was freed in the courtroom; the Black Hundred press read the first answer as the court's confirmation of the libel and repeated it for decades. Both readings are still current, and we name both.
Beilis left with his family for the Land of Israel, moved to America in 1920 and died there in 1934.
Sources
Documents of the period
- The stenographic record of the Beilis trial, Kiev 1913 — the course of the trial and the jury's double answer
Scholarship
- The standard reference works and encyclopedias — the dates of the inquiry and trial, and Beilis's life after the acquittal
Basis: documents and evidence.
People and places
Kiddush ha-Shem · The Anusim · Ze'ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky · Odessa