Menahem Mendel Beilis | |
|---|---|
מנחם מענדל בייליס | |
 Portrait of Beilis after his arrest in 1911 | |
| Born | 1874 (1874) Kiev, Russian Empire |
| Died | July 7, 1934(1934-07-07) (aged 59–60) |
| Resting place | Mount Carmel Cemetery,Glendale, New York |
| Criminal charge | Ritual murder |
Menahem Mendel Beilis[a] (1874 – July 7, 1934; sometimes spelledBeiliss)[1] was aRussian Jew accused ofritual murder inKiev in a notorious 1913 trial, known as the "Beilis trial" or the "Beilis affair".[2] Although Beilis was eventually acquitted after a lengthy process, the legal process sparked international criticism ofantisemitism in the Russian Empire.
Beilis's story was fictionalized inBernard Malamud's 1966 novelThe Fixer, which won thePulitzer Prize for Fiction and the U.S.National Book Award for Fiction.Maurice Samuel's bookBlood Accusation: the Strange Case of the Beilis Trial, a non-fiction account, was published byAlfred A. Knopf the same year.[3]: 6–7
Menahem Mendel Beilis was born into aHasidic family.[4][5] In 1911, he was an ex-soldier and the father of five children. He was employed as a superintendent at the Zaitsev brick factory inKiev.
On March 12, 1911, a 13-year-old boy named Andriy Yushchinskyi disappeared on his way to school. Eight days later, his mutilated body was discovered in a cave near the Zaitsev brick factory. Beilis was arrested on July 21, 1911, after a lamplighter testified that the boy had been kidnapped by a Jew. A report submitted to TsarNicholas II by the judiciary named Beilis as the murderer.[4][6]
Beilis spent over two years in prison awaiting trial.[7] Meanwhile, an antisemitic campaign was launched in the Russian press against the Jewish community, with accusations of ritual murder.[4]: Intro, citing newspapers, 1911 Among those who wrote or spoke against these false accusations wereMaxim Gorky,Vladimir Korolenko,[8]Alexander Blok,Alexander Kuprin,Vladimir Vernadsky,Mykhailo Hrushevskyi andPavel Milyukov.[9]: p.5 : p.118
Beilis had been in prison for over a year when a delegation led by a military officer came to his cell. In what might have been a ploy to get Beilis to incriminate himself or other Jews, the officer informed Beilis that he would soon be freed due to a manifesto pardoning allkatorzhniks (convicts at hard labor) on the tercentenary jubilee of the reign of theRomanov dynasty. As related in his memoir, Beilis refused this overture:
This is one of many incidents from Beilis's memoir thatBernard Malamud incorporated in his novelThe Fixer.[11]
The Beilis trial took place in Kiev from September 25 through October 28, 1913. The prosecution was composed of the government's best lawyers. Professor Ivan A. Sikorsky ofKiev State University (father of helicopter pioneerIgor Sikorsky), a medicalpsychologist, testified as anexpert witness for the prosecution that in his opinion it was a case ofritual murder.
Beilis had a strong alibi due to the fact that he worked on the Jewish Sabbath. Yushchinskyi was abducted on a Saturday morning, when Beilis was at work, as confirmed by his Gentile co-workers. Receipt slips for a shipment of bricks signed by Beilis that morning were produced as evidence. The prosecution argued that Beilis could have gone out for a few minutes, kidnapped Yushchinskyi, and then returned to work.[9]
Internal police documents from 1912 subsequently revealed that the weakness of the case was known.[9]: pp.90–91 [12]
One prosecution witness, presented as an expert in Judaic rituals, was a LithuanianCatholic priest,Justinas Pranaitis fromTashkent, well known for hisantisemitic 1892 workTalmud Unmasked. Pranaitis testified that the murder of Yushchinskyi was a religious ritual. One police department official is quoted as saying:
Pranaitis' credibility rapidly dissipated when the defense demonstrated his ignorance of basic Talmudic concepts and definitions, such ashullin,[9]: p.215 to the point where "many in the audience occasionally laughed out loud when he clearly became confused and couldn't even intelligibly answer some of the questions asked by my lawyer."[4] A Tsaristsecret police agent is quoted, reporting on Pranaitis' testimony, as saying:
A Beilis Defense Committee advisor, a writer named Ben-Zion Katz, suggested countering Father Pranaitis with questions like "When didBaba Bathra live and what was her activity" which he described as the equivalent of asking an American "Who lived at theGettysburg Address?", a ploy that invites a purported expert witness unfamiliar with the subject matter to wrongly assume a word is used in one sense where it is in fact used in another, demonstrating the ignorance of the witness for the audience. In RussianBaba meansgrandmother whereas Baba in Aramaic, the language used in theTalmud meansgate, thus exposing Pranaitis's lack of direct understanding of the contents of the Talmud.[3]: 134 In the Gettysburg example, an informed person will immediately recognise the term 'Gettysburg Address' refers to a speech (address) and not to a location (address). There were enough Jews in the court for the resultant laughter to negate Pranaitis' value to the prosecution.[9]: pp.214–216
Beilis was represented by the most able attorneys of the Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kiev bars:Vasily Maklakov,Oscar Gruzenberg, N. Karabchevsky,A. Zarudny, and D. Grigorovitch-Barsky. Two prominent Russian professors, Troitsky and Kokovtzov, spoke on behalf of the defense in praise of Jewish values and exposed the falsehood of the accusations, whileAleksandr Glagolev, philosopher and professor of theKiev Theological Academy of theOrthodox Christian, affirmed that "theLaw ofMoses forbids spilling human blood and using any blood in generalin food." The well-known and respected Rabbi ofMoscow, RabbiYaakov Mazeh, delivered a long, detailed speech quoting passages from theTorah, the Talmud and many other books to conclusively debunk the testimony of the "experts" brought forth by the prosecution.[4][14]
The lamplighter on whose testimony the indictment of Beilis rested confessed that he had been confused by thesecret police.
The prosecution's case was further undermined after it had spent a great deal of effort to link the 13 wounds which Professor Sikorsky had discovered on a part of the murdered boy's body with the importance of the numberthirteen in "Jewish ritual," only to have it revealed later that there were actually 14 wounds on that part of the body.[4]
The chief prosecutor A.I. Vipper made supposedly antisemitic statements in his closing address. There are conflicting accounts of the twelve Christianjurors: seven were members of the notoriousUnion of the Russian People, part of the movement known as theBlack Hundreds. There was no representative of theintelligentsia in the jury.[15] However, after deliberating for several hours, the jury acquitted Beilis.
The Beilis trial was followed worldwide and the antisemitic policies of the Russian Empire were severely criticized. The Arabic newspaperFilastin published in Jaffa,Palestine, dealt with this trial in several articles.[16] Its editor,Yousef El-Issa, published an editorial titled: "The Disgrace of the Twentieth Century". He wrote on 13 October 1913:[16]
We said in the previous issue and repeat that their accusing the Jews of shedding blood to perform religious ritual is a fabrication with regard to those who believe it; an abomination with regard to those who spread it; and a disgrace to the twentieth century, during which, if minds are not liberated from the shackles of ignorance, God will never liberate them.
The Beilis case was compared with theLeo Frank case, in which an American Jew, manager of a pencil factory inAtlanta, Georgia, was convicted of raping and murdering 13-year-old Mary Phagan.[17] Leo Frank was lynched after his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
After his acquittal, Beilis became a celebrity. One indication of the extent of his fame is the following quote: "Anyone wanting to see the major stars of New York's Yiddish stage on Thanksgiving weekend in 1913 had three choices:Mendel Beilis at Jacob Adler's Dewey Theater,Mendel Beilis at Boris Thomashefsky's National Theater, orMendel Beilis at David Kessler's Second Avenue Theater.”[18] The violinistJacob Gegna also composed a piece in his honor,A tfile fun Mendel Beilis, which he recorded in 1921.[19]
Due to his great fame, Beilis could have become wealthy through commercial appearances. Spurning all such offers,[7][20] he and his family left Russia for a farm purchased by Baron Rothschild[21] inPalestine, then a province of theOttoman Empire.
Beilis had difficulty making ends meet but he resisted leaving. When friends and well-wishers pleaded with him to go to America, he would respond: “Before, in Russia, when the word ‘Palestine’ conjured up a waste and barren land, even then I chose to come here in preference to other countries. How much more, then, would I insist on staying here, after I have come to love the land!”[22]
During theRussian Civil War, the Beilis trial was reopened by theBolsheviks. The former Minister of JusticeIvan Shcheglovitov, who had the case investigated as a ritual murder, was shot after a short trial in September 1918. Vera Cheberyak, the presumed actual killer, was shot in March/April 1919, as was one of her alleged accomplices, Pyotr Singaevsky. After his identity was discovered, former prosecutor A.I. Vipper, who had been working for the Bolsheviks, was arrested and sent to agulag. He died in prison.
When Beilis's financial situation became desperate, he finally gave in. In 1921 he settled in theUnited States[23][9]: p.254 where in 1925 he self-published[4][24] an account of his experiences titledThe Story of My Sufferings.[25] Originally published in Yiddish (1925 and 1931 editions), the book was later translated into English (1926, 1992, and 2011 editions), and also Russian.
Beilis died unexpectedly at a hotel inSaratoga Springs, New York[26] on July 7, 1934[27] and was buried two days later at theMount Carmel Cemetery,Glendale, Queens, which is the burial place ofLeo Frank andSholem Aleichem.[28] Though Beilis's fame had faded since the trial in 1913, it returned briefly at his death. His funeral was attended by over 4,000 people. TheNew York Times noted that Beilis's fellow Jews “always believed that his conduct [in resisting all pressure to implicate himself or other Jews] saved his countrymen from a pogrom.”[29] A history of theEldridge Street Synagogue, where Beilis's funeral was held, describes the scene at his funeral as follows: “The crowd could not be contained in the sanctuary. As many as a dozen policemen failed to establish order in the streets.”[30]
Around six months before his death, Beilis was interviewed by the English-languageJewish Daily Bulletin. Asked for “one outstanding impression” of the trial in Kiev, he paid a final tribute to the Russian Gentiles who had helped him to escape the blood libel, such as the detectiveMykola Krasovsky (Nikolai Krasovsky) and the journalist Brazul-Brushkovsky: “There was real heroism, real sacrifice. They knew that by defending me their careers would be ruined, even their very lives would not be safe. But they persisted because they knew I was innocent.”[31]
While Bernard Malamud's novelThe Fixer is based on the life of Mendel Beilis, Malamud transformed Beilis’ character, and that of his wife, in ways that Beilis's descendants found degrading. The real Mendel Beilis was “a dignified, respectful, well-liked, fairly religious family man with a faithful wife, Esther, and five children.” Malamud's protagonist Yakov Bok is “an angry, foul-mouthed, cuckolded, friendless, childless blasphemer.”[32]
WhenThe Fixer was first published, Beilis’ son David Beilis wrote to Malamud, complaining both that Malamud had plagiarized from Beilis’ memoirs and that Malamud had debased the memories of Beilis and his wife through the characters of Yakov Bok and Bok's wife Raisl. Malamud wrote back, attempting to reassure David Beilis thatThe Fixer “makes no attempt to portray Mendel Beilis or his wife. Yakov and Raisl Bok, I am sure you will agree, in no way resemble your parents.”
The historian Albert Lindemann lamented: “By the late twentieth century, memory of the Beilis case came to be inextricably fused (and confused) with...The Fixer.”[33]
Special Cable to THE NEW YORK TIMES .NOV. 2, 1913"
