Menahem Mendel Beilis (1874 – July 7, 1934; sometimes spelled Beiliss)The top of his gravestone says "Martyr: 1862–1934". was a Russian Jew accused of ritual murder in Kiev in a notorious 1913 trial, known as the "Beilis trial" or the "Beilis affair". Although Beilis was eventually acquitted after a lengthy process, the legal process sparked international criticism of antisemitism in the Russian Empire.
Beilis' story was fictionalized in Bernard Malamud's 1966 novel The Fixer, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Maurice Samuel's book Blood Accusation: the Strange Case of the Beilis Trial, a non-fiction account, was published by Alfred A. Knopf the same year.
Biography
Menahem Mendel Beilis was born into a Hasidic family.father's name: Tuvia In 1911, he was an ex-soldier and the father of five children. He was employed as a superintendent at the Zaitsev brick factory in Kiev.
Murder of Andriy Yushchinskyi
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 Tsar Nicholas II by the judiciary named Beilis as the murderer.also verbally: "Your Majesty, I am happy to inform you that the real culprit in Yushchinskyi's murder has been discovered. His name is Beilis, and he's a Zhid."
Beilis spent over two years in prison awaiting trial. Meanwhile, an antisemitic campaign was launched in the Russian press against the Jewish community, with accusations of ritual murder. Among those who wrote or spoke against these false accusations were Maxim Gorky, Vladimir Korolenko,Title: "Call to the Russian People in regard to the blood libel of the Jews" Alexander Blok, Alexander Kuprin, Vladimir Vernadsky, Mykhailo Hrushevskyi and Pavel Milyukov.Blood Accusation: the Strange History of the Beiliss Case, Samuel, Maurice, Alfred A. Knopf, 1966.
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 all katorzhniks (convicts at hard labor) on the tercentenary jubilee of the reign of the Romanov dynasty. As related in his memoir, Beilis refused this overture:
“That manifesto,” said I, “will be for katorzhniks, not for me. I need no manifesto, I need a fair trial.” “If you will be ordered to be released, you'll have to go.” “No – even if you open the doors of the prison, and threaten me with shooting, I shall not leave. I shall not go without a trial.”Beilis, Mendel. Blood Libel: The Life and Memory of Mendel Beilis, ed. Jay Beilis et al. (2011), p. 64.
This is one of many incidents from Beilis' memoir that Bernard Malamud incorporated in his novel The Fixer.Malamud, Bernard. The Fixer (1966), p. 294.
The trial
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 of Saint Vladimir Imperial University of Kiev (father of helicopter pioneer Igor Sikorsky), a medical psychologist, testified as an expert witness for the prosecution that in his opinion it was a case of ritual 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.
Internal police documents from 1912 subsequently revealed that the weakness of the case was known."It is a probably assumption that the boy ... was a witness to ... evidence gathered against Beiliss will entirely fall to the ground."
Prosecution expert One prosecution witness, presented as an expert in Judaic rituals, was a Lithuanian Catholic priest, Justinas Pranaitis from Tashkent, well known for his antisemitic 1892 work Talmud Unmasked. Pranaitis testified that the murder of Yushchinskyi was a religious ritual. One police department official is quoted as saying:
The course of the trial will depend on how the ignorant jury will perceive arguments of priest Pranaitis, who is sure about the reality of ritual murders. I think, as a priest he is able to talk with peasants and to convince them. As a scientist, who defended a thesis about this question, he will give props to the court and prosecution, though nothing can be guessed in advance yet. I became acquainted with Pranaitis and am firmly convinced that he is the person who knows the problem, about which he will talk, in depth... Everything, then, will depend on which arguments priest Pranaitis will furnish, and he has them, and they're shattering for the Jewry.
Pranaitis' credibility rapidly dissipated when the defense demonstrated his ignorance of basic Talmudic concepts and definitions, such as hullin, 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."Scapegoat on Trial: The Story of Mendel Beilis – The Autobiography of Mendel Beilis the Defendant in the Notorious 1912 Blood Libel in Kiev, Beilis, Mendel, Introd. & Ed. By Shari Schwartz, CIS, New York, 1992, A Tsarist secret police agent is quoted, reporting on Pranaitis' testimony, as saying:
Cross-examination of Pranaitis has weakened evidentiary value of his expert opinion, exposing lack of knowledge of texts, insufficient knowledge of Jewish literature. Because of amateurish knowledge and lack of resourcefulness, Pranaitis' expert opinion is of very low value. Professors Troitskij and Kokovtsev, who were interrogated today, gave conclusions which are exceptionally positive for the defence, praising doctrines of the Jewish religion, and not accepting even a possibility of a religious murder by Jews ... Vipper thinks that acquittal is possible.
Defense A Beilis Defense Committee advisor, a writer named Ben-Zion Katz, suggested countering Father Pranaitis with questions like "When did Baba Bathra live and what was her activity" which he described as the equivalent of asking an American "Who lived at the Gettysburg 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 Russian Baba means grandmother whereas Baba in Aramaic, the language used in the Talmud means gate, thus exposing Pranaitis' lack of direct understanding of the contents of the Talmud. 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). His credibility rapidly evaporated 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 [Beilis'] lawyer."
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, while Aleksandr Glagolev, philosopher and professor of the Kiev Theological Academy of the Orthodox Christian, affirmed that "the Law of Moses forbids spilling human blood and using any blood in general in food." The well-known and respected Rabbi of Moscow, Rabbi Yaakov Mazeh, delivered a long, detailed speech quoting passages from the Torah, the Talmud and many other books to conclusively debunk the testimony of the "experts" brought forth by the prosecution.A translation of an extract of his statement is at
Case summary The lamplighter on whose testimony the indictment of Beilis rested confessed that he had been confused by the secret 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 number thirteen in "Jewish ritual," only to have it revealed later that there were actually 14 wounds on that part of the body.
The chief prosecutor A.I. Vipper made supposedly antisemitic statements in his closing address. There are conflicting accounts of the twelve Christian jurors: seven were members of the notorious Union of the Russian People, part of the movement known as the Black Hundreds. There was no representative of the intelligentsia in the jury, and most of them were reported to be Ukrainian peasants. However, after deliberating for several hours, the jury acquitted Beilis.
After the trial
The Beilis trial was followed worldwide and the antisemitic policies of the Russian Empire were severely criticized. The Arabic newspaper Filastin published in Jaffa, Palestine, dealt with this trial in several articles. Its editor, Yousef El-Issa, published an editorial titled: "The Disgrace of the Twentieth Century". He wrote on 13 October 1913:
The Beilis case was compared with the Leo Frank case, in which an American Jew, manager of a pencil factory in Atlanta, Georgia, was convicted of raping and murdering 13-year-old Mary Phagan. 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, or Mendel Beilis at David Kessler's Second Avenue Theater.”Berkowitz, Joel, “The ‘Mendel Beilis’ Epidemic on the Yiddish Stage,” Jewish Social Studies 8, no. 1 (Fall, 2001), p. 199 The violinist Jacob Gegna also composed a piece in his honor, , which he recorded in 1921.
Due to his great fame, Beilis could have become wealthy through commercial appearances. Spurning all such offers,“Mendel Beilis Coming,” The New York Times, January 25, 1921 he and his family left Russia for a farm purchased by Baron Rothschild“Mendel Beilis Goes To Palestine,” Omaha Daily Bee, January 16, 1914 in Palestine, then a province of the Ottoman Empire. He arrived in early 1914 with celebrity status, welcomed warmly by Jews and Palestinian Arabs alike. He would even be allowed to visit al Aqsa mosque.
Beilis had difficulty making ends meet, however, 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!”Beilis, Mendel. Blood Libel: The Life and Memory of Mendel Beilis, ed. Jay Beilis et al. (2011), p. 200.