Celia Gurevitch Jewish Community Library

Some of you might have read Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer. (If you did not, I recommend it; we have a copy. This was the first book that won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.) In short it is a story of a man in prison between 1904 and 1907, who is falsely accused and convicted in Tsarist Russia fueled by anti-Semitism. To a large extent it is the fictionalized version of a true story of Mendel Beilis. Ezekiel Leikin’s “The Beilis Transcripts: The Anti-Semitic trial that shook the world” contains both (the English translations of) the actual transcripts of the case and provides historical analysis to gain a better understanding of the context.

Instead of trying to describe the content of the book with my own words, let me quote it:

On March 20, 1911, the mutilated body of a twelve-year-old boy was discovered in a cave near Kiev, Russia. In reaction, a vicious anti-Jewish campaign was launched in the Russian press against the Jewish community, accusing the Jews of using human blood for ritual purposes. Although a police investigation pointed to a gang of thieves, pressure from anti-Semitic organizations led to the arrest of a Jewish scapegoat, Mendel Beilis, the superintendent of a local factory.

The Beilis case attracted worldwide attention, inspiring protests and public outcries by political leaders, artists, clergymen, scientists, and many others throughout Europe and the United States. Beilis was imprisoned for more than two years. After deliberating for several hours, a jury composed of simple Russian peasants found him not guilty.

The Beilis trial had been engineered by high officials in the czarist hierarchy and reflects the maladies and misadventures of Imperial Russia before its collapse in the 1917 Revolution. Beilis was-in a very real sense-a scapegoat of extreme forces, including the rabidly anti-Semitic ‘Black Hundred’ which held sway over Russian body politic under the last czar, Nicholas II.

It was only in the aftermath of the Revolution in 1917 that the archives of Imperial Russia were opened to public scrutiny. These declassified documents revealed the full scope of the conspiracy and how leading ministers of state were involved in staging the trial in a way that would malign Judaism and the Jewish people.