A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel

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In the spring of 1911, a young boy was found stabbed to death in a cave on the desolate outskirts of the city of Kiev, then part of the Russian Empire, his body riddled with some fifty puncture wounds. Four months later, a troop of police and gendarmes raided the home of a Jewish brick factory clerk named Mendel Beilis and dragged him off to prison in the middle of the night. Beilis’s trial for the murder of thirteen-year-old Andrei Yushchinsky, which took place in the fall of 1913, was the most sensational court case of its time and surely one of the most bizarre ever tried in an ostensibly civilized society. The case was front-page news around the world. The reason for the intense international attention: the Russian state had charged Beilis not simply with the boy’s murder but with the ritual Jewish killing of this Christian child.

Beilis was an improbable candidate on whom to pin a crime supposedly associated with his “race.” As a Jew, he was barely observant and of modest religious learning. But soon after the discovery of the body, the Russian anti-Semites known as the Black Hundreds were leveling the centuries-old slander known as the blood libel or blood accusation. A leaflet passed out at the boy’s funeral proclaimed, “The Yids have tortured Andrusha Yushchinsky to death!” If a Jew was to be accused, Beilis turned out to be, for reasons that will become clear, the most convenient choice. Only slowly comprehending the tremendous significance of his case, Beilis found himself at the center of an anti-Semitic maelstrom.

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