A Child of Christian Blood

11

“Gentlemen of the Jury!”

The morning of the Beilis trial’s nineteenth day was marked by a notable change in mood as the power of rumor descended on the court for the first time. Certainly, the occasional rumor had been known to circulate—for example, that the jury was leaning eight to four to convict. But rumor as a force rippling through the crowd had, strangely, never arisen until now.

The trial was ripe for a wave of unconfirmed items of intelligence. The spectators, Vladimir Nabokov noted in his daily column, were awaiting “some kind of sensation.” While the trial was generally sensational, this day promised a thrill: a spy story, with double agents, backstabbing, provocateurs, and a witness’s finger pointed dramatically at a helpless figure in the courtroom. The eighteenth day had severely damaged the prosecution, but the whispering suggested all was not what it seemed and the defense would now be undone.

Lieutenant Colonel Pavel Ivanov, who had headed the Gendarmes’ investigation into the Andrei Yushchinsky case, was due to testify in the morning session. Would he really expose the revolutionary Sergei Makhalin as a renegade police informer in open court? If he did, he would discredit this important defense witness who had claimed to have tricked one of Andrei’s real killers into confessing.

Nabokov, a former Duma member, noted jurist, and founding member of the liberal Kadet Party, was not naive concerning government intrigues. He had once been imprisoned for three months for antigovernment activity. But the idea that one government faction was battling another to pull off some coup de théâtre seemed to him “fantastic” and “improbable.” Nabokov was wrong. Civil prosecutor and Duma member Georgy Zamyslovsky had threatened to embarrass the secret police and the whole Interior Ministry if it did not agree to expose in court Makhalin’s past as the informer code-named “Vasilevsky” and “Deputy.” The record suggests that state prosecutor Oskar Vipper approved of his colleague’s stance.

Before Ivanov could take the stand and confirm the rumor or not, the court had to hear yet another witness testify about the defendant’s cow. Ekaterina Maslash, a fruit seller, was grilled harshly by the prosecution, but she firmly avowed that Beilis had no cow in the spring of 1911. After another uninformative witness testified, Vera Cheberyak, her head humbly clad in a scarf instead of a hat, returned for an eye-to-eye confrontation with a journalist named Yablonovsky, who she was now contending had actually offered her the forty-thousand-ruble bribe. He said he was not even at that notorious Kharkov meeting; she did not exactly recognize him but was sure he was the right man “by the way he folded his hands.”

Finally, the judge called Lieutenant Colonel Ivanov.

Three days earlier, under pressure from civil prosecutor Zamyslovsky, the highest authorities had given Ivanov permission to unmask his former operative, Sergei Makhalin. Both the national chief of police, Stepan Beletsky, and interior minister Nikolai Makakov had signed off on the decision. But the secret police, uneasy about exposing their sources and methods to public view, kept urging Zamyslovsky to withdraw his ultimatum. To betray an agent publicly would harm their ability to recruit others, they argued. They made a tempting counterproposal: instead of exposing only one witness, Ivanov would testify that all of them—Makhalin, Karaev, Brazul, and Krasovsky—were in the pay of the Jews. Ivanov would assert he had proof that Jewish money funded the so-called private investigation implicating Vera Cheberyak and her gang. The day before Ivanov was to testify, Zamyslovsky dropped his demand to expose Makhalin as an informer. It was far better for Ivanov to declare him and all his comrades to be tools of the Jewish conspiracy.

Like Nabokov, the defense dismissed the rumors that Ivanov was in league with the prosecution and fully expected him to be a helpful witness. They knew that Ivanov believed Beilis to be innocent. One of the more intriguing figures in the entire affair, Ivanov was a man whose instincts had been to do what was right. He had recommended that the police arrest Vera Cheberyak and her gang for Andrei’s murder. He had planted the informer Ivan Kozachenko in Beilis’s cell but then drove the man to confess on his knees that he lied about Beilis’s offer to pay him to poison witnesses. When the prosecution included Kozachenko’s falsehood in the indictment, Ivanov confided the truth to the venerable conservative editor and publisher of the Kievan, Dimitry Pikhno, an opponent of the blood accusation. The defense knew about this conversation and now counted on Ivanov to tell the truth.

On the witness stand, however, Ivanov denied even meeting with Pikhno. The editor had since died and could not contradict the witness. In response to a series of simple questions about whom he had spoken to and what he had told them, Ivanov repeatedly pleaded amnesia. “I don’t remember this,” he said. “I cannot remember a conversation that happened two or three years ago.” “I don’t remember.”

Ivanov’s evasions likely went unnoted by the jurors while his accusation that Jewish money had funded the independent investigation was all too understandable.

“Is it known to you whether Brazul-Brushkovsky, Makhalin, and Karaev received sums of money from someone?” asked state prosecutor Vipper.

“In that regard, it is a reliable fact that in the files of the Gendarmes’ office, there is reliable information, that all persons taking part in the private investigation received compensation,” Ivanov replied.

Brazul, he told the court, had received at least three thousand rubles. The covert funding had even covered Brazul’s therapeutic visit to a Crimean resort after the group had completed implicating Vera Cheberyak and her gang. As for Karaev and Makhalin, Ivanov said each man received daily payments of fifty rubles. Krasovsky had also received money, he testified, though he didn’t know how much. Asked about the source of the money, Ivanov remained vague, though he did mention a lawyer named Vilensky, an associate of Beilis’s first attorney, Arnold Margolin.

Gruzenberg and his team were shocked. The spectators were witnessing, if not a coup de théâtre, then a truly unusual sight: Russia’s foremost defense attorneys, knocked off balance.

Defender Karabchevsky, stunned by Ivanov’s testimony, pressed him to reveal the name of the person who supplied him with this information. “Are we supposed to just take you at your word and not have the opportunity to verify it?” he asked. Ivanov vouched for the “reliability” and even “infallibility” of his source but, “in view of my official obligations,” said he could not reveal it.

Gruzenberg was irate. No witness had the right to conceal information from the court.

He addressed the judge. “Why don’t you, Your Excellency, explain to him that his ‘official duty’ has no place here, and that here his only duty is to serve the truth?” But Judge Boldyrev rejected the argument, maintaining that the source of the information was irrelevant. Zamyslovsky then took the opportunity to provoke his opponent. “I would like to point out,” he said, “that this witness [Ivanov] was called at the request of the defense.”

“It does not matter by whom the witness was called,” Gruzenberg retorted. “There are no witnesses for the defense or for the prosecution. There are only honest witnesses and dishonest witnesses.” Now the attorney was showing his rash and reckless side. To imply that a government official was a liar constituted a gross, and punishable, breach of decorum. Judge Boldyrev called a recess, after which he warned Gruzenberg of “extreme measures” in the event of another such outburst.

The prosecution relentlessly probed the question of covert subsidies to Brazul, Krasovsky, and the rest. Their logic was not unreasonable. Did Margolin and, perhaps, other well-to-do members of the Jewish community indeed fund the investigators? Krasovsky and Karaev were, after all, unemployed. Makhalin, as a freelance tutor before he received his inheritance, had no money to spare. Brazul insisted he had bankrolled much of the venture on his newspaperman’s salary but that, too, seemed questionable. Where did the money come from for the trip to Kharkov, and the wining and dining of Vera Cheberyak and the Diakonova sisters?

Nabokov seems to have been the first observer to confront this question unflinchingly. “I believe that Jewish people of means did not only have the right to spend their money on a private investigation but it was their moral responsibility to do so,” he wrote in his commentary the day after Ivanov’s testimony. If Jews used their money to rescue one of their brethren who stood falsely accused, that “does not deserve condemnation but the reverse.” With a flourish, Nabokov added that he gladly offered the right wing this helpful “new material.”

Lieutenant Colonel Ivanov was the last of the trial’s witnesses addressing facts or circumstances relating to the case. Now came the expert witnesses—on forensic pathology, psychiatry, and religion. In his daily report on the trial, a Department of Police agent struck a perverse note of optimism. “In general the evidence against Beilis is very weak,” he wrote, “but … the dim jurors may convict on the basis of tribal enmity.”

On the twentieth day, the courtroom was nearly empty as the judges read aloud the autopsy reports on the victim and lengthy, lulling descriptions of the material evidence. A funereal solemnity filled the air. Beilis, the jurors, the attorneys for both sides, and the row of experts sat through it all nearly stock-still. To Stepan Kondurushkin of Speech, the proceedings resembled the traditional Russian Orthodox reading of the psalter over the body of the deceased:

The eyelids are covered with dried clay. The ears and nose are intact, the external ear canals, nostrils and lips are covered with dried clay, the mouth is closed, the teeth are intact…

The twine was wound twice around [the right wrist] and tied in a knot, then the left wrist was secured to the right, the twine criss-crossed, wound twice around the wrists, and then knotted…

Underdrawers. Children’s. Of white cloth with blue stripes. Button at the waist missing … The ends of the cord are frayed. The area of the frontal opening is soaked with a brownish-red substance, evidently blood.

The funeral analogy was more than apt; the words were intoned in the presence of the victim’s remains. On a table in front of the judges’ bench, sitting there like a coffin, was an open wooden box with jars containing his preserved organs. The pathologists explained the jars could be opened to display their contents—the boy’s punctured lungs, his liver and right kidney, a part of his brain, and the target of the final wounds, his heart.

After two days of preliminaries, the first expert witness, the pathologist Dr. Dimitry Kosorotov, finally took the stand. Kosorotov, together with the psychiatrist Dr. Ivan Sikorsky and the Catholic priest, Father Justin Pranaitis, formed a trio that would supposedly demonstrate the ritual nature of Andrei Yushchinsky’s murder. Dr. Kosorotov, however, could claim a unique distinction: of all the witnesses, he alone is known to have extracted a bribe for his testimony that was paid for, in principle, by the tsar himself.

After the death of its original witness on the autopsy, Dr. Nikolai Obolonsky, the prosecution had drafted Dr. Kosorotov, who had obliged them by affirming that the wounds on Andrei “were inflicted with the goal of collecting the greatest quantity of blood,” a conclusion that no other pathologist had been willing to draw so explicitly. But as the trial approached, Dr. Kosorotov became difficult. The proceedings, he complained to the prosecution, would take up so much of his time. His university in St. Petersburg would dock his pay. The official state rate of compensation for a witness was not nearly sufficient.

The doctor clearly knew his importance to the state’s case and meant to exploit it. Alarmed, the prosecution sent out a distress call to St. Petersburg that reached all the way to justice minister Ivan Shcheglovitov and interior minister Nikolai Maklakov, who quickly agreed to secure the doctor’s cooperation.

Six days before the trial began, the national chief of police, Stepan Beletsky, paid Dr. Kosorotov a call. Beletsky had with him a sum of four thousand rubles in cash, money disbursed from the tsar’s secret Ten Million Ruble Fund for expenses to be kept off the official budget books. Beletsky, fearing to insult the doctor by being too direct, began by flattering him about the significance of his testimony in such a historic case. Kosorotov had no need for the polite prelude. The two men agreed on a price, four thousand rubles, the exact amount Beletsky happened to have with him. But because Zamyslovsky, the civil prosecutor, had said to pay out only half the agreed-on sum, with the balance to be delivered if the testimony proved satisfactory, Beletsky politely fibbed that he unfortunately had only two thousand rubles with him. He assured the doctor he would receive the balance on his return home from the trial.

Kosorotov did not disappoint his benefactors. He proved to be the most coherent prosecution witness so far. “If they had wanted only to kill [the boy],” he explained to the jury, “they could have hit him with a stone and he would have been dead.” With an awl, “the killers still could have immediately plunged it into the heart,” causing death instantaneously. But the killers did not do that, which, he reasoned, meant the goal was not murder, but something else—“torture and wounding in such places as are rich in blood.”

The doctor gestured to the jar holding Andrei’s dissected heart. The organ contained only two small clots the size of a pea. “That’s all the blood remaining in Yushchinsky’s heart,” he declared. From the amount of blood contained in the internal organs and from the autopsy reports, he concluded that Andrei had lost more than half his blood. The perpetrators, he believed, would have collected the blood from the wounds to the right side of the neck, which bled profusely.

The medical experts for the defense then took the stand. Dr. Evgeny Pavlov, who held the honorary title of court-surgeon, and Dr. Alexander Kadyan, both professors from St. Petersburg, were far more distinguished than Dr. Kosorotov. They had no doubt that from the first blow, the killers—they agreed there had been more than one—had intended to kill. That is why they first went for the head, with blows that punctured the skull and penetrated into the brain. The heart, they explained, is actually not an easy target, something Andrei’s body attested to: of the eight stab wounds in the area of his heart, only three had hit their mark. Dr. Pavlov explained that the preserved organs were now in nothing like the state they were in at the time of death; most of the blood in them would have been squeezed out during the dissection and more would have leached out over time into the formalin preservative. The autopsy, in fact, indicated that while the blood loss was significant, the veins were filled with blood, there were rose-colored tissues, and not a single organ was bloodless.

The doctors made clear that the notion that the crime had been committed to harvest the boy’s blood was absurd. Any layman could see that the best way to obtain blood was to open up a vessel near the skin. As Dr. Kadyan put it: “If you want to get blood from the arm you make a cut and lower the limb so blood will flow. It’s the same with a leg. If you cut open a vein, the blood will flow.” Moreover, the natural tool for the purpose would be a knife that could make a clean cut, not an awl that could only puncture. To open a vessel with a puncture wound requires a very experienced hand. A layman, even with fair aim, would likely push a vessel aside rather than pierce it. In any event, Dr. Kadyan pointed out, not a single one of the wounds corresponded to the location of a major blood vessel.

Moreover, to collect blood from the head, as Kosorotov insisted had been done, the killers would have had to turn the boy upside down. “The idea that you would wound the head … the very uppermost part of the body in order to obtain blood is”—Dr. Kadyan said, using the English word—“nonsense.” The bleeding from the wounds to the neck was, in any case, mostly internal. The numerousness of the wounds was surely not an aid to collecting blood but, if anything, the reverse. The wounds to the vital organs, neck, and skull were undoubtedly meant to kill. The two dozen remaining wounds had no clear purpose and tell a story of killers in a frenzy. All in all, the signs pointed to a murder committed on the spur of the moment “with whatever weapon was at hand.”

The penultimate witness for the prosecution was Dr. Ivan Sikorsky, professor emeritus of psychiatry at St. Vladimir University in Kiev. If not for Sikorsky, the ritual-murder case against Mendel Beilis would almost certainly never have been brought. After Andrei’s murder, the authorities had asked Sikorsky to review the evidence and try to draw conclusions about the killer or killers. (Later in the century Sikorsky might have been called a “profiler.”) In May 1911, two and half months before Beilis’s arrest, he rendered his expert assessment: the “psychological basis” of the crime was “the racial revenge and vendetta of the sons of Jacob.” The terrible deed, he contended, was typical of child murders committed by Jews throughout the ages.

Dr. Sikorsky was, by far, the prosecution’s most distinguished expert. He was a scientist of international reputation—or, at least, had been until he became involved in the Beilis case: he was under assault by his colleagues at home and in Western Europe, condemned and derided as a man who had sacrificed his professional honor to superstition and religious hatred.

Dr. Sikorsky’s illness in the spring of the previous year occasioned the initial postponement of the trial, nearly driving Beilis out of his mind. Now, a year and a half later, on the trial’s twenty-fourth day, Sikorsky remained a very ill old man. His personal physician was in attendance in the courtroom and he was allowed to sit in a chair to testify. Nabokov also noted “signs of mental deterioration,” an assessment widely shared.

The doctor initially testified more or less coherently. “The murder of Andrei Yushchinsky,” he began, “differs from ordinary murders, but is extraordinarily similar to those unusual murders which have been noted from time to time even into our day. I have in mind the murders of children by means of bloodletting while the victims are alive.” He noted a number of “secondary signs” that Andrei’s murder shared with others of its kind. There was the season in which the crime was committed—spring; the age of the victim—around twelve or thirteen years old; the lack of any clear motive for the crime; the leaving of the body unburied and uncovered; and the number of wounds. He asserted the wounds were often a multiple a seven—“that is, 14, 21, 49 etc.”—and added the further qualifier “approximately.” Andrei’s wounds were officially reckoned at forty-seven—in other words, “approximately” forty-nine. Contradicting every other expert, even the prosecution’s own Dr. Kosorotov, Dr. Sikorsky maintained that Andrei’s killers had conducted the butchery and bloodletting “skillfully,” showing a knowledge of anatomy. Finally, it was characteristic of such crimes that “there appears some kind of unseen hand”—a Jewish conspiracy—“which tries to direct the investigator on a false path.” In sum, he said the evidence clearly suggested that the murder of Andrei Yushchinsky had been “committed by fanatics from among the Jews.” Child murder by this nation’s “community of killers,” he told the court, “is no invention, no myth, no imaginary product of the Middle Ages, but a criminal reality of the twentieth century.”

Now the professor began to ramble. “Their capital,” meaning Jewish money, “is thrown around so as to persecute those who would unmask them. Those who want to fight this evil must be prepared to face enormous monetary force.” The judge told Sikorsky to confine himself to psychiatric expertise, but the witness persisted. “Talmudism, Jewish capital, the Jewish press, all arm themselves, unify themselves, for the struggle with the unmaskers.” Stranger things started coming out of the professor’s mouth. “Russian society has reached a dead end, from which it has to be brought out. Bankers, doctors, sexual psychopaths, go around like a pack of dogs.”

Dimitry Grigorovich-Barsky initiated a fusillade of defense objections by proclaiming, “This is definitely not expert testimony.” Taking note of the objection, the judge again cautioned the professor to confine himself to psychiatry, to no effect.

“We protest against all of this,” Karabchevsky told the judge a few minutes later.

Zamyslovsky, taking the opportunity to provoke the defense, declared, “Servants of the Jews!”

“We are serving justice, not the Jews,” Karabchevsky shot back.

After Zamyslovsky repeated his insult, Zarudny rose to object to the entirety of Sikorsky’s testimony. “I am defending only the accused, I am not defending the Jews, but at this moment I am defending the Russian court,” he told the judge.

“The Russian court has no need of your defense,” Boldryev replied. He allowed Sikorsky to testify essentially unimpeded.

But in his cross-examination, Karabchevsky honed in on Sikorsky’s fundamental weakness with a crafty question to which he must have known the answer.

“Could you tell us from where you obtained these words, so we can check them?” he asked, regarding one quotation the professor had adduced.

“That was published in a book entitled The Damascus Ritual Murders,” he responded, and then volunteered ingenuously, “which I believe was prepared by Mr. Shmakov.” The supposed expert was relying on the work of one of the very prosecutors who had been questioning him.

“Ah, by Mr. Shmakov!” Karabchevsky declared. “I have no more questions!”

Yet the attacks by the defense apparently did not undermine Sikorsky to the jury. As they listened in on the jurors’ conversations, police spies had picked up something encouraging. An agent reported to headquarters in St. Petersburg, “Sikorsky’s expert testimony, according to the gendarmes, made a strong impression on the jurors, convincing them of the existence of ritual murder.” At the same time, though, the agent reported a worrisome sign. The jury had noticed the odd hollowness at the center of the case. “How can we judge Beilis,” jurors were heard to say, “when they do not even mention him?”

As the trial edged toward its conclusion, Mendel Beilis would go utterly unmentioned during three days of testimony critical for the state. With experts opining on the Jewish religion and its relation to ritual murder, the prosecution sought to convince the jury that killings like Andrei’s were a reality deeply rooted in Jewish history and theology.

The final witness for the prosecution, and its only purported expert on Judaism, would be the priest from Tashkent, Justin Pranaitis. The prosecution moved to acquaint the jury with one of the texts on which he would rely, The Book of the Monk Neophyte, said to have been written in Romania in the early nineteenth century. Its author describes himself as a Jewish convert to Christianity who took monastic orders and assumed the name Neophyte. He asserts an intimate and intricate knowledge of his people’s secret rites. Lengthy excerpts of The Book of Neophyte were read into the record as the jury listened:

A curse was pronounced upon [the Jewish people] by the prophet Moses who said: the Lord will strike you with the boils of Egypt in the buttocks, and the horrible scab and itch from which you will not heal … We clearly see that the damnation has been fulfilled … since all European Jews have a scab on the buttocks, all Asian ones have mange on the head, all African ones have boils on the legs, and the Americans have a disease of the eyes, that is suffer from trachoma, as a result of which they are ugly and stupid. The wicked rabbis found a medicinal remedy that consists of curing the afflicted with Christian blood…

All Jews, Neophyte attested, are obligated to kill Christians for three reasons:

a) the extraordinary hatred which they bear toward Christians, and the assumption that, in committing such a murder, they are making a sacrifice to God … b) the numerous magical actions which the Jews perform with the blood itself, c) and also the uncertainty of the rabbis as to whether Jesus was the son of Mary, the true Messiah, and whether, given this circumstance, they might be saved by sprinkling themselves with the aforementioned blood.

He also reveals that the Jews put Christian blood to a remarkable number of other uses.

At the beginning of each season, from the air there appears on [the Jews’] food some sort of blood which they call “tekifa,” and if a Jew eats this food he will immediately die…

The wicked rabbis … smear a steel fork with the blood of a Christian martyr, putting it on the top of the food, so that the above-mentioned blood from the air does not fall upon this food…

When Jews marry, they have a custom that the young people fast the whole day … and in the evening after the ceremony, a rabbi comes … and gives them both, the bride and groom, a boiled egg, sprinkled instead of salt with the ash of a burned rag that has been dipped in the blood of a Christian martyr…

On their Passover, preparing matzo with many devilish Jews … they put a little of the powder with the blood of the Christian martyr on one piece of matzo. And on the day they begin their Passover … every Jew, even the smallest of them, is obliged to eat a part of it…

Beilis’s attorney Vasily Maklakov, considered one of the Duma’s greatest orators, knew beforehand about the reading of the Book of Neophyte, yet still seemed dumbfounded about how to respond to such obvious absurdity. He quoted derisively from the text and then declared sarcastically to the jury, “So this is the ‘scholarly’ work on which the prosecution is basing the indictment.” If a juror did not find it self-refuting, then what, really, could the defense do?

Father Justin Pranaitis, a clean-shaven old man in a black cassock, with a full head of steel gray hair, spoke very softly, from time to time muttering an execration, such as: “The extermination of Christians is the main goal of the Jewish Talmudists’ existence. Toward that end are directed all prayers, all deeds.” Such epigrammatic moments were exceptional during his eleven hours of meandering testimony. Pranaitis embarked on a lecture clotted with references to Jewish texts—the Talmud, the Shulkhan Arukh, the Gemara, the Mishnah, the Tosefta, and the Zohar—personages such as the ancient Jewish historian Josephus Flavius and the Baal Shem Tov (the founder of Hasidism), and contemporary Christian defenders of the Jews. Judge Boldyrev, exasperated, repeatedly warned him to hew to his expertise. But nothing could restrain his digressions, including one on the origin of playing cards, in particular the Jack of Diamonds.

The prosecution was itself largely to blame for encouraging Pranaitis’s maddening detours, by organizing the testimony around twenty-nine theological questions, some of them obscure in the extreme. (For example, Question 19: “What effort did the Frankists make to reveal human sacrifice among the Jews during the dispute in Lvov in 1759?”) As for the murder of Andrei Yushchinsky, Pranaitis had only one directly relevant thing to say: he pointed to a group of thirteen wounds on Andrei’s right temple, as representing the Hebrew word “echad” (“one,” as in “God is One”), to which the Kabbalah gave a numerical value of thirteen.

Why not look at the total number of wounds, the defense argued. Moreover, the true number of wounds on Andrei’s right temple was, in all likelihood, not thirteen, but fourteen. An autopsy photograph seemed to show thirteen punctures at first glance but, on closer inspection, the defense experts showed that one of the puncture marks was a double wound—the weapon had struck in nearly the same place twice. Even Kosorotov, the prosecution’s own expert, agreed that the true count was very possibly fourteen.

The prosecution had a far greater problem than the attack on their witness’s numerology. Once Father Pranaitis departed from his prepared opening statement, he seemed lost. This became evident under questioning by the prosecution itself. Shmakov would formulate a question, often citing a lengthy textual quotation, and Pranaitis would invariably respond with, “I don’t know,” “I don’t remember,” “I can’t explain,” or silence. To Nabokov, Pranaitis resembled a seminary student failing an exam: “Sweating, wiping his brow, looking with wide frightened eyes at his tormentors”—that is, the very prosecutors who had called him as a witness—“Pranaitis’s whole figure expressed physical suffering.” Shmakov grew openly angry at his foundering witness; Beilis’s supporters began smiling and sometimes even burst into laughter.

The defense, oddly, did a better job of eliciting answers from the witness. Father Pranaitis had mentioned an eighteenth-century Jewish convert named Serafimovich who had attested to the ritual killings of Christians. “Would you please tell us,” Gruzenberg asked, “does he not say that when they [the Jews] drew the blood of a [Christian] child, that it ran white as milk?”

“Yes,” Pranaitis answered, “that is the case, though why it was white, I cannot say.”

Karabchevsky took over, initiating an exchange about ritual-murder trials of the Middle Ages. “How were those trials conducted? With the use of torture?”

“Yes, there was severe torture,” he responded, “but due to this torture one can say that the truth was revealed. Of course, this is not good, but if a person will not confess, you have to torture him.”

A reporter at the trial, Benzion Katz, who was editor of Russia’s only regularly published Hebrew-language newspaper, Ha-Zeman (The Time), approached Karabchevsky with additional ammunition to discredit Pranaitis. He had evidence that the priest was not just highly ignorant but a fraud. The man who had once attempted to pass off a worthless painting as an Old Master had passed off others’ work as his own. He had plagiarized The Talmud Unmasked and The Jewish Blood Secret from other anti-Semitic pseudo-scholars, even copying their typographical errors. This was why he had such trouble answering simple questions.

Katz was confident that Pranaitis, contrary to his claims, was wholly ignorant of Semitic languages. He proposed a ploy to destroy Pranaitis’s credibility beyond all doubt. The attorneys would ask the priest to translate the headings of a number of Talmudic tractates, or sections, that he himself had mentioned, as well as a trick question that would definitively expose his ignorance.

“Maybe he will answer correctly, and then your ploy will backfire,” Karabchevsky objected. Gruzenberg agreed, but eventually Katz won the pair’s agreement to the plan. The defense first presented its experts on Judaism, including two non-Jewish scholars: Professors P. K. Kokovtsov of the University of St. Petersburg, one of Russia’s most distinguished Hebraists; and I. G. Troitsky, of the St. Petersburg Theological Seminary; as well as the chief rabbi of Moscow, Jacob Mazeh. Kokovtsov testified in detail about the ancient Jewish prohibition against ingesting blood, which required the most careful butchering to drain the fluid completely from slaughtered animals. Food that came into contact with blood was considered unclean and not fit to eat. The idea that any Jew would ingest blood in the name of his religion was utterly absurd. A less likely foundation for a Jewish sect could hardly be imagined. Kokovtsov cracked that, if he heard some Jews were caught with an exsanguinated corpse, he “would sooner believe they were preparing to eat it than consume its blood.”

After a recess, Pranaitis was recalled to the stand.

“In your testimony,” Karabchevsky asked him, “it seems you mentioned the tractate Hulin. Is there such a thing?”

“I don’t remember,” Pranaitis replied.

“But you know the tractate Hulin? How do you translate that title? What is it about?”

Pranaitis was silent.

“You can’t say anything?”

There was no response.

“Let’s go on. What about Makshirin? What does that mean?”

“That’s liquid,” Pranaitis responded. The response was vaguely on target—the tractate deals with the circumstances under which contact with liquid renders food unclean.

Shmakov jumped up to object. “The defense is giving the witness an examination. That is unacceptable.”

Judge Boldyrev overruled the objection. He had little choice. He could not forbid the defense from asking the witness to clarify the meaning of terms he himself had used. “You cited the tractate Yevamot?”

“I will not answer.”

“And Eruvin?”

Silence.

Karabchevsky’s final question, devised by Benzion Katz, was, “Where did Baba Bathra live and what was she famous for?”

Baba Bathra (“The Lower Gate”) is not a person but a Talmudic tractate dealing with the rights and responsibilities of property owners. “Baba” means “old woman” in Russian, so the defense counted on Pranaitis’s falling into the trap. As the historian Maurice Samuel put it, the question was similar to asking, “Who lived at the Gettysburg address?”

Pranaitis responded, “I don’t know.”

Several Jewish spectators burst into laughter and Benzion Katz himself began laughing so uncontrollably that he was ejected from the courtroom, which did not trouble him at all. “Many congratulated me,” he later recalled, “for having brought Pranaitis to his knees.”

The two police agents reporting on the trial to St. Petersburg both agreed that Pranaitis’s testimony had been a fiasco. The priest had demonstrated “ignorance of the texts,” “insufficient familiarity with Hebrew writings,” and, generally, no more than “dilettantish” knowledge. In sum, “he looked as if he could not answer the simplest questions.” One additional aspect of Pranaitis’s pitiful testimony is of note. Zamyslovsky asked the priest at one point, “You have not found papal bulls which would directly condemn the accusation that the Jews commit ritual murder, is that correct?”

“Yes,” Pranaitis responded. “There are no such bulls.” In his pretrial testimony the priest had further contended that any such purported bulls were forgeries. Both statements were false. In fact, several popes had condemned the blood accusation, beginning with Innocent IV in 1247. But the papal declarations could be introduced by the defense only if the Vatican authenticated them for the Russian court. To secure the authentication, the British journalist and Jewish activist Lucien Wolf drafted a letter in the name of Lord Lionel Rothschild to the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Merry del Val. For some reason, the letter was sent off only as the trial began. The cardinal replied eleven days later with a letter attesting to the accuracy of a report written in 1756 by Cardinal Lorenzo Ganganelli—the future Pope Clement XIV—which quoted papal pronouncements against the blood accusation, and generally cast extreme doubt on the charge. The secretary of state’s response arrived promptly enough to be of use to the defense—if the defense had seen it. But the state made sure the defense would not be able to introduce evidence that would be too awkward for the Catholic Pranaitis to dismiss. Forwarding the letter to Kiev was the responsibility of the Russian ambassador to the Vatican, Dimitry Nelidov. He made sure it would not arrive in time. In a letter to foreign minister Sazonov shortly after the trial, the ambassador expressed his displeasure at the “readiness of the Curia [the papal court]…to please the Jews” and boasted that the cardinal’s missive “could have no significance, since it would arrive in Kiev after the verdict.”

Ambassador Nelidov’s letter is one of the most remarkable in the archives for another reason. In the left margin of the first page, in blue pencil, is a vertical slash flanked by two dots. This was the personal mark Tsar Nicholas had a habit of inscribing on briefing materials he had read. Documentary evidence of the tsar’s involvement in the Beilis case is scant. The record does indicate that he was briefed on it a number of times. This mark is the clearest indication of how closely the tsar must have been following the case and his awareness of the tactics of his minions.

By the time the summations began on the trial’s twenty-ninth day, Mendel Beilis was in declining health. He had fainted repeatedly during the proceedings and a physician had found him to be suffering from “anemia of the brain” brought on by the strain. The endless days of testimony had also been hard on the jurors, two of whom had needed medical attention.

With eight attorneys participating—three for the prosecution and five for the defense—the summations would take up five days of the trial. Then the judge would read his charge to the jury and send the twelve men off to deliberate. A great deal was left to endure. Still, in less than a week, Mendel Beilis might finally know his fate.

State prosecutor Oskar Vipper was the first to address the jurors. Officially, he was the only prosecutor in the trial, with his two colleagues technically representing only the mother of the victim. When Vipper spoke, he spoke for the state.

Why, he asked, was the world so interested in this case? Surely, there was only one reason. “If a non-Jew, a Russian, were accused of this crime,” he continued, “would there be such a commotion?” Surely not. The world had taken notice only because Mendel Beilis, a Jew, “sits in the dock and we have the audacity to accuse him … of committing this evil deed out of fanatical motives.” Recently another trial had attracted such attention, he said. “One has only to recall the Dreyfus case—how a single person was accused of treason and the whole world was concerned about him only because he was a Jew.”

Vipper denied indicting the Jewish people as a whole. “Once and for all, nothing of the sort is true,” he proclaimed. “We are accusing only a single fanatic.” But he did not shrink from accusing the Jews as a whole of attempting to cover up the truth. From the very beginning of the case “all means were used to confuse and obscure” the investigation. He had no doubt the Jews were behind these efforts. “Some kind of unseen hand, in all likelihood, raining down gold,” was at work. If evidence was lacking—if the Lamplighters or the Wolf Woman did not say what was needed—the primary reason was a Jewish conspiracy to suppress it.

Vipper struck the note of helplessness that characterizes many anti-Semitic screeds against Jews. “I will say candidly—let people criticize me for this if they wish—that I personally feel that I am in the power of the Jews, in the power of Jewish opinion, in the power of the Jewish press.” That the Jews lacked legal rights was of no consequence. “In fact they rule our world,” he proclaimed. “We feel ourselves under their yoke.”

In the seventh hour of an oration lasting some ten hours, when jurors and spectators must have been nodding off at his recapitulation of trial testimony, Vipper surprised the courtroom. He was adding a new name to his list of unindicted accomplices. The list—which included the hay and straw dealer Shneyerson, with his suspiciously “noble” Jewish surname, and included nearly every Jew at the Zaitsev factory—was already rather long. He now found room in it for Vera Cheberyak.

Could Vera Cheberyak have been involved in Andrei’s murder? Vipper could not rule it out. She and Beilis, he maintained, were “apparently well-acquainted.” Now Beilis’s cow ambled into his argument. “When the question of the cow was raised here,” he told the jury, “I attached to it, as indeed I still do, substantial significance.” The animal, he hinted, served as the excuse for frequent contact between Cheberyak and the defendant. “She went to buy milk from him,” he said, adding suggestively, “as she herself did not deny.” Vera Cheberyak could well have been complicit in Andrei’s death, Vipper declared. “Just like other witnesses,” such as Shneyerson, “she could possibly take her place in the prisoner’s dock.” This gambit by the prosecutor was a bid to outflank the defense, which had put Cheberyak’s guilt at the center of its strategy. Whether it would persuade or confuse the jurors remained to be seen.

By the end his summation, Vipper could barely be heard. An anxious man, he was now in a state of nervous exhaustion, which he oddly admitted to the jury before making his final plea. Beilis, despite his ill health, remained attentive throughout the daylong speech. When Vipper called on the jury to “look at this fanatic who committed this evil deed with his own hands” and “pronounce the verdict upon him that he deserves,” he did not visibly react.

Civil prosecutor Georgy Zamyslovsky delivered his summation the next day. By all accounts his performance was far superior to that of Vipper. He projected confidence. His well-constructed and straightforward oration focused on convincing the jury, although he did spin out an extended metaphor about ultraviolet rays: just as there was an invisible spectrum, so, too, there were “ultraviolet clues” that could not be seen but were nonetheless present. In the main, though, he attempted to rely on the factual record. He presented the jurors with a stark choice: either Cheberyak or Beilis. Nabokov gave Zamyslovsky high marks. He feared the speech might be quite effective “should the jurors, in the end, give in to subtle, competent hypnosis, which counted on their ignorance and racial prejudice.”

Civil prosecutor Alexei Shmakov spoke for five and a half hours, in a feverishly incoherent speech that leapfrogged from overly detailed recapitulations of the evidence to obscure digressions and back again. He treated the jurors to a defense of the ancient Greek sophist Apion before moving on to Vera Cheberyak, dismissing as a “legend” that she was involved in the murder. Soon, however, he insisted, like Vipper, that Beilis and Cheberyak might have been accomplices. “Why not Beilis and Vera?” he asked. “That is perfectly possible.” Then he told the whole story of the Jewish holiday of Purim despite Judge Boldyrev’s repeated warnings that it was irrelevant. The jury, if it was paying attention, learned much about the Persian grand vizier, Haman; the Jewish heroine, Esther; and the tasty Purim treat known as Hamentaschen, which Shmakov insisted the Jews sometimes made with human blood. He, too, spoke a great deal of the “unseen hand” and the worldwide Jewish conspiracy, with its “horrific, overwhelming weapon—the press.”

On the afternoon of the thirty-first day—October 23, 1913—Vasily Maklakov gave the first summation for the defense. Of the five members of the defense team, he possessed the most powerful intellect. He had an unusual talent for arguing questions from both sides and getting into the minds of those he might be inclined to despise. Perhaps most important, as a speaker, he was direct and plainspoken.

Maklakov began by imploring the jury to focus solely on the defendant. He would not seek to disprove the blood accusation against the Jews. He only wanted them to disregard it as wholly irrelevant to their one and only responsibility: deciding the defendant’s guilt or innocence. He even went so far as to concede that fanatics might arise anywhere, and “perhaps … there could have been some among the Jews.” But it was not for the jurors to settle a dispute that had been going on for centuries. They would need all their wisdom simply to decide the case before them.

“The prosecution says it is convinced Beilis is guilty,” he continued. At this point, Beilis broke down. He was given a glass of water and Maklakov proceeded.

Maklakov liked to assume a jury’s common sense and rely on logic and the law. He conceded that the jurors had the right to question the credibility of some defense witnesses, so he would clear the stage of anyone about whom they might have doubts. “I will rely only on what is totally reliable, on what the prosecutors themselves acknowledge to be true,” he told them. Gone were Ekaterina Diakanova and her masked man; Zinaida Malitskaya and her claim that she had heard Andrei and his killers scuffling overhead; and even, for now, Detective Krasovsky. But what remained was a strikingly convincing case against Vera Cheberyak.

“After Andrei disappeared, when people were looking for him everywhere, when there were notices in the newspapers, she uttered not a word about seeing him on that fateful day, March 12,” he told the jury, “She alone held the key to helping find Andrei, but she did not show anyone that key.” He posed a series of questions. “Why did she so diligently hide all this?…What so worried her that she forbade Zhenya to speak?…Why, if she was innocent, did it occur to her that people would suspect her of the child’s murder?”

He then moved on to the centerpiece of his oration. “And now,” he told the jury, “we come to the most frightening and mysterious episode in this case—the death of her son.”

The courtroom was about to be transfixed by his dramatic recounting of Zhenya Cheberyak’s deathbed scene. Maklakov began with one of his characteristic lawyerly concessions to gain the jurors’ confidence. Some, such as Detective Krasovsky, had accused Vera Cheberyak of wanting her children dead. That was not true, he said.

But together with that natural love of a mother for her children there was another feeling in her, a feeling of horror and fear for herself … The unfortunate Cheberyak had to think at that moment not of saving her son, nor of giving him peace. She did not dare to cry at the detectives, “Get out of here, this is death, this is God’s business.” She could not do that. She was afraid. She wanted to use her dying son. She asked him: “Zhenya, say that I had nothing to do with it.” And what did Zhenya answer? “Mama, leave me alone, it hurts.” The dying boy did not fulfill her request. He did not say what would have been so easy for him to say. If only it had been true, he could have told the detectives, “Leave my mother alone, I myself saw Beilis drag Andrusha to the brick kiln.” Why did he not say that? And when he wanted to speak, this unfortunate mother, as witnesses have testified, kissed him to prevent him from speaking. Before he died, she gave him the Judas kiss so that he would not speak.

At those words, the spectators drew in their breath and shifted in their seats. At least one juror was seen to wipe away a tear. Maklakov went on to a give an elegant accounting of the prosecution’s flaws, posing a series of questions that answered themselves. Would anyone, even a group of fanatics, grab a child in broad daylight in front of several witnesses? Even if one accepted that scenario, why did none of the children who were supposedly with Andrei immediately tell their parents? Why did not all of Lukianovka immediately know what had happened? The answer was obvious: “No one knew about it, simply because it never happened. The whole story was the invention of Cheberyak.”

In a keen psychological move, Maklakov appealed to the jurors’ national pride. Imagine, he asked,

all of Lukianovka, knowing that their child, a Christian child, had been dragged off to the brick kiln by a Jew and then found dead in a cave … If what the prosecutor described had really happened … then all of Lukianovka would have arisen. These simple Russian people would have risen up, fearing no one, and we would not have had to sit in judgment of Beilis. There would be nothing left of the Zaitsev factory. There would be nothing left of Beilis. There would be no trial.

Unspoken was the message that the jurors themselves were the kind of men who surely would have joined in avenging the poor Christian boy’s murder. Maklakov then moved nimbly to appeal to the jurors’ basic sense of fairness. “You have been told in various ways,” he said, “that the Jews are our enemies, that they do not consider us [non-Jews] to be human beings, and they [the prosecutors] are inviting you to have the same feelings toward them. Do not give in to that invitation.” The jurors were free to convict Beilis if they believed the evidence warranted it. But he implored them to consider only the evidence, and nothing else, and refuse to be accomplices in “the suicide of the Russian justice system” by succumbing to an attempt to stir up their hatred.

Oskar Gruzenberg, the only Jew on the defense team, spoke next. He felt, with some reason, that he had to explain himself as a Jew before he did anything else. “Ritual murder,” he began, “the use of human blood … a frightful accusation, frightful words, which had been buried long ago. But they are powerful and enduring, as you have heard, and now rise from the grave.” He then turned to his personal beliefs. “If I for one minute thought that Jewish teachings allowed the use of human blood—I say this clearly, knowing that these words will become known to Jews throughout the world—that not for one minute would I consider it possible to remain a Jew. I am deeply convinced, I have no doubt, that there are no such crimes among us and there cannot be.” Returning to his funereal metaphor, he declared “these accusations, rising from the graveyard, drag us back to it, where they have been exhumed from thousand-year-old tombs long ago crumbled to dust.”

Though not as elegantly as Maklakov, Gruzenberg went on to do an excellent job of detailing the numerous flaws, lapses, inconsistencies, and omissions in the prosecution’s case. How could the prosecutors defend Vera Cheberyak as innocent of murder and then just a short time later label her as a possible accomplice? If she was a suspect, why did the authorities not take the most elementary steps to investigate her? If the prosecution was so sure that Shneyerson was involved, why was he not sitting in the dock with Beilis? The prosecution maintained that Andrei’s blood was needed for the dedication of a prayer house being built by the Zaitsevs. If so, why did the Zaitsevs not stand accused as well? Gruzenberg’s relentlessly logical dissection of the prosecution’s case took up most of his six-hour oration. In closing, however, Gruzenberg returned to a declamatory mode.

I firmly hope that Beilis will not be allowed to perish … But if I am wrong, what of it? Hardly two hundred years have passed since our forefathers were burned at the stake for similar charges. Without complaint, with a prayer on their lips, they went to their unjust punishment. How are you, Beilis, better than they? So, too, ought you to go. In your days of suffering at hard labor, when you are seized by despair and grief, take heart, Beilis. Repeat often the words of the prayer uttered by the dying. “Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.” Terrible is your destruction. But more terrible still is the very possibility of such accusations here [in this court], made under the cover of reason, conscience and the law.

Was this melodramatic conclusion—however moving to the Jews in the courtroom and those who read it in newspapers around the world—helpful to Mendel Beilis? Maklakov argued that any attempt by the attorneys to defend the Jews as a group, or argue generally against the existence of ritual murder, was misguided and even risked the life of their client. “Gruzenberg held the opinion that world Jewry sat in the dock and it was necessary to defend not only Beilis but the Jews as a whole,” he recalled decades later, while “I was always on the side of defending only Beilis, and not the Jews.” He may have been exaggerating their differences. In his memoirs, Gruzenberg agreed with Maklakov that “in court there should be only one goal”—to prove the defendant’s innocence, but in his summation, to a degree, he departed from that principle. Perhaps Maurice Samuel’s judgment—that “the more eloquent he became, the more futile it sounded”—is too harsh. Gruzenberg argued in his memoirs that he considered it his “duty” to say certain things of broader importance in his address to the jury and “took the liberty” of saying them. But the wisdom of taking that liberty could be questioned.

On the thirty-second day of the trial Alexander Zarudny and Nikolai Karabchevsky delivered the final summations for the defense. Zarudny’s was unfortunate. Instead of letting their experts’ words speak for themselves and dismissing the blood accusation as nonsense, he decided to play Shmakov’s opponent regarding the minutiae of things Jewish. The Temple in Jerusalem, for example, was not illuminated by thirteen candles, as Shmakov held (there were not even candles in biblical times) but with a seven-branched oil-lit candelabrum, and the prosecutor was thoroughly wrongheaded about the Jewish ritual of circumcision. Zarudny’s broader sentiments were irreproachable and sometimes eloquently expressed. “The court is a kind of temple,” he told the jury. “As in a temple, one prays for one’s enemies, one must judge even them with complete impartiality, without any prejudice.” But the fine sentiments were lost in the thicket of allusions to the “the 248 positive commandments,” “the Seven Noahide Laws,” and “Exodus 37, verses 17 through 23.”

The final summation belonged to Nikolai Karabchevsky. It would be easy to judge his oration as harshly as Zarudny’s. He failed to tailor his grandiloquent style to the mostly uneducated jury. He spoke of the prosecution’s attempt to prove its case “by means of the negative system of formal proofs.” He used words like “axiom,” “idyll,” “extraterritorially,” and “casus.” Yet he did reinforce many of the points made by Gruzenberg and Maklakov—for example, the matter of Andrei’s missing coat. The prosecution itself conceded that all the evidence suggested that it had been left at the Cheberyaks’ house. Why had Vera Cheberyak not told anyone about it? “You cannot get away from the coat,” Karabchevsky emphasized. “Against Beilis there is, strictly speaking, no evidence,” he went on to say. And not to be underestimated is the tremendous presence Karabchevsky projected, which everyone, including Beilis, found so striking. Some said that a performance by Karabchevsky had to be experienced firsthand; perhaps his summation in the Beilis case made a greater impression on the jury than the words on the page suggest.

On the thirty-third day of the trial, after rebuttals that added nothing of importance, the judge gave Mendel Beilis the final word.

“Defendant Beilis,” he asked, “do you have anything to tell the gentlemen of the jury?”

Beilis stood up quickly. “Gentlemen of the jury,” he said, speaking rapidly in his Yiddish-inflected Russian and looking directly at them, “I could say much in my defense. I am tired. I have no strength to say what I could. You can see that I am innocent. I ask you to acquit me so that I can see my poor children who have been waiting for me for two and a half years.”

Then Beilis was taken back to prison. He lay down on his cot knowing this might be his last night of captivity or the prelude to a life of hard labor.

The trial was nearly over, but far away, in America, Jewish leaders were still arguing over how, and how vocally, to help Mendel Beilis. Three days earlier the noted Reform rabbi Max Heller had taken the American Jewish leadership to task for its inaction. “Has the Jewish people ever afforded the world a more doleful and piteous spectacle of disunion and disorder than what it is presenting just now?” he asked in an article entitled “Statesmanship,” published in the American Israelite. He may have had in mind the nation’s leading Jewish lobbying organization, the American Jewish Committee, whose executive body first met about the case only on the thirty-second day of the trial—that is, the day before the end of summations. The only significant action the committee had taken to help Beilis was to organize the open letter to Tsar Nicholas from a group of prominent Christian clergymen. As they met, the committee’s leaders felt reason to be optimistic; their State Department sources were saying the Russian government believed Beilis would be acquitted. Still, they agreed it was prudent to have a plan of action should he be convicted. After discussing how they might pressure the Wilson administration into appealing to the Russian government, they came to no consensus.

Jewish organized labor and the thriving socialist movement had also been slow to organize in Beilis’s defense. Midway through the trial, Abraham Cahan, the editor of the leading Yiddish newspaper, Forverts (Forward), had berated a New York gathering of twelve hundred socialists for being so preoccupied with local issues that they “ignore the evil-doing in Russia.” Only on the thirty-third day did a group of predominantly Jewish, or Jewish-led, unions—including the furriers, laundry, and millinery workers, as well as socialist movement chapters—decide to organize a protest. But the hour for protests had passed.

October 28, 1913. At eight a.m., Mendel Beilis was taken to the prison office and handed over to his security detail. As usual before departing, this crew strip-searched him. Beilis endured the degrading routine without complaint. But then, just as his convoy was about to depart, the deputy warden demanded that the prison guards search Beilis as well. Beilis removed everything but his undershirt, which he had always been allowed to retain when searched. But now the deputy warden demanded he remove every piece of clothing. The needless humiliation sent Beilis into a rage. He tore off the undershirt, ripped it to pieces, and threw it in the guard’s face. The deputy warden pulled out his pistol and aimed it at him with such a wild look in his eyes that it seemed to Beilis he might really pull the trigger. Had this been any other insolent prisoner, shooting him would have been nothing out of the ordinary. Luckily, a courthouse security officer grabbed the pistol from the deputy warden’s hand. After the head warden came in and chastised Beilis for “starting trouble,” the convoy finally headed off.

Beilis found St. Sophia Square filled with mounted police and surrounded by Cossacks on foot. The authorities would allow no crowd that could cause trouble to gather in the square. The thousand people or so who came to await the verdict had to squeeze onto the sidewalks, pressing themselves against the buildings around the square’s perimeter. Judging by press reports, the throng was entirely pro-Beilis or else held their tongues. Supporters of the prosecution gathered at the other end of the square, in St. Sophia Cathedral, where Vladimir Golubev’s right-wing youth group, Double Headed Eagle, held a requiem for Andrei.

Once court was in session, the prosecution formally moved to put into effect its insurance policy. The jury’s first charge would be to decide, irrespective of Beilis’s guilt, the manner in which the crime had been committed and its location. “Has it been proven,” the charge read,

that on the twelfth of March, 1911, in one of the buildings of the [Zaitsev] brick factory belonging to the Jewish surgical hospital, thirteen-year-old Andrei Yushchinsky … had wounds inflicted on him with a pointed instrument on the crown, and sides, and back of his head, and also on his neck, causing injuries to the veins in the brain, arteries of the left temple, and veins in the neck, resulting in copious blood loss, and that after Yushchinsky had lost up to five glasses of blood, there were inflicted on him, with the same weapon, wounds to the torso, causing injuries to the lungs, liver, right kidney, and heart, to the latter of which were directed the final wounds; and that these wounds, totaling forty-seven, caused Yushchinsky’s torturous suffering, resulting in the almost complete loss of blood and in his death?

The question did not mention the word “ritual” or “religious.” The jury could avoid ruling on the killers’ motivation, but the wording served the purposes of the supporters of the blood accusation well enough. “Complete loss of blood” suggested that the intention had been to drain it from the body. Measuring the blood in “glasses” was suggestive of collecting and consuming it. The description of the crime accorded with the prosecution’s contention that the killers had waited for some time so as to let the blood flow out, and only then finished the boy off. And, of course, placing the location of the crime at the Jewish-owned Zaitsev factory implied Jewish culpability.

The second question concerned the guilt or innocence of the defendant. The wording was almost exactly the same as the first question except that it began, “Is the defendant Menahem Mendel Tevyev Beilis guilty of having conspired with others unknown … in a plan motivated by religious fanaticism, to deprive thirteen-year-old Andrei Yushchinsky of his life …” Here the jury was asked to rule on motivation. Still, the prosecution avoided the word “ritual.” It did not need to push the jury on this point. The phrase “religious fanaticism” was sufficient. If Beilis was found guilty, no one would doubt that he had been convicted of ritual murder.

The defense argued that there was no basis in law for the first question and that the way both were formulated was prejudicial. Judge Boldyrev overruled the objections and prepared to give his charge to the jury. This was his moment. Boldyrev’s superiors had promised him a promotion should he perform his duties at the trial to their satisfaction. Now he would prove himself worthy.

Boldyrev’s two-hour address was as biased toward the prosecution as he could manage without shedding all pretense to juridical propriety. “Essentially,” Nabokov wrote in his daily analysis, “it was a summation for the prosecution, deliberate and well thought out.” In summarizing the thirty-three days of testimony for both sides, Judge Boldyrev gave a more compelling account of the prosecution’s point of view, though he was always careful to add that the jury could reject it. He stated, “You know that the body was drained of blood,” even though the experts for the defense disputed that contention. “Why did the killers allow blood to flow?” he asked. “What was the point of looking at their victim, as blood flowed out of him?” He saved his major nod to respectability for the end. “A great deal was said here about the Jews,” he told the jurors. “Forget all of that. You are deciding the fate only of Beilis.”

The judge handed the list of charges to the foreman and sent the jurors off to deliberate. Expressionless, the twelve men filed out of the courtroom, led by the foreman, whose fawning demeanor toward the judge and prosecutor had so aroused Gruzenberg’s distrust. Gruzenberg made a final motion, asking the judge to call the jury back and amend his charge with material from the defense. Boldyrev denied the motion, and the waiting began.

Most of those who had only read about the trial—including, confidentially, senior Russian officials—believed the jury would vote to acquit. But they were thinking in terms of logic and of evidence. Most of the observers who had actually sat through the trial, Nabokov among them, believed that Beilis would be found guilty.

The defendant’s lead attorney was ready for the worst. Gruzenberg confessed to a reporter that, as he waited, he could think only of reasons the jury would convict. The jurors were “exceptionally ignorant.” He had seen their faces, growing more “confused, helpless, embittered, sullen” with each passing day. The relentless talk of “Jewish domination,” “all-powerful Jewish gold,” and blood sacrifice, beaten into their heads for thirty-three days, must have succeeded in arousing in these simple Russians an instinctive ethnic animosity. His last hope had been Judge Boldyrev’s charge to the jury. But when the judge sent the jurors off, Gruzenberg could only think to himself, “Beilis is finished.”

Russian jurors usually came back with a verdict quickly. After an hour passed, some pro-Beilis spectators argued that hesitance to convict was a good sign, but several attorneys in the crowd outside the courtroom said that long deliberations usually went against the defendant. Quite a few spectators, certain of the guilty verdict and overcome with anxiety, were heard to say, “I can’t take this,” and left the courthouse.

After one hour and twenty minutes of deliberations a bell sounded inside the building. The jury had reached a verdict. The spectators stopped arguing and dashed into the courtroom to take their seats. Mendel Beilis was led in, leaning heavily on his guards, who sat him down in the prisoner’s dock for the last time.

Court procedure could not be rushed. The bailiff cried out, “Court is in session! Please rise!” Everyone rose. The four judges entered and took their places at the bench, and then everyone sat down again. At 5:40 p.m. the bailiff announced, “The jury is entering! Please rise!” Everyone rose. The foreman handed Judge Boldyrev the sheet of paper with the verdicts. The judge read it and handed it back to him. Then all took their seats, except for the foreman, wearing his pince nez, who still stood before the bench, the piece of paper in his hand. The judge told him to proceed. The foreman began to read the first question, about whether the crime had been committed on the premises of the Zaitsev brick factory and in what manner.

The question was long, but he was obliged to recite it in its entirety. The words—“blood loss,” “five glasses,” “forty-seven”—escaped his lips in a soft, quavering voice until he finally reached “and in his death.” The foreman then uttered two more words: “Yes, proven.” Regardless of the defendant’s guilt, the crime had been committed in the manner the prosecution had contended.

The foreman then moved on to the second question. After he finished reading it, he pronounced three more words. Beilis began to sob violently, though people noticed there were no tears. He fell forward onto the railing of the dock. He rose up a number of times and then fell back again. He was reacting physically to the verdict, but it seemed to people that he gave no sign of understanding what it meant. In fact, he understood, but at first could not believe the three words: “Net, ne vinoven.” “No, not guilty.”

The chief guard tried to give Beilis a glass of water, but Zarudny grabbed it from him, saying curtly, “Beilis is not yours anymore, he belongs to us,” and handed it to Beilis himself. Judge Boldyrev then told Beilis, “You are a free man. You may take your place among the public.” His guards stood aside, but Beilis did not move. The judges withdrew for a few minutes and returned to declare the case resolved. Beilis, still crying, managed to half stand and bow.

He was held in the courthouse for nearly two hours until the crowd had dispersed. At seven thirty p.m. a police wagon took him back one last time to the prison, where he signed for the return of his belongings. Then he was conveyed to the Zaitsev brick factory, heavily guarded by police and night watchmen. At nine thirty p.m. he finally walked through the door of his home into his family’s arms.

The next morning Beilis awoke as the man everyone in Kiev wanted to meet. “Old people and children, fashionably turned-out ladies and simple peasant women, workers and students, and little schoolchildren,” a Kiev Opinion reporter wrote, “they all make their way to the Zaitsev factory.” So many people were asking directions that at Alexandovskaya Square the tram conductor took to crying out, “Take Number 16 to Beilis’s!” Someone set up a sign outside the home saying “Beilis Station.” The arriving visitors stood in line to spend a moment with the world-famous defendant. Over the course of two days Beilis shook thousands of hands.

Telegrams arrived by the hundreds. One, from Chicago, was in English. When someone was found to read it, it turned out to be an offer from an impresario to perform in his theater for a twenty-week run for twenty thousand rubles. Beilis laughed.

The onetime brick factory clerk was utterly exhausted. He would have loved to leave the city, go somewhere to rest. But for now he would remain in Kiev, he told a reporter, “so that the Unionists”—that is, the Black Hundreds—“won’t say that I ran away.”

Beilis’s supporters were overwhelmed by joy at the acquittal. But in the trial’s aftermath, the double verdict allowed both sides to claim victory. Civil prosecutor Zamyslovsky admitted that he was, of course, disappointed at the not-guilty verdict but insisted that the main goal—demonstrating the nature of the crime—had been accomplished. “The peculiarities of that act, given in detail,” he contended, “leave no doubt about the ritual character of the murder.” Beilis’s attorneys argued that the positive verdict on the first question in no way confirmed that the crime was a ritual murder. The question posed to the jury contained no reference to religion. To find that the crime took place somewhere on the Zaitsev factory’s thirty-three acres of grounds in itself meant nothing. Moreover, the prosecution had argued that if Jews had committed the murder, then Beilis must be involved. So, in exonerating Beilis, the jury must have exonerated the Jews. To paint the trial’s results as victory for the prosecution, Gruzenberg declared, was “a comic effort that deserves pity.”

How had the jurors reached their decision? According to the popular right-wing newspaper New Times, the vote on Beilis’s guilt had been a six-six tie. This rumor grew into fact, but there was no proof of it. The verdict led some to speculate it had been rigged by the state. The Anglo-Jewish journalist and activist Lucien Wolf had little doubt that the outcome “was engineered by the authorities with the idea of throwing dust in the eyes of foreigners, while at the same time preserving the blood accusation.” Herman Bernstein, secretary of the American Jewish Committee, concluded that the verdicts were clearly “prearranged” to satisfy both public opinion in the West and the Black Hundreds in Russia. Such suspicion was reasonable, but the archival record, which includes numerous secret communications, contains absolutely nothing to support it. It is nearly certain that the jurors came to the decision on their own. As Gruzenberg told a reporter, “The muzhichki”—the little peasants—“they stood up for themselves.” Gruzenberg further recounts in his memoirs that the jury’s initial vote was seven to five to convict “but when the foreman began taking the final vote one peasant rose to his feet, prayed to an icon, and said resolutely, ‘I don’t want to have this sin on my conscience—he’s not guilty.’ ” (This beautiful and oft-repeated story unfortunately remains unconfirmed.)

Agent Pavel Liubimov, in his final, secret report to the chief of the national police, called the Beilis trial a “political Tsushima”—referring to the sinking of the Russian fleet by the Japanese in 1905—“which will never be forgiven.” Many in the government undoubtedly did view it as a disaster on a par with a military defeat. Yet whatever the verdict, the case could only have ended as a fiasco for the regime. The whole affair, Vasily Maklakov wrote soon after the trial, was a sign “of a dangerous internal illness afflicting the state itself.” A regime that could prosecute such a bizarre case suffered from the kind of rot that only reform—or revolution—could root out. A jury’s decision one way or the other could not alter that profound reality.

For the government officials directly involved in it, the case was an undoubted success. In St. Petersburg, ten days after the verdict, a victory banquet was held “in honor of the heroes of the Kiev trial.” The minister of justice, Shcheglovitov himself, and prosecutor Oskar Vipper were the guests of honor. Also present was Alexander Dubrovin, founder of the Union of Russian People, the group synonymous with the term “Black Hundreds.” Congratulatory telegrams were sent to the absent heroes—including Chaplinsky, Dr. Kosorotov (who had been paid the balance of his four-thousand-ruble bribe for a job well done), Dr. Sikorsky, and others—praising them for their “noble patriotic courage” and “great moral dignity.”

These men had correctly calculated that the case would advance their careers. They were showered with praise, promotions, and material rewards. Kiev’s chief prosecutor, Grigory Chaplinsky, was appointed to Russia’s highest court, the Senate. Judge Boldyrev received his promised appointment as chief judge of the Kiev Judicial Chamber, as well as an illegal pay increase. Civil prosecutor Zamyslovsky was paid twenty-five thousand rubles from the tsar’s secret fund to write a book about the case.

What of Tsar Nicholas? What was the sovereign’s view of the trial’s outcome? The day of the verdict found him at the Livadia Palace near Yalta, on the Black Sea, where he had gone to relax with the empress Alexandra and their family. When a member of his entourage informed him of the news from Kiev, Nicholas delivered his opinion: “It is certain that there was a ritual murder. But I am happy that Beilis was acquitted, for he is innocent.”

This jury of common folk, in its wisdom, had found its way to the result most pleasing to their tsar. To Nicholas, who believed his rule to be divinely ordained, it must have seemed in the natural order of things. Yet in his ingrained and deepening fatalism, Nicholas took limited comfort even from welcome events. The tsar was given to speaking humbly of the impotence of the human will and of his own powerlessness to influence the course of history. As he had told Prime Minister Stolypin just a few years earlier, he knew he was destined for “terrible trials.” He often invoked a verse from the righteous sufferer Job on whose feast day he had been born:

For what I feared has overtaken me;

What I dreaded has come upon me.