Weekly Reader: Menahem Mendel Beilis
Published on July 07, 2024.
On July 21, 1911, Menahem Mendel Beilis, a Russian army veteran, father of five, and superintendent of the Zaitsev brick factory in Kiev, was arrested for the murder of Andriy Yushchinskyi, a thirteen-year-old boy who had disappeared the previous March and whose mutilated body was later found in the vicinity of the Zaitsev factory. For the next two years, while Beilis sat in jail, a blood libel against the Jewish community was waged in the Russian press accusing Beilis and other Jews of practicing the ritual murder of Christian children. At the same time, Beilis’s case became a cause célèbre in Russia and around the world, bringing attention to the persistence of antisemitism in the Russian Empire. In 1913, after a trial lasting just over a month, Beilis was acquitted of all charges. Following the trial Beilis became an international celebrity, though he chose to avoid the limelight, emigrating from Russia to Ottoman-ruled Palestine and later to the United States, where he died in Saratoga Springs, New York, on July 7, 1934.
In Beilis’s Words
The Beilis Affair was widely covered in the Yiddish press, and historical accounts of the trial began to appear nearly as soon as it ended. For example, the 500-plus-page Beilis’s Trial in Kiev was published by Shlomo Biber in Warsaw in 1913. But the best-known Yiddish source for the affair is Beilis’s own memoir, self-published in 1925 as Di geshikhte fun mayne laydn and later translated into English as The Story of My Sufferings.
Read Beilis’s Trial in Kiev in the Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library
Read Beilis’s memoir in the Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library
Immortalized in Fiction
While there have been no shortage of factual accounts of the Beilis Affair, the event also provided ripe material for fiction. As events were still unfolding, Sholem Aleichem wrote Der blutiker shpas (The Bloody Hoax), whose details were largely based on the Beilis Affair. Perhaps the most famous fictional treatment was Bernard Malamud’s 1966 novel The Fixer. Though its depiction of Beilis and other figures proved controversial, the novel ultimately won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award.
Read Sholem Aleichem’s The Bloody Hoax in the Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library
Watch an oral history interview with Bernard Malamud’s cousin Jean Fidelman Kopelman Haber
Legacy of a Libel
Despite the international opprobrium heaped on the tsarist government for perpetuating a modern blood libel, the Beilis Affair was not the last such event to take place in Russia. In her 2020 book Legacy of Blood, historian Elissa Bemporad traces the legacy of Russian pogroms and blood libels in the Soviet Union, ranging from 1917 until the 1960s.
A Cousin Remembers
Given Beilis’s large family, it’s not surprising that Beilis descendants and relatives are still around. In this oral history interview, Edythe Bloom, a retired social worker from Connecticut and a cousin of Beilis, recounts the story of her relative and his ordeal.
Speaking for Justice
While the Beilis Affair demonstrated the antisemitism of the Russian government, many of Russia’s most prominent writers and intellectuals risked their reputations and careers to defend Beilis in the courts of law and public opinion. One of these was the Ukrainian writer, journalist, and human rights activist Vladimir Korolenko, who had long been a critic of the tsarist regime. In this oral history interview, Yiddish and Russian performing artist Psoy Korolenko discusses why he borrowed his stage name from this literary predecessor.