Autumn 2013 marked the one-hundredth anniversary of the trial in Kiev of Mendel (Menachem) Beilis, charged with the ritual murder of thirteen-year-old Andrei Iushchinskii. The Beilis affair gained immediate notoriety in western Europe and North America, where it was widely regarded as emblematic of a corrupt and decaying tsarist system and engendered numerous editorial condemnations and public protests. The case was also notable for the fact that it constituted the last of a wave of such trials prosecuted by central and eastern European governments, beginning in Hungary (Tiszaeszlár) in 1882 and extending to the eve of the First World War, and for the unusual verdict handed down by the jury (more on this below). Beilis, the thirty-nine-year-old secular Jewish manager of a brick factory located in the vicinity of the cave where the boy's body was found, was not the first—and certainly not the most likely—suspect in the case, but he soon fell victim to a growing and increasingly voluble campaign to find and arrest “the Jew” who had perpetrated the murder as a ritual crime. The Ministries of Justice and the Interior developed a keen interest in the investigation from the start—motivated in equal parts by a desire to maintain order in Kiev and other parts of the country, eagerness to both placate and tamp down radical right-wing groups such as the Black Hundreds, and, perhaps, the need to justify its restrictive Jewish policies to the world. Officials in St. Petersburg interfered in the local police investigation, ignoring the skepticism of grizzled detectives that the boy's murder had anything to do with ritual killing, juggling personnel when necessary, and closely reviewing strategy with the prosecutor's office in Kiev. The criminal investigation dragged on for two years—during which time Beilis languished in prison; it was botched at crucial junctures and laced with perjured testimony from numerous witnesses. The case was weak on its merits and appeared at several points to be heading for disaster. Finally, after nearly five weeks of trial proceedings, the jury of twelve men (half of whom came from the peasant estate) found Mendel Beilis not guilty—but with a twist.

The excellent books under review constitute fitting and important contributions to the historiography of the Beilis affair, though they are quite different in construction, narrative strategy, and final product. Edmund Levin's A Child of Christian Blood, while a work of nonfiction based on archival and printed primary sources, applies the narrative techniques of the novelist to produce a dense and appealing work of “true crime.” Levin pays close attention to character development, description, and detail, encouraging the reader to venture into the minds and motivations of the affair's many players: Vera Cheberiak, the mother of Andrei Iushchinskii's best friend, Zhenia, and the head of a den of thieves; Georgii Chaplinski, the chief prosecutor in Kiev; Vladimir Golubev, the Kiev university student who headed a right-wing youth group, the Society of the Double-Headed Eagle, and was deeply committed to promoting the murder as a “Jewish crime” with “the Yid Beilis” as its perpetrator; Ivan Shcheglovitov, the Russian minister of justice; Nikolai Krasovskii and Evgenii Mishchuk, two brave police detectives who—while often at each other's throat—tried valiantly, though unsuccessfully, to keep the criminal investigation on target and free of ministerial interference; the defense team, headed by Oskar Gruzenberg; and numerous others.

Robert Weinberg's Blood Libel in Late Imperial Russia functions quite differently. Roughly, the first half of the book (73 pages) is devoted to a narrative account of the Beilis affair based on the extensive trial transcript, newspaper accounts, published archival documents, and some secondary works (notably Maurice Samuel's Blood Accusation [New York: Knopf, 1966] and Alexander Tager's The Decay of Czarism [original Russian edition, 1933; Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1935]). The slightly longer second half comprises primary sources, translated into English, designed “to illustrate key aspects of the case” (17), and meant to be read together with the narrative chapters. Among the documents on display are selections from Samuel, Tager, and Hans Rogger; Russian newspaper accounts—including those of the anti-Semitic press; the coroner's report; meaty sections from the trial transcript; and numerous archival sources. With this unusual but welcome structure, Weinberg has provided a precious service, producing a text that will be of immediate benefit to university instruction at all levels. Levin, on the other hand, has set his sights on a broad readership.

Beyond questions of audience and pedagogical utility, it is appropriate, I think, to ask how the books under review advance our understanding of the Beilis affair specifically and of the place and function of the ritual murder accusation in modern times more generally. Levin's work sets out to “tell the story” as completely as possible; it does not structure the narrative along the lines of framing, overarching questions or problems. Those questions that do emerge tend to be narrowly focused and are found within individual chapters: Why did the government seek to accommodate rather than stand above the racism of radical groups such as Golubev's? What exactly was the prosecution's charge to the jury? Who came up with the wording, and so forth? In the final chapter Levin speculates as to who the real killer of Andrei Iushchinskii might have been, pointing intriguingly to the arrest and prosecution in late 1913 of a serial murderer of boys, but arguing that, in the end—just as a century ago—the most plausible theory of the crime is that he was killed by Vera Cheberiak's gang. Levin also shows some diligent detective work of his own in tracking down the fates of the main characters in the investigation and trial following the October Revolution of 1918. And though he writes in the end of the persistence of the ritual murder accusation in Nazi Germany, Poland, and Russia, he eschews the chance to offer a general conclusion or comprehensive argument.

What Levin does provide are some general observations in his preface that could serve as signposts for the direction of the larger work. Of these three stand out: (1) The persistence of a paranoid anti-Semitism among tsarist officials, “as evidenced by the some fourteen hundred different government statutes and regulations limiting where Jews could live, what schools they could attend, and which professions they could pursue” (xii); (2) The paradox of Russia's emulation of Western legal norms and judicial procedures on the one hand, and its willful perversion of these procedures and norms on the other. The state recognized that it had to produce expert witnesses (pathologists, clergymen, even a psychological profiler) and hew—at least minimally—to the standards and expectations of forensic science if it had any hope of producing a guilty verdict. In Levin's words, “that the methods of Western justice could be so perverted in the service of this case is part of what gives Mendel Beilis's story so much of its eerie resonance. The toxic mixture of the medieval and the modern was a formula whose destructive power would be fully realized in the heart of Europe a generation later” (xii); (3) The obtrusive involvement of high Russian officials in the case—up the chain of command, from investigating magistrates to regional prosecutors to imperial ministers, perhaps all the way to the tsar himself. “In all of its deceit, corruption, and sheer absurdity, the Beilis case powerfully illuminates the final chapter of the Romanov dynasty” (xiv).

Robert Weinberg, for his part, also limits his interpretive comments to the book's introduction. He indicates that he wishes in part to use the Beilis case to question what he sees as the scholarly consensus on the distinctive qualities of modern anti-Semitism, questioning the hard-and-fast distinction that one finds between modern anti-Semitism as primarily secular in content, and traditional, religiously inspired anti-Judaism. Mainstream scholarly literature, according to this reading, holds that in the nineteenth century “the theological motivation for much of medieval and early modern European Jew-hatred yielded to an antisemitism representing a backlash to the ideologies of liberalism and socialism, and the greater involvement of Jews in the politics, culture, and economies of Europe” (7).

Weinberg argues that the prosecution of Mendel Beilis challenges this traditional division between medieval and modern and in fact demonstrates the persistence of religious attitudes and prejudices, “even as Russian antisemitism began to acquire characteristics generally associated with the modern variants of Jew-hatred” (7–8). Evoking the work of Jacob Katz, he adds that both kinds of anti-Semitism worked to influence and reinforce each other. True enough, though not particularly surprising. The question is how much this perspective advances our understanding of the modern ritual murder accusation. (Here I should point out that Weinberg also enumerates other factors that he feels were in play: Jewish religious practices, including purity and dietary laws; bizarre folk beliefs regarding Jews, such as the claim that Jewish males menstruated; the interest of Silver Age spiritualists and writers in Jewish mystical symbolism and belief; and the anxieties of turn-of-century racial anti-Semites that Jews did not wish so much to consume Christian blood as to pollute the gene pool through the mixing of blood.)

Weinberg offers a second revisionist argument against historiographical orthodoxy when he considers the role and motivations of the tsarist government in pursuing the prosecution of Mendel Beilis. Historians, he argues, have tended to portray Beilis not only as the victim of a failing government that was perfectly content to deploy anti-Semitism as a political weapon to prop up the regime, but also as one who was deliberately framed for the crime. The tsarist government knew that it was putting an innocent man on trial. Indeed it hoped to provoke a violent response as punishment for the involvement of Jews in revolutionary politics or as a deterrent to efforts to abolish the Pale of Settlement. Weinberg refers to scholarship over the past fifty years that has demonstrated that the tsarist officialdom was not monolithic, but rather, often very divided in opinion and on policy. Nor did the government seek to organize anti-Jewish violence in response to the trial; indeed quite the opposite was true. Beilis's main problem may, in fact, have been that he fell victim to a police force and judiciary “intent on preserving law and order” at all cost, even if this meant bowing to the pressure of anti-Semites (who threatened to attack Jews) (12–13). The discussion here is nuanced, since Weinberg also argues that the historical record leaves no doubt that Beilis was framed and that prosecutors and investigators suborned perjury, meaning that this element, at least, of the conventional historical (and popular) consensus is correct! What is not correct? Primarily the contention that the tsarist government conspired in advance to arrest and convict a Jew on the basis of the ritual murder accusation. Also that the government did so in order to prop itself up against external political and social pressures. And finally, that it sought to provoke anti-Jewish violence—as a diversion or for whatever other reason.

Given the nature of the evidence, Weinberg writes, it is impossible to determine with certainty the motivations of government officials who conspired to frame Beilis. This is especially true for the minister of justice, Shcheglovitov, who ultimately approved the plot and may have brought it to the attention of Nicholas II (who, in any case, did not object). It may well be that Shcheglovitov hoped that the prosecution of Beilis would, in Weinberg's words, “provide the regime with the ideological bulwark that would justify autocratic principles, values, and policies, particularly toward the Jews,” but one cannot be sure (13). One can speak with greater confidence, however, concerning the motives of those Kievan officials, such as the prosecutor Chaplinskii, who engineered the conspiracy. Here the evidence suggests that fringe right-wing elements conspired with anti-Semitic deputies in the Duma (who had the ear of the minister of justice) and prevailed upon Chaplinskii to put together a case against Beilis embracing the theory of ritual murder. Apparently Golubev and his group “assumed that the successful prosecution of Beilis for ritual murder would please Nicholas II and generate support for the regime by providing ‘proof’ of the evil and duplicitous nature of the Jews, thereby justifying the antisemitic policies of the autocracy in the face of condemnation on the world stage” (13).

One cannot help but notice how close this reading of the organization and direction of the prosecution is to the conventional historiography, which Weinberg is eager to push aside. There was a conspiracy, there was prosecutorial malfeasance, and at least tacit approval from the highest levels of the government. The distinction seems to be that the conspiracy's origins did not lie in the government itself, and that the government may have gone along with this line of investigation and prosecution reluctantly. But once the plan was put in place, officials went to great lengths—including the perversion of justice—to see it through. Moreover, the apparent motivations of both the right-wing agitators and government officials seem to have been very similar to those articulated by earlier historians: to prop up the regime and to justify its anti-Jewish policies.

On October 28, 1913, the presiding judge, Fyodor Boldyrev, instructed the jury to respond to two questions. The first was directed at the nature of the crime: that is to say, was the prosecution's characterization of the murder of Andrei Iuschinskii and the condition of the corpse correct? The second question asked whether Mendel Beilis and “persons not yet discovered” were guilty of having perpetrated the murder. Both Levin and Weinberg give serious attention to the judge's charge—which flowed from the second indictment of May 1912, under which the trial was held—as well as to the jury's verdict: both lie at the heart of how the Beilis affair is ultimately to be understood. Famously, as many know, the jury agreed with the prosecution that the murder bore the markings of a ritual crime. The state's wording spoke of the various wounds to the boy's head and neck produced by a “pointed instrument” and to the “abundant bleeding” that ensued—characterized in the document as “five glasses of blood.” As to the second question, regarding Beilis's guilt or innocence, the jury returned a verdict of “not guilty.” The split decision was widely understood at the time to be an endorsement of the accusation of Jewish ritual murder even if the culprit in this particular case did not happen to be Mendel Beilis. Upon hearing news of the verdict, Tsar Nicholas is said to have remarked: “It is certain that there was a ritual murder. But I am happy that Beilis was acquitted, for he is innocent.” The anti-Semitic newspaper the Double-Headed Eagle put it more succinctly, proclaiming simply, “One Jew Is Acquitted, All Kikes Are Found Guilty.”

Neither author strays far from this reading of the event, describing the communications that went back and forth between St. Petersburg and Kiev and the sense of impending doom in some quarters that the government was about to lose the case. From this perspective, it is reasonable to view the judge's instructions as a desperate effort to save face and, perhaps, an act of defiance directed at Western opinion. But there are important facets of the verdict that deserve to be noted. The first has to do with what the state was asking the jury to confirm in the first question. While suggestive of a ritual crime, the question maintained a degree of critical distance; nowhere did it contain the words “ritual” or “religion,” “Jewish” or “Christian.” The jury, moreover, had just been subjected to several days of forensic testimony by expert witnesses for the prosecution. Who were they to contradict the government experts? (Remarkably it seems that five of the twelve did just that.) The one occasion in which the jury was asked to render an explicit verdict on the ritual nature of the crime was in connection with the second question, which asked whether Mendel Beilis and his unknown accomplices colluded “to deprive out of religious fanaticism the boy Andrei Iuschinskii, thirteen years old, of his life?” (Weinberg, 162). On this crucial point, the only explicit reference to ritual murder as well as to Beilis's presumed guilt, the jury said no. The only conclusion to draw is that the tsarist government had suffered a humiliating loss of prestige. A clear defeat.