Menahem Mendel Beilis - The Trial

The Trial

During the pre-trial period in 1911−1912 the investigation was conducted by Nikolay Krasovsky (Николай Александрович Красовский), the foremost investigator of the Kiev Police Department. Krasovsky forsook any prospect of promotion and continued his investigation in spite of resistance and sabotage from the circles interested in railroading Beilis; he eventually refused to participate in the outright falsification of the case and was fired.

Krasovsky continued his investigation privately, assisted by his former colleagues from the Kiev Police Department. They eventually were able to determine the actual killers of Yushchinsky, who were professional criminals: Rudzinsky, Singayevsky, Latyshev, and Vera Cheberyak, whose son Yevgeny was a friend of Yushchinsky's.

On 30–31 May 1912, reports were published in Kiev's newspapers. Immediately after this, Krasovsky was arrested on charges of official misuse allegedly committed in 1903 but acquitted by a court.

The Beilis trial took place in Kiev from September 25 through October 28, 1913. The prosecution was composed of the government's best lawyers. Professor Sikorsky of Kiev State University (father of Igor Sikorsky, the inventor of the helicopter), a medical psychologist, testified as an expert witness for the prosecution that in his opinion it was a case of ritual murder.

Beilis had a strong alibi that resulted, ironically, from his habit of working on the Jewish Sabbath. Yushchinsky was abducted on a Saturday morning, and Beilis was then at work, as confirmed by his Gentile co-workers in trial testimony. Receipt slips for the shipment of bricks, signed by Beilis that morning, were produced in evidence. The prosecution was forced to argue that Beilis could have ducked out for a few minutes, kidnapped Yushchinsky, and then returned to work.

One prosecution witness, presented as a religious expert in Judaic rituals, was a Catholic priest, Justinas Pranaitis from Tashkent, well known for his antisemitic 1892 work Talmud Unmasked. Pranaitis testified that the murder of Yushchinsky was a religious ritual, associating the murder of Yushchinsky with the blood libel, a hoax believed by many Russians at the time. One police department official is quoted as saying:

The course of the trial will depend on how the ignorant jury will perceive arguments of priest Pranaitis, who is sure about the reality of ritual murders. I think, as a priest he is able to talk with peasants and to convince them. As a scientist, who defended a thesis about this question, he will give props to the court and prosecution, though nothing can be guessed in advance yet. I became acquainted with Pranaitis and am firmly convinced that he is the person who knows the problem, about which he will talk, in depth... Everything, then, will depend on which arguments priest Pranaitis will furnish, and he has them, and they're shattering for the Jewry.

Beilis was represented by the most able counsels of the Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kiev bars: Vasily Maklakov, Oscar Gruzenberg, N. Karabchevsky, A. Zarudny, and D. Grigorovitch-Barsky. Two prominent Russian professors, Troitsky and Kokovtzov, spoke on behalf of the defense in praise of Jewish values and exposed the falsehood of the accusations, while professor of Kiev Theological Seminary Orthodox Christian philosopher Alexander Glagolev affirmed that "the Law of Moses forbids spilling human blood and using any blood in general in food." The well-known and respected Rabbi of Moscow, Rabbi Mazeh, delivered a long, detailed speech quoting passages from the Torah, the Talmud and many other books to conclusively debunk the testimony of the prosecution "experts".

The lamplighter, on whose testimony the indictment of Beilis rested, confessed that he had been confused by the secret police.

Pranaitis' credibility rapidly evaporated when the defense demonstrated his ignorance of some simple Talmudic concepts and definitions, such as hullin, to the point where "many in the audience occasionally laughed out loud when he clearly became confused and couldn't even intelligibly answer some of the questions asked by my lawyer." A Tsarist secret police agent is quoted, reporting on Pranaitis' testimony, as saying:

Cross-examination of Pranaitis has weakened evidentiary value of his expert opinion, exposing lack of knowledge of texts, insufficient knowledge of Jewish literature. Because of amateurish knowledge and lack of resourcefulness, Pranaitis' expert opinion is of very low value. Professors Troitskij and Kokovtsev, who were interrogated today, gave conclusions which are exceptionally positive for the defence, praising doctrines of the Jewish religion, and not accepting even a possibility of a religious murder by Jews ... Vipper thinks that acquittal is possible.

The prosecution's case was further undermined after it had spent a great deal of effort to link the 13 wounds which Professor Sikorsky had discovered on a part of the murdered boy's body with the importance of the number thirteen in "Jewish ritual," only to have it revealed later that there were actually 14 wounds on that part of the body.

The chief prosecutor A.I. Vipper made antisemitic statements in his closing address. There are conflicting accounts of the 12 Christian jurors: seven were members of the notorious Union of the Russian People, also known as the Black Hundreds. There was no single representative of the intelligentsia in the jury. However after deliberating for several hours, the jury acquitted Beilis.