Over the past few months, because of its centenary, the case of Mendel
Beilis has been the subject of several conferences and seminars, as well as
television documentaries in the Ukraine.
Like the Dreyfus Affair a decade earlier in France (from 1894 through to
1906), the allegations against Beilis and the charge that he was responsible
for the ritual murder of a young boy, became a cause célèbre and exposed the deep and divisive roots of
anti-Semitism in Czarist Russia.
There are a few significant differences between these two instances in
which a Jew is accused of a crime he didn’t commit and brought to trial. Alfred Dreyfus was a young military officer
on his way up through the ranks and was serving in the intelligence service of
the French Army when he was charged with treason and espionage: a single
document indicated that someone in the department had offered to sell state
secrets to the German Embassy in Paris.
As soon as Dreyfus’s name appeared on a list of possible suspects, the
men in charge noticed he was a Jew—the only one in the department—and that was
enough to make him seem guilty. A
military tribunal held a trial in which basic procedures were ignored or
perverted, not least withholding evidence from the defence lawyer, but also
including teasing references to other documents too sensitive to be exposed in
an open court. As a Jew, Dreyfus was
found guilty because it was unanimously decided that no Jew could be loyal to
the French Republic. Later after his
conviction, when he was sent off to Devil’s Island in isolation for the term of
his life, various forgeries were constructed to bolster the case in the event a
retrial was ordered—as it was indeed in 1899; so that, although a civilian
panel of judges had found the whole first court martial unsafe and ordered a
second court martial to clear Dreyfus’s name, when that tribunal met in Rennes,
not only were all the forgeries presented, but many witnesses perjured
themselves, and thus the defendant was found guilty a second time, albeit with
extenuating circumstances and no unanimous verdict. Within a few days, however, a new government
more sympathetic to the Dreyfus cause, issued a pardon which was accepted on
the grounds of poor health and the possibility of Dreyfus pursuing further
legal steps to clear his name fully.
Throughout the period from 1894, Dreyfus’s family, especially his
brothers and sisters, and his wife Lucie, pressed for a re-trial. Thanks to Emile Zola’s public letter J’accuse (I Accuse) in 1898, more and
more Frenchmen and women pushed to quash the conviction, so that eventually by
1906 there was a nearly complete exoneration of Alfred’s name.
Though many of the principle participants in the outrageous cover-ups
and false testimonies died before that exoneration or were granted pre-emptive
pardons, there were three major consequences.
First, as public opinion turned increasingly towards belief in Dreyfus’s
innocence, the government of France shifted radically to the left, to an
anti-clerical position, which resulted in a separation of Church and State, and
to a more anti-militarist stance. Thus
second, when the First World War broke out, France was not fully prepared to
meet the German invasion, having lost many of its experienced generals. Dreyfus himself, who had retired from the
army, went back into service in 1914 and remained active until 1918, but never
received the recognition his age and training deserved. At one point when he requested an assignment
on the Western Front, his superiors snidely wrote that they weren’t sure on
which side he would fight, the French or the German. Then the third consequence was that in the
1930s, as anti-Semitic parties and movements grew in France, grudges by the surviving
anti-Dreyfusists flourished, and when the Germans occupied the north of France
and a defeatist Vichy regime was set up in the south, many of the same figures
who had slandered Dreyfus came to power and initiated anti-Jewish actions to
take revenge on those who had favoured the pardon and the exoneration.
In my three book-length studies of the Affair and the central characters
of Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus, I have tried to show that what happened occurred
because of the changes in sensibility that were in progress in western
Europe—in the arts, in science, in philosophy, as well as in politics—and that
the Affair itself would not have turned out the way it did had not Alfred and
his wife been as strong-willed and as intellectually aware of their world as they
were. The Beilis case is important too
but its central figure, Mendel, was a more passive victim of events, and the
consequences of the false charges against him were swallowed up by subsequent
history. His, unfortunately, was neither
the last of the long line of such slanders thrown at the Jews collectively nor
the most important, as current anti-Israeli propaganda accuses the whole of the
State of Israel and all of the Jewish people of deliberately murdering little
children—and of a genocide against the Palestinians.
The Beilis case, well-known, albeit through a darkened prism, to readers
of Bernard Malamud’s novel The Fixer,
has a somewhat different trajectory in history.
It begins in 1911 with the discovery of a boy’s corpse near Kiev. Initial investigations by the local police honed
in on a gang of thieves, but quickly there was interference from the Black
Hundreds, a nationalist anti-Semitic movement, and various officials obedient
to the Czar himself. The case was diverted into a hunt for the Jewish
perpetrators of a Blood Libel, the ritual murder of the boy to use his blood in
the making of Passover matzoh. Mendel
Beilis, an accountant in a brick works near to the site of the cave where the
body was found, was chosen as the scapegoat for the crime, and he was accused
not of a simple murder but of a collective action. Unable to find other conspirators, after
almost a year and a half while he was kept in dreadful conditions in prison,
the Czarist officials were forced to put Mendel on trial by himself. Meanwhile, in the big cities of Russia and
around Europe, and even in North America, both Jewish and non-Jewish protests
against the trumped up charges were held.
When the prosecuting attorneys called other anti-Jewish witnesses to
prove the case against Beilis and the reality of the blood libel, the speeches
were so preposterous and lacking in any evidence whatsoever, the world
laughed. Nevertheless, the jury made up
mostly of simple peasants and small town merchants, listened carefully to both
sides. In the end, they found Beilis
innocent of the murder but found that a Jewish ritual killing had taken place by
person or persons unknown. Beilis was
freed and then took his family out of Russia and went to settle in what was
then known as Palestine, and then eventually moved to New York where he died in
1934, the year before Dreyfus’s own death.
Though he was acquitted of the charges against him, Beilis was unable to
prove that the collective guilt of the Jews was a myth. In the next few years, the Great War and the
Russian Revolution overcame concern for this incident in Czarist history. Beilis wrote a memoire of his experiences
which appeared in Yiddish and that has only recently been translated in English
and made available to the public. To a
great extent, had it not been for Malamud’s novel, there would have been little
public interest in what happened in Kiev from 1911 to 1913. The
Fixer fictionalizes the case, universalizes it, and changes many of the
specific details, from the name and personality of the central character—Yakov
Bok is not at all like Mendel Beilis, the sequence of the police investigation
and the procedures of the court are very different from the historical
evidence.
These differences have offended the family of Beilis in recent years and
they and some scholars interested in the truth have argued strongly for a
rectification of the way most people have come to view the episode Rather than the wringing of hands in despair
at what has transpired, with Malamud’s version—and the film made from it in
1968 by director John Frankheimer and starring Alan Bates as Yakov Bok—replacing
in many ways the historical life of Mendel Beilis, it might be better to argue
that all future editions of the novel contain an introduction or epilogue that
sets the record straight, a list of further readings, or even a selection of
historical documents to show where and how Malamud transformed the facts into a
profound work of fiction. As remarked at
the start, due to the persistence of Mendel’s grandson Jay Beilis, the whole
case has not been allowed to fade away behind the shadow of The Fixer. Today more and more attention is turned on
what really happened and why. Mendel is
also receiving the honors he deserves for what he and his family went through.
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