Thread by @IzaTabaro

One of the great things about Twitter is that you get to meet amazing people here you’d never meet otherwise. (Yes, I choose to be positive!) One such person I just met is @beilis_jay, grandson of Mendel Beilis of the Beilis Trial fame. jpost.com/Jewish-World/J… 1/

Beilis was a 39-year old father of five living in Kyiv in late 19th-early 20th century. His 1913 blood libel trial captivated the world. He was charged with ritual murder—the killing of a 13-year-old Christian boy to use his blood in the making of matzah. 2/

In this Easter/Passover week, as images of Polish villagers beating up an effigy of a Jew & libelous allegations against the IDF are circulating on Twitter, it’s especially timely to recall this story. The violence against Jews associated with these holidays was all too real. 3/

Beilis was set up by a group of thieves who were looking to incite citywide pogroms b/c they richly benefitted from the previous ones. They found support among members of Black Hundreds—a viciously antisemitic ultranationalist organization.4/

Tzar Nicholas II himself apparently expressed satisfaction that a Jew was at fault in the murder case.

Beilis was acquitted but not until he spent 2 years in jail under terrible conditions, losing his health as he awaited trial. 5/

But this is also a story of courage—his own & that of courageous Christian gentiles. Among them was detective Krasovsky, who chose to lose his position (he was dismissed when it became clear that he wasn’t buying into the official version) rather than implicate an innocent man 6/

In fact, from Beilis’s memoirs it appears that quite a number of gentiles were on his side, believing that he was framed.This part of the story—& the fact that, despite official pressure, he was exonerated by an all-Christian jury—is a ray of light in this story. 7/

Years after his release, Beilis, who had moved to Palestine & ultimately settled in the US, wrote a memoir. I highly recommend it. It’s a page turner & offers a rare glimpse into what it was like to be a Jew in the Russian Empire on the eve of WWI: amazon.com/Blood-Libel-Me… 8/

What jumps out at me in his memoir is how clearly Beilis understood that the trial was not just about him & that if he was found guilty, the lives of all of Kyiv Jewry would be in danger. The whole case was a “frame-up on the entire Jewish people,” he wrote. 9/

“One thing I always had before me: the shameful charge of ritual murder must be wiped off the good name of the Jewish nation. It was my fate, it had to be done through me, & in order to be effected, I had to remain alive,” he wrote. 10/

“I had to exercise every ounce of power, I had to suffer all without murmuring, but the enemies of my people would not triumph... The world would know the truth—the world would know me innocent & the Jewish nation unspotted by the terrible calumnies brought forth by its enemies.”

“A Jew was to be imprisoned in order that the Jews might remember the case for generations to come,” Beilis wrote. It appears though that after his acquittal, pogroms were unleashed anyway,which only goes to show that no real reason is needed for anti-Jewish violence to happen.12

You can also watch his story as told in this film about Russian Jews, starting with min 58. (I have issues w/the film as a whole but @beilis_jay endorses the telling of his family’s story here.) 13/

When Mendel Beilis died in 1934, 4000 people came to his funeral at the Eldridge Street Synagogue on NY’s Lower East Side. His life & trial undoubtedly had an impact. As @beilis_jay noted in the JPost article, the trial caused many Jews to leave the Russian Empire. 14/

This ultimately saved them from the revolutionary violence (200,000 Jews died in pogroms during the Russian Civil War), famines, Stalin’s repressions & ultimately the Holocaust, which wiped out 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine alone. 15/

Although this was the last state-sponsored blood libel trial in Europe, Beilis’s story, with the blood libel accusations at the heart of it, remains, unfortunately, all too relevant today. 16/16