The Beilis Ritual Murder Trial

Cardozo School of Law
The Beilis Ritual Murder Trial and the Culture of Apocalypse

Author(s): Harriet Murav
Source: Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Autumn - Winter, 2000), pp.
243-263
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Cardozo School of Law
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The Beilis Ritual Murder Trial
and the Culture ofApocalypse
Harriet Murav
In March 1911 in Kiev, the body of a thirteen-year-old boy, Andrei

Iushchinskii, was found in a cave. Soviet scholar Alexandr Tager, who
used archives closed until 1917, showed that Iushchinskii was murdered
by a gang of thieves headed by Vera Cheberiak because the gang believed
Iushchinskii was going to inform the police about them. Iushchinskii and
Cheberiak's son were friends. Vera Cheberiak was arrested and released in
July of the same year, at which time Mendel Beilis was arrested. Beilis had
been identified as the "man with the black beard," whom witnesses
claimed they saw with Iushchinskii. He was a clerk at a brick factory on
the territory of which Iushchinskii's body was found. Beilis was tried in
1913. The indictment charged that he had committed the murder "out of
religious fanaticism, for ritual purposes."' Two questions were put to the
jury. The first suggested that the murder had been committed in such a
way as to allow the perpetrator to harvest the maximum amount of blood
from the victim's body. The language of the question implied that the
purpose was to consume the blood. The question asked whether it had
been shown that Iushchinskii had been subjected to wounds which pro-
duced "five glasses of blood" and then subjected to a second series of
wounds which killed him and left his body in a state of "almost complete
bloodlessness." The second question was whether Beilis was guilty of the
crime. The jury, consisting mostly of peasants, answered "yes" to the first
question, but acquitted Beilis.2 The jury's finding left open the possibili-
ty that ritual murder had been committed.
The government's case against Beilis is easily interpreted as a politi-
cally expedient form of anti-Semitism. Some historians maintain that the
Beilis trial was part of the greatly weakened tsarist government's effort to
maintain a strong sense of national identity by defining Jews as alien and
harmful to Russia. Tager argues that the government transformed a mur-
der case into a ritual murder accusation for political purposes: as a weapon
in its struggle against the revolutionary movement, as a way of justifying
243
government sponsored pogroms, and in order to suppress plans in the
Duma to lift some of the highly restrictive legal measures against Jews
(including the Pale of Settlement itself), and to strengthen its ties to the
nobility.3 Hans Rogger offers a different version of these arguments, sug-
gesting that the Beilis case came not so much from the center as from the
periphery of early twentieth century Russian political movements: a "few
honest maniacs," as he puts it, who worked together with a few "unsuc-
cessful politicians" in the absence of a "grand design."4
In contrast to this approach, the Russian scholar L. E Katsis examines
the 1913 Beilis trial in its broad cultural context.5 He avoids treating the
Beilis case as a simple instance of politically expedient anti-Semitism by
considering the cultural support for the case - not in terms of broad
stereotypes about Jews - but in terms of a specific kind of elite cultural
production at the beginning of the twentieth century. Katsis shows that
the Symbolists and the Decadents, the leading figures of the so-called
Silver Age in Russia, as well as other members of the upper layers of the
Russian intelligentsia of the time, were engaged in the pursuit of a par-
ticular kind of mystical knowledge and experience that provided a context
for the ritual murder charge against Beilis. Katsis argues that the work of
V. V. Rozanov, a philosopher and a writer associated with the Symbolists
and the Decadents, gave support for the ritual murder charge in the form
of alleged special knowledge of secret Jewish practices.
The charge of ritual murder was not limited to Jews. In 1892 mem-
bers of the Udmurt ethnic group (known at the time as the Votiak) were
accused of killing a beggar in order to use parts of his body in service to
their gods. The case was known by the name of the settlement in which
the accused peasants lived, namely, Multan. The region had been annexed
to Russia in the late fifteenth and the early sixteenth centuries. The
Multan human sacrifice case attracted the attention of the writer V. G.
Korolenko, who wrote a series of articles describing the mishandling of
the matter by the prosecution and the police. The defense was interrupt-
ed by the prosecutor; it was not permitted to call all its witnesses and not
permitted to question them on all relevant matters.' These and other vio-
lations of procedure led to a second trial and an appeal, at which the
conviction of the Multan peasants was finally overturned. The well-
known liberal jurist A. E Koni made the final speech at the appeal,
emphasizing the far-ranging implications of the case. According to Koni,
244
the charge against the Multan peasants was not only an indictment of a
few individuals, but of an entire people, and furthermore, an indictment
of all Russia. Koni said that correct procedure must be scrupulously
observed in all legal matters, but in this case in particular because in mak-
ing its judgment the court was assessing whether Russia had fulfilled its
"Christian-cultural and civilizing mission" in the region.' Koni suggested
that if the Multan peasants were guilty of human sacrifice, then Russia
was guilty of failing to civilize them.
The particular nature of the Multan case led Koni to reflect on the
intersection of law, culture, and power. The court was pronouncing sen-
tence on Russian culture as a whole. Law, to use Peter Goodrich's
language, is fully imbricated in "surrounding discourses and socio-politi-
cal practices."8 The 1913 ritual murder trial of Mendel Beilis offers a
unique opportunity to reconsider the problem of how legal discourse and
other forms of cultural production interact.
One of the reasons that the Beilis case is so important for the study
of law and culture is that the Symbolist and the Decadent writers were
themselves conscious of, and some troubled by, the possible connection
between their own and Rozanov's work and hence their connection to the
ritual murder charge. They raised questions about the legal and the polit-
ical consequences of cultural discourse, or, to use the language of the
time, the relation of the "word" to the "deed." These writers came face to
face with problems of law and literature - not as theoreticians, but as
participants in a cultural discourse whose legal implications appalled
them. They made their anxieties clear in a public discussion, which took
the form of a trial of sorts, at which Rozanov played the role of defendant.
The 1913 Kiev trial may be seen as the staging of two competing legal
performances: the trial of the single defendant, Mendel Beilis, and the
trial of the collective body of the Jews. It generated more trials: the quasi-
trial of Rozanov and new ritual murder trials. The article attempts to trace
the intersections of these discourses and practices, focusing first on the rit-
ual murder charge against Beilis. I then consider the theme of blood
sacrifice in the Symbolist literature of the period and its relation to ritual
murder discourse. Finally, I examine how Rozanov and his peers under-
stood the legal implications of their discourse and the law's capacity to
regulate it.
245
I. Ritual Murder: A Dogma of Blood
In the Beilis case, the basis for the ritual blood murder charge was
threefold. First was the questionable medical evidence that the wounds
were inflicted in order to torture the victim and to produce the greatest
possible quantity of blood. Second, the act of indictment relied on psy-
chological and anthropological findings of Dr. Ivan Sikorskii, a
psychiatrist and a professor at Kiev University. The indictment para-
phrased Sikorskii, who alleged that based on historical and
anthropological considerations, and judging from the way the murder
was committed, that is, the gradual extraction of the victim's blood from
his body, that the crime showed a similarity to other murders in Russia
and elsewhere. Its psychological basis was, according to Professor Sikorskii
(here the indictment directly quotes him), "the racial revenge and vendet-
ta of the sons of Jacob" against subjects of another race.9
Third, the act of indictment used the religious expertise of the
Catholic priest Justin Pranaitis, who testified that a "dogma of blood"
exists among the Jews. The rabbis, according to Pranaitis, notwith-
standing the differences among their schools, are united in their hatred
of non-Jews, whom the Talmud considers less than human. According
to Pranaitis, hatred for Christians is particularly intense. He said that
the Jews hold a mystical belief that the killing of non-Jews hastens the
coming of the Messiah. Pranaitis testified that a special method must
be used for the killing, which is detailed in the main Jewish mystical
text, the Zohar. The victim's mouth must be closed, and twelve plus
one stabs with the knife must be made. Pranaitis drew the attention of
the magistrate to the fact that Iushchinskii's mouth was bound and that
there were thirteen wounds in the area of his right temple. Relying on
a work published in 1803 by a converted Jew, Neophytos, Pranaitis
detailed the multiple ways in which Jews allegedly used Christian
blood: as a cure for the skin and eye diseases Jews usually suffer from;
at weddings, circumcisions, funerals; and in their Passover matzo.
Notwithstanding this widespread use of blood, not all Jews know about
it: the knowledge of ritual blood use is passed down from generation
to generation under great secrecy. The charge against Beilis specifies
that he committed the murder motivated by "religious fanaticism" and
for "ritual purposes."10 The prosecution explicitly called upon medical,
246
anthropological, and theological expertise in order to make its case
against Beilis and the Jews.
II. Rozanov
The theme of secrecy and the mystical-redemptive significance

attached to the Iushchinskii murder were of great importance to the
Russian writer Vasilii Rozanov. One of the most provocative and contro-
versial writers in this period, Rozanov, called the "Russian Nietzsche," was
known primarily for his writings on sex and Jews." Rozanov preached the
sanctity of sex and extolled the emphasis on sexuality that he argued was
key to Biblical and rabbinic Judaism. According to Rozanov, the Jews pos-
sess the secret to true knowledge of the divine because they sanctify sex and
the body. The sign of God's covenant with Israel is cut into the male sex-
ual organ. Rozanov's analysis of the Hebrew Bible concludes that Israel is
essentially a people of the "flesh" (plot). Circumcision, the central rite of
Biblical Judaism, not only signifies, but embodies, the human, fleshly link
to the divine in the form of sacrifice (that is, the cut off piece of flesh). The
circumcised male is "betrothed" to God, and at the same time, betrothed
to the female; his circumcision, which leaves a ring in his flesh, symbolizes
his human sexuality. Israel is rewarded for its sacrifices with fertility.
III. Hebrew: A Guilty Language
In a series of articles written and published - during the 1911-1913

Beilis case - separately as "The Olfactory and Tactile Relation of Jews to
Blood (Oboniatel'noe i osiazatel'noe otnoshenie evreev k krovi)," Rozanov
transformed his theory of carnal Judaism, arguing that blood was not only
central to the sacrificial system of the ancient temple, but remained cen-
tral in modern Jewish practice. "The Secret Writing of the Jews"
(Iudeiskaia tainopis), originally published in 1911, alleges that the very
manner in which the Hebrew language is written - that is, with conso-
nants only - shows that the Hebrew Bible is a code written to conceal
the conspiracy of the Jews to perform blood sacrifice. In a grotesque
metaphor, Rozanov compares the consonants to bones, "plain for all to
see." He likens the vowels to the blood that is kept secret. But it is the
blood both literally and figuratively - the blood of sacrifice and the
blood of the vowels - that give the Hebrew scriptures life. Rozanov does
247
not explicitly say so, but it seems he is drawing out a contrast between the
Christians, for whom the "spirit" gives life, and the Jews, for whom,
according to him, blood gives life. In his closing statement, one of Beilis's
lawyers pointed out that other Semitic languages, in addition to Hebrew,
rely on a consonantal system.
IV Writing on the Body
Rozanov uses his own alleged knowledge of the Jews' secret writing in
another sense. Pranaitis, as we saw, testified that there was a link between
the thirteen wounds on Iushchinskii's face and the Zohar. Rozanov argues
that the shape and the distribution of the wounds reveal a code of letters
- each letter standing for a word, and the words taken together forming
a magical sentence stating that this was a sacrificial victim to God. The
writing of these letters in the flesh of the innocent victim Iushchinskii was
an act of practical magic. It gave the perpetrators power and furthermore,
according to Rozanov, the inscription of each letter itself released the
power of God's emanations (the sefirot). In 1913, the same year as the
Beilis trial, Russian experimental poets were developing theories of the
transrational meaning of language, and were writing poetry consisting
only of consonants. John Bowlt notes that in the years 1912-1914, "a
number of the Moscow cubo-futurists... painted their faces and other
parts of their bodies with cryptic messages, codes, and ceremonial images
of animals." Bowlt argues that in imitating the tattooing practices of
primitive societies, the cubo-futurists were also imitating the attempts of
their predecessors to "establish contact with a divinity."12 Among the signs
used was the Star of David. I suggest that Rozanov adapted avant-garde
experimentation with the "magic of words" (the title of an essay written
by Symbolist Andrei Belyi) for his own purposes.
In an article published on October 13, 1913, while the Beilis trial was
ongoing, entitled "Andriusha Iushchinskii," Rozanov agrees with
Sikorskii's assessment that the wounds inflicted on the victim show that
they were carried out by Jews. Russians, says Rozanov, slit throats and
smash heads, but someone methodically "without anger or fear" (here
Rozanov cites printed versions of Sikorskii's testimony) inflicted thirteen
wounds on Iushchinskii with a rhomboid shaped instrument. Rozanov,
however, did not elaborate on Sikorskii's racialistic pseudo-science, but
248
instead emphasized the sacrificial nature of the crime. Just as the body
requires the circulation of blood, so the collective body of Israel requires
sacrifice in order to sustain itself as such."' Rozanov concluded that it did
not matter whether Beilis committed the crime or not, indeed "individu-
ally, no one is responsible for Iushchinskii."'14 This resonates with the
jury's finding at the trial: the murder had left the body in a state of
"almost complete bloodlessness," but Beilis was innocent.
Part of Rozanov's argument about the Beilis case had to do with his
interpretation of the Jewish ritual of circumcision, which, according to
Rozanov, was a form of blood sacrifice."5 Rozanov writes that the mohel,
who cuts the infant's foreskin, extracts as much blood as possible from the
penis - using his fingernails for the purpose - and sucks the blood with
his mouth, allowing the blood to drip into a bowl, so that he and those
participating in the ceremony can wash their faces with a mixture of this
blood, wine, and narcotics.16 Rozanov underscores this point: "Around
the tongue and lips of the mohel is the infant's blood, he feels it, hot,
sticky, read, arterial - it must be arterial, and not the black blood of the
veins, according to the general law and method of all Jewish sacrifice.""17
As Laura Engelstein writes, the homoerotic element introduced here
relates to Rozanov's argument elsewhere about the centrality of the phal-
lus in Jewish culture and the heightened sexual vitality of the Jews."8 As
Engelstein puts it, according to Rozanov, Jewish religious initiation took
"the form of fellatio between men."
There may be another dimension to this point. For the writers with
whom Rozanov associated and Rozanov himself, homosexuality and les-
bianism were behaviors to be explored in literature and in life. According
to M. M. Prishvin's 1914 diary, Rozanov was the object of a homosexual
attraction. Prishvin writes that Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, a philosopher and
a poet who admired Rozanov's work but opposed him on the Beilis case,
was in love with Rozanov.19 I will have more to say about Merezhkovskii
later. Both Rozanov and Merezhkovskii were described by their peers as
not quite masculine. Rozanov's picture of the bloody fellatio of Jewish
circumcision, published in 1913, may be seen as a grotesque transforma-
tion of the homosexual erotics that he and his fellow artists had written
about elsewhere.
Rozanov's emphasis on the life giving nature of blood, and the link
between blood, sacrifice, and sexuality in Jewish ritual, presents a picture
249
of the Jew's body that sharply contrasts with the image of the weak, defi-
cient Jewish body found in ritual murder literature quoted by Pranaitis at
the Beilis trial. According to this literature, Jews suffer from a myriad of
diseases, including male blood flow, and an excessive blood flow at cir-
cumcisions. They suffer from a fundamental Jewish disease, the Jewish
stink, which marks them as enemies of Christ. They are forced to use
Christian blood as a therapy for their very condition of Jewishness.
Rozanov's emphasis on Jewish sexual vitality and fertility inverts this pic-
ture of the sickly Jew. What Rozanov described elsewhere as the
"womanish nature" of the Jews did not interfere with his insistence on
their heightened sexuality. The link between blood ritual and sexuality is
key to the Decadent literature of the period.
V Blood Fantasies of The Silver Age
Rozanov's erotic representation of the alleged blood rituals of the Jews

echoes the representation of blood rituals in the literary work of such early
twentieth century Russian writers as Zinaida Gippius and Fedor Sologub.
Best known in Russia and the west for his novel The Petty Demon,
Sologub's short story "The Redlipped Guest" describes the adventures of
a young aristocrat who falls under the spell of Lidiia Rotshtein, the
"redlipped guest" of the title. Tall, thin, pale, dressed in black, Lidiia, who
likes to be called Lilith, asks the hero for
only one drop of blood... With my lips, eternally thirsty,

like a vampire risen from the grave, I will bite into the
sweet flesh of my beloved and drink one drop of his
blood.20
Together with Gorkii and Leonid Andreev, Sologub participated in a vol-

ume titled The Shield, sharply critical of the government's prosecution of
the Beilis case. Sologub's explicitly political writing denies the reality of
Jewish ritual murder, but his fictitious Lidiia Rotshtein evokes the image
of the bloodthirsty, oversexed Jew. Sologub's Jewish vampire, a fashion-
able fin-de-sikcle Lilith, is one among many bloodthirsty literary heroines.
Zinaida Gippius's 1901 play, Sacred Blood (Sviataia krov), is a
retelling of the familiar Anderson tale of the mermaid who falls in love
with a prince. In Gippius's version, the mermaid, or rusalka, desires a
250
human soul and body and kills a saintly hermit in order to acquire them.
A witch brings her a knife with a long, thin blade and instructs her to
plunge it deeply into her victim, so that the blood will splatter on her, giv-
ing her human attributes. The heroine explains that she spilled blood in
order to "approach the One, Who called me."2' The murder is both a sac-
rifice and a means of transforming a supernatural and demonic creature
into a human being - that is, in the logic of the play - into a Christian.
In order to become a Christian, the rusalka must absorb Christian blood.
The charge made against the Jews in ritual murder literature was that they
needed Christian blood to cure themselves of their Jewishness. At the
1913 Beilis trial, the Catholic priest Justin Pranaitis testified that for Jews,
blood has magical qualities. According to Pranaitis, the rabbis, "hesitat-
ing" in their belief that Jesus was not the Messiah, "saved themselves" by
spilling and consuming Christian blood. In so doing they could become
like Christians.22
VI. Apocalypse
Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, philosopher and poet, husband of Zinaida

Gippius, spoke against the government prosecution of the Beilis case. Yet
Rozanov's influence on Merezhkovskii - notwithstanding their disagree-
ment about the Beilis case - is clear. In an essay entitled "Not Peace But
the Sword," published in 1914 after the conclusion of the Beilis trial,
Merezhkovskii wrote that Christianity had lost its sense of the "visible and
tactile reality of the Resurrection."23 The word "tactile" that Rozanov had
used in his "The Olfactory and Tactile Relation of Jews to Blood" appears
twice on the same page, both times in reference to what Merezhkovskii
describes as the real, living knowledge of the "Resurrected Flesh" held by
early Christians - in contrast to the lifeless doctrine that modern
Christians believe. Merezhkovskii writes that for his era, the "resurrected
Adonis and the resurrected Christ are not the real embodiment of a new
world order, but only an ideal symbol."24 He wanted to move beyond
symbols to the flesh, and described an approaching "Third Testament."
In this future age of "holy flesh" the earlier stages of human civilization
were to be recapitulated and transformed onto a higher plane. The earli-
er stages, according to Merezhkovskii, included human sacrifice practiced
by all ancient cults, including the Jews. This phase is what Merezhkovskii
251
calls the first testament, the first instantiation of the union between the
divine and the human, preserved in circumcision.
Merezhkovskii singled out Rozanov for special praise in this work
because Rozanov revealed the fundamental antithesis between the Old
and the New Testament, between an affirmation of the flesh and sexuali-
ty and their denial. For Merezhkovskii the coming Apocalypse means a
reconciliation between the two testaments and the creation of the third
testament - not God becoming man, but man becoming God - and an
affirmation, of "the world, the flesh, and the earth."25
Rozanov, according to Merezhkovskii, had no audience in the church;
his true audience was the new type of Russian writer, the so-called "deca-
dent." For Merezhkovskii, "decadence" was a way out of the sterile
positivism that had dominated Russian thought in the previous decades.
In the Decadent yearning to penetrate the mysteries that lay just beyond
the surface of life, Merezhkovskii saw a profound religious yearning, akin
to that found among the ordinary Russian people, for example, the sec-
tarians who gathered to interpret the Apocalypse and to ponder the
meaning of the number 666.26 The Decadents, the sectarians, and
Rozanov rejected "this world" and its institutions, the law courts, and the
established church. Merezhkovskii describes meetings held in 1909 in
Rozanov's apartment decorated with its Egyptian, Phrygian, and Italian
Renaissance art. The extreme right and the extreme left, churchmen,
Decadents, and revolutionaries gathered in discussions that, according to
Merezhkovskii, could have come straight out of Dostoevsky's Devils and
The Brothers Karamazov.27 The speeches, according to Merezhkovskii,
were more like prayers or prophecies: "anything was possible... a miracle
might take place... the union of all the warring factions might occur.'"28
Merezhkovskii cherished his own hopes for a transformed humankind of
the future, one in which the flesh would be holy. He saw in these meet-
ings the beginning of what he called the "third hypostasis" - that of the
holy flesh.
VII. Blood Communion
Rozanov saw evidence of a link between ancient rituals and modern
artistic practices at a party he attended in 1903. In the same book in

which Rozanov describes the horrors of circumcision, we also find an
252
account of a ceremony held at the home of Nikolai Minskii, a Jew and a
"Decadent" artist, an active member of the Religious-Philosophical meet-
ings. The Symbolist poet Valerii Briusov described Minskii as a person
who looked like a "spider (paukoobraznyi chelovek)" with a "slight Jewish
accent."29 As Rozanov describes it, a young Jewish woman held out her
arm, "from which either Minskii, or some one else drew out either by a
pin or penknife several drops of blood," and then doing the same to him-
self, mixed the blood with wine and distributed it to all present to drink.30
According to the noted British scholar Avril Pyman, it was Lidiia
Zinov'eva-Annibal, the author of a banned lesbian love story and the wife
of the Symbolist poet Viacheslav Ivanov, who initiated the so-called
"communion" by blood. According to Pyman, Lidiia "appeared at a party
given by Nikolai Minskii in a blood-red toga with sleeves rolled up like
an executioner to extract from the guests drops of 'sacrificial' blood."31 In
her memoir of Rozanov, Zinaida Gippius also describes this episode, but
puts it in the context of the "literary-aesthetic-mystical circles" that
Rozanov frequented at the time. She mentions, for example, the "bac-
chic" singing and round dances held at the Ivanovs' house, in which the
guests wore long robes and wreaths around their heads.32
For Rozanov, writing in 1913, the literary blood ritual underscored
the "olfactory and tactile relation of Jews to blood." Rozanov emphasizes
that the event took place at a "Jewish house, in primarily Jewish company
and [arose] in a Jewish brain."33 Rozanov writes that for the Minskii's, the
episode was a joke, without content, "proportional to the 20th century,
not a tragedy," not like the "mystical" tragedies of the distant and sacred
times of the Old Testament. But what is a comedy in Petersburg, Rozanov
continues, "somewhere in the backwaters of Vilnius... takes place seri-
ously, magnificently, and lyrically" (se'rezno, velikolepno ipesenno). Among
the Jews, according to Rozanov, atavism and inheritance shows, and the
ceremony at the Minskii's reveals the inheritance of ancient times in a
"palpable" and visible way.
Rozanov saw a connection between this instance of "decadent" ritual
and Jewish blood ritual. The various aesthetic and mystical projects of the
symbolists and Decadents - including literary descriptions of a height-
ened and supernatural sexuality, as in the Sologub vampire;
Merezhkovskii's longings for a transformed humankind; expectations
about the end of the world; proclamations about the sanctity of sin; and
253
paens to sacrifice found in, for example, Briusov's and Gippius's work
all were being realized in the flesh, in the here and now, in Jewish prac-
tice, which Rozanov condemns as grotesque and monstrous but also
celebrates, as we have just seen, as "magnificent and lyrical. "
VIII. The Religious-Philosophical Society
In 1901, Zinaida Gippius and Dmitrii Merezhkovskii founded a jour-

nal, The New Path. As its first issue reveals, the journal rejected the
public-spirited ideology, the emphasis on civil society and progress so
important to Russians of the 1860's and the 1870's. It was in part this ide-
ology that led to the legal reform of 1864, which eliminated the secret
procedures and inquisitorial principles of the old system and introduced
the adversarial oral principle, trial by jury, and the profession of the bar.
The ideology of the artistic avant-garde in the beginning of the twentieth
century was directly opposed to the rationalistic philosophy of the emerg-
ing legal culture of the time. The leading members of the latter group
sought to establish, by means of their legal societies and journals, a new
kind of public deliberative sphere in Russian political life. But the avant-
garde disdained the realm of civic life in favor of the cultivation of a realm
accessible only to the few, in which magic, myth, art, esoteric language,
and belief combined into one. In his work on the Beilis trial and other
work Rozanov attacks the law, the legal institutions, and the lawyers, who,
he claims, have no capacity to understand the sacrificial significance of the
Iushchinskii murder, and the link between sacrifice, sex, and circumcision.
Politically, Merezhkovskii, Gippius, and the writers associated with
them did not join forces with the Union of Russians and other right-wing
organizations who promulgated the ritual murder charge against Jews. But
artistically and philosophically, the anarchic archaicism of such writers as
Merezhkovskii and other writers who opposed Rozanov on the Beilis case
could, and did, imagine the beauty and the saving force of unregulated sex-
uality, blood ritual, and even human sacrifice - in their literary and
philosophical works, and in rituals that they themselves invented.
However, the distinction between art, literature, and philosophy, on
the one side, and law and politics, on the other, became less and less clear
to Merezhkovskii, Gippius, and other writers. It became necessary to
redraw the line of demarcation between these discourses, not just once, by
254
protesting the Beilis trial, but again and again, and especially in relation
to Rozanov. Following Katsis's lead, I have tried to link Silver age writing
and salon behavior to ritual murder discourse. What did the writers them-
selves think of this possible connection?
The test of how Rozanov's own contemporaries evaluated their work
in relation to his, and by extension, to the Beilis case, may be seen in a
public discussion of the St. Petersburg Religious-Philosophical Society.
The Society originated in 1901 at the initiative of Dmitrii Merezhkovskii
and Zinaida Gippius. The stated purpose of the first set of meetings was
to bridge the gap between the intelligentsia and the clergy. Shut down by
Konstantin Pobedonostev, Procurator of the Holy Synod, in 1903, the
meetings resumed in 1907. In 1914, based in part on Rozanov's Beilis
writings, including among others, two which I have already discussed:
"The Secret Writing of the Jews" and "Andrei Iushchinskii,"
Merezhkovskii attempted to have the Religious-Philosophical Society
remove Rozanov from its membership. On January 26, 1914 those pre-
sent debated whether Rozanov should be excluded.
IX. Rozanov on Trial
The proceedings were recorded and published, which indicates that

the society imagined itself as a public body with something at stake in its
own history. The Religious-Philosophical Society imitated the historio-
graphical practices of a State. Like a State, or a State agency, it recorded
its deliberations in order to meet any challenges to its version of events.
Indeed, part of the deliberation was: is this a judicial proceeding or some
other kind of event?
The heart of the matter was what kind of criteria could be used to
interpret and to evaluate Rozanov's writing. Before turning to the discus-
sion itself, I will rehearse the standard, but flawed, distinction between
legal and literary interpretation of speech and writing. Legal interpreta-
tion generally rests on some notion of the unity of authorial intention and
output, and furthermore, a univocality of, and authorial control over,
meaning. Literary interpretation, in contrast, emphasizes the multiplicity
of meanings, and the ways in which the word may escape the intention of
its author. This distinction is overly simple because it does not allow that
law itself may be multi-voiced.
255
Notwithstanding its shortcomings, the distinction plays an important
role in current hate speech controversies. In order to evaluate whether
words do harm according to a juridical standard, we move maximally far
away from literary open-endedness. On this criterion, there is no gap or
slippage between word and meaning, and meaning and author. The word
is not a word, but a form of behavior. To paraphrase from Judith Butler's
Excitable Speech, those who advocate judicial intervention for hate speech
argue that the word does what it says. There is no need to interpret, to pin
down meaning, or to look to subsequent effects a word may have because
the word itself does immediate harm; it is itself an act of violence.
At the 1914 meeting of the Religious-Philosophical Society, Dmitrii
Filosofov, a writer and a close associate of Merezhkovskii and Gippius,
spoke in favor of removing Rozanov. He distinguished between a trial of
an individual's private life, which he considered "impermissible," and a
trial of the published - and therefore public - works of that individual,
which was permissible. Even though the Religious-Philosophical Society
was concerned with purely theoretical questions about literature and reli-
gion, it could not be divorced from real life. Filosofov said that the Society
is bound to uphold principles of freedom and tolerance, but at a certain
point tolerance becomes "cynicism." Filosofov said, "we respect the word,
we know that the word has value, that is not an empty sound, and that
the more talented it is, the more accountable it is."34 He continued: to
"relate to Rozanov only aesthetically... is to despise Rozanov, not to con-
sider him a real force." Filosofov saw the principle of freedom of speech
as "the mockery of the aggressor" when "every day these words become
acts."35 By the same token, Filosofov pointed out, silence on the part of
the Society would be a highly significant "action." The acts Filosofov had
in mind were acts of violence against Jews.
In terms of the relation between the word and the violence of which
I spoke earlier, Filosofov did not claim that Rozanov's words were in and
of themselves acts, but that they produced an effect on others who trans-
formed them into acts. Filosofov's model for the maximum fusion of
word and act comes from Russian history. Until the late eighteenth cen-
tury, Russian tsars could use a legal procedure known as "The Word and
the Deed." The proclamation of these words meant that those to whom
they were spoken were under arrest and were subject to interrogation for
their possible role in a crime being investigated. Arrest and interrogation
256
meant torture. This is a particularly clear example of a word that not only
does what it says, but says so.
Filosofov had a problem. He appealed to his audience not to respond
to Rozanov only aesthetically, but resisted categorizing his response as a
juridical one. He denied that he himself was engaged in a juridical pro-
ceeding against Rozanov. "All these quarrels about quorums and
paragraphs are profoundly alien to us," Filosofov concluded. The Society
had a certain "face," as Filosofov put it, by which he means its own par-
ticular moral character, which Rozanov's Beilis writings "distort." Here
Filosofov imagines the Religious-Philosophical Society not as a state with
multiple and conflicting interests, but more like a church, which under-
stands itself to possess one unified intention and voice. In his effort to
resist a judicial intervention, Filosofov's vision of the single voice and face
of the Society could be seen as leading to a greater degree of internal cen-
sorship and homogeneity than the juridical model would.
The language about the Society's "face," which, according to
Filosofov, Rozanov "distorts," and other language about the intolerability
of Rozanov's writing for people "who respect themselves" suggests that for
Filosofov the most pressing concern was not violence committed against
Jews, but the need on the part of the members of the Society to make a
clean break with Rozanov. The power of words to do harm to bodies was
indeed an issue, but the body in question was the metaphorical body of
the Religious-Philosophical Society and the individual bodies of its mem-
bers. Another speaker said that he was in favor of exclusion because he did
not want to face the dilemma of whether to offer Rozanov his hand to
shake upon meeting him. Rozanov's words, detached from his body, are
published and influence others to commit acts of violence. But for these
speakers, the problem was that Rozanov's words attached themselves to
his body, transforming Rozanov into a source of ritual pollution for them,
which could be avoided only by severing themselves from him.
Among the speakers against exclusion was Symbolist poet Viacheslav
Ivanov, who argued that the "writer is untriable" (pisatel' nesudim). 6 If
Rozanov had directly called for violence, if he had written "gentlemen,
start pogroms," then those words would no longer be categorized as liter-
ary discourse. Ivanov said that "such calls for bloodshed fall out of the
sphere of the writer's activity." The term used in this country today is
"fighting words," which, according to a 1942 Supreme Court decision,
257
have so little value that the First Amendment can be suspended in favor
of the state's interest in keeping public order. However, the distinction
that Ivanov made was not so much that between fighting words and pro-
tected speech, not between two different types of speech, as between two
different types of agents responsible for it, the writer and the "public fig-
ure," (obshchestvennyi deiatel). He went on to say that the writer is such
an "integral and delicate organism that to break him into parts and tear
them [the words] out of context is impossible."
In comparison to Filosofov, Ivanov argues for a far greater separation
between Rozanov's words and the acts which could result from them.
Ivanov attempts to remove writing altogether from the realm of judicial

interpretation and hence regulation, what he refers to as the "introduc-
tion of these disgusting judicial and police practices into this free
sphere." It is impossible, he claims, even to identify which words are
liable to judicial action, because no word can be taken out of its context.
To put it differently, no standard could be used to evaluate the action-
ability of any single work because each work has to be seen in relation to
every other in the writer's corpus. To subject the writer to judicial exam-
ination is to break him into parts, says Ivanov. Here it seems that Ivanov
posits some notion of the author's subjectivity dispersed throughout the
literary corpus as an integral and organic whole. Text and authorial sub-
jectivity are so wholly intertwined that taking a word out of context
means rending the fabric of the authorial self. This Dionysian concept of
subjectivity is at odds with what we can take to be Ivanov's beliefs about
the boundedness of legal subjectivity.
To ask how the literary work and the religious investigations of the
Russian artists of the Silver Age contributes to the body of knowledge that
makes ritual murder believable does not necessarily mean subjecting them
to the kind of juridical examination that Ivanov feared, one that could
reduce the meanings of their writing to a single question. Symbolist liter-
ature and ritual murder discourse do not stand in a cause and effect
relation. They may be seen as falling along a spectrum of attitudes,
desires, and occult beliefs that dominated a vast segment of elite Russian
culture in the early part of the twentieth century. Neither the messianic
chauvinism of the right nor the apocalyptic revolutionism of the left envi-
sioned law as a system of meaning and cultural value. The Beilis
prosecution and the Symbolist writers were each in their own way
258
engaged in the production of discourse about the forces - both dreaded
and desired - that lay just below the surface of civilized society and just
beyond the boundaries of European Russia. In literature, art, dance, and
ritual, in travel to the East and research into the ancient Near East and
the Russian Pale of Settlement, and finally, in a criminal trial, they
attempted to make real the imagined sites of their discourse.
The Beilis prosecution, with its emphasis on an alleged Jewish
"dogma of blood," the blood fantasies of the Symbolist and the Decadent
writers, especially Rozanov's, and his own subsequent quasi-trial all par-
ticipate in a sacrificial logic. Beilis and Rozanov play the role of scapegoat.
The collective body, whether it be the Russian state or the Saint
Petersburg Religious-Philosophical Society - performed, by means of
these trials - rituals which sought to delimit an alien other and re-estab-
lish the homogeneity and the unity of the community.37 The sacrifice that
Rozanov imputed to the Jews and the sacrifice celebrated in Symbolist lit-
erature came to life in the Beilis trial, a Symbolist artwork in the flesh.
In the Beilis case law, narrative, and culture cohered powerfully on
the side of the accusers. What about the defense? The question goes
beyond the scope of this paper, but I want to conclude by at least indi-
cating the nature of the strategy that led to Beilis's acquittal but could not
stop the condemnation of the Jews. The prosecution and the defense were
by necessity speaking in two different languages, relying on two different
and opposed "chronotopes," to use Bakhtin's term, that is, two different
orientations in space and time.
The prosecution rehearsed the entire history of the ritual murder
accusation, finding evidence of its practice in the Bible, and in Josephus,
the first century historian, who dismissed a charge brought by Apion that
the Jews performed human sacrifice in their temple in Jerusalem. The
prosecution claimed that Josephus, a Jew, was prejudiced against Apion.
In his closing statement, defense attorney O. Gruzenberg denied the
accusation, but also argued that what people did 3,000 years ago should
have no bearing on a criminal trial in 1913.38 To take the story back 3,000
years is an impermissible widening of the time frame. But for writers like
Rozanov and others, who operated in an apocalyptic time frame and
yearned for the moment when time would be no more, the first century
was highly relevant.
Gruzenberg explicitly stated to the jury that he was deliberately mak-
259
ing his argument out of what he called the "little facts" ("Ia narochno idu
po melkim faktam").39 For example, Iushchinskii was last seen alive with-
out his school notebooks, which, it was established, he habitually left at
Cheberiak's apartment in order to go out and play. His body was found
in the cave with the notebooks, suggesting a link between Cheberiak and
the murder. Near the body were also found pieces of perforated paper. As
Gruzenberg explains, this paper was used in a game called "post office,"
which Cheberiak and her associates were known to play. The paper was
torn along the perforations, and off-color notes and jokes were written on
it and distributed in the game. As we recall, Rozanov made much of the
pattern of perforations on Iushchinskii's right temple, arguing that they
constituted an act of practical magic. For Gruzenberg, the perforated
scraps of paper show a link between Cheberiak and the murder. For
Rozanov the perforations on the victim's body are tell-tale signs of a secret
link between the crime, Jewry as a whole, and a vast cosmology. For
Gruzenberg what matters is the here and the now, the scrap of paper that
casts doubt on the guilt of a single individual.
I am not suggesting that the disjuncture between on the one side, the
prosecution and the Symbolist writers and on the other, the defense at the
Beilis trial falls along the familiar and false distinction between Jewish
legal mindedness and Christian spirituality. We have already seen the
example of a Jewish Symbolist poet, Nikolai Minskii. Gruzenberg was just
as passionate about his "facts" as Rozanov was about his "secrets." For
Gruzenberg, the scraps of paper and the notebooks were part of a com-
pelling whole. They were as pregnant with meaning as Rozanov's secrets.
It was in the accumulation of such "little facts" that Gruzenberg succeed-
ed in undermining the legal case against Mendel Beilis. But he could not
untell the story about the Jews and the blood sacrifice.
1 Transcript, Delo Beilisa. Stenograficheskii otchet, vol. 1, Kiev, 1913, 3 vols., p. 37.
2 Id., at 300.
3 See Alexandr Tager, in M. Grinberg and A. Kovel'man, eds., Tsarskaia Rossiia i delo
Beilisa: Issledovaniia i materialy, 2nd ed. (Moscow/Jerusalem: Gesharim, 1995
260
[original publication 1934]).
4 Hans Rogger, Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1986), p. 155. The charge that Jews engaged in the ritual
use of Christian blood can be traced to an episode in Germany in 1235, although previ-
ously they had been accused of crucifying a Christian child, William of Norwich, in the
12th century, and had been accused of human sacrifice in the 1st century. Accusations of
ritual murder reached their peak in late 15th century Europe, and tapered off in the 17th.
But in Russia and Eastern Europe, the number of ritual murder cases reached its height
in the 19th and the early 20th centuries. A partial list of these cases includes: the Veilizh
case of 1823, the Saratov case of 1853, the Kutais case of 1879, and the 1911-1913 Beilis
case. From 1897 to 1911 there were five other ritual murder cases in Russia. Khana
Spektor's trial, which ended in acquittal, overlapped with the arrest of Mendel Beilis in
1911. Most historians interpret the ritual murder cases of the medieval period in terms
of the religious framework of the time, though they differ as to which aspects of it are
the most significant. R. Po-Chia Hsia argues that the cases permitted Christian society
to play out a drama of human sacrifice and redemption. R. Po-Chia Hsia, The Myth of
Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1988), p. 226. Gavin Langmuir attributes great importance to the first
appearance of the charge of actual ritual blood consumption in 1235 and suggests that
the charge can be related in part to Christian doubts about the presence of Christ in the
Eucharist. Gavin I. Langmuir, Toward a Definition ofAnti-Semitism (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1990), pp. 266-281. Historians find very little evidence of a religious
framework in modern ritual murder cases, even in cases where political forces do not
dominate, as in the Beilis affair. Hillel Kieval, investigating the 1899 Czech ritual mur-
der case against Leopold Hilsner, finds a "virtual absence of religious symbolism" in
accounts of the case. He finds instead that narratives of the case are organized around a
modern discourse of crime and detection, in which the facts are left to speak for them-
selves. In place of a religious narrative, Kieval finds a "not quite coherent racial code."
Hillel J. Kieval, "Representations and Knowledge in Medieval and Modern Accounts of
Jewish Ritual Murder," Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, and Society, vol. 1, no. 1
(1994), p. 68. Jonathan Frankel's 1997 study of the 1840 Damascus blood libel case gives
greater importance to the religious framework. Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus Affair:
'Ritual Murder,' Politics, and the Jews in 1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997), pp. 257-310. In his chapter, "The Occult Element in Russian Judeophobia," John
Klier argues that until the 1870's, charges against Jews in Russia were "based on observ-
able evidence," but that afterwards, charges against Jews can be termed "occult" because
they "were often fantastic, esoteric, or even supernatural." Klier goes on to say that since
these "phenomena are not susceptible to rational investigation, their widespread accep-
tance revealed a new psychological orientation in Russian society." John Doyle Klier,
"Imperial Russia's Jewish Question, 1855-1881," in S. White, ed., Cambridge Russian,
Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies, vol. 96 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995),
pp. 417 and 417-449. In this article, I attempt a rational investigation into the condi-
tions of belief in the occult phenomenon of ritual murder by reconsidering the question
of a religious framework for the charge against Beilis, not in terms of theological debates
about the true religion, but in terms of the apocalyptic discourse of the literary circles of
early 20th century Russia and its role in the secular ritual of the Beilis trial.
261
5 See L.E Katsis, "Delo Beilisa v kontekste 'serebrianogo veka,"' in A. Kovel'man and M.
Grinberg, eds., Tsarskaia Rossiia i delo Beilisa (Moscow/Jerusalem: Gesharim, 1995),
pp. 412-434.
6 See V.G. Korolenko, "Multanskoe zhertvoprinoshenie," in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol.
4 (St. Petersburg: A.E Marks, 1914), pp. 361-464. Two points relate the Multan case to
the subsequent Beilis trial and the other ritual murder cases of the period. Korolenko
reported that the prosecutor began his speech repeating the ritual murder accusation
against Jews, as if belief in that accusation could support belief that the Multan peasants
performed similar rituals. Korolenko also reported testimony given by an inhabitant of
the region that in the Udmurt religion an angry god named "Kurban" demanded a
human sacrifice every fifty years. The term is the Hebrew word for victim or gift to God,
and it is found in Mark 7:11. Later in the trial, the testimony was refuted.
7 A.E Koni, Izbrannyeproizvedeniia (Moscow: Iuridicheskaia literatura, 1956), p. 484.

8 Peter Goodrich, Legal Discourse: Studies in Linguistics, Rhetoric and Legal Analysis (New
York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), p. 187.
9 See Transcript, supra note 1 at 31.
11 Katsis shows that Rozanov's earlier writings - his 1903 work Judaism, for example,
which emphasizes the secrets of the Jews - are significant to the government's case in
the Beilis trial. See Katsis, supra note 5 at 423.
12 John E. Bowlt, "The Body Beautiful: The Artistic Search for the Perfect Physique," in
John E. Bowlt and Olga Matich, eds., Laboratory of Dreams: The Russian Avant-Garde
and Cultural Experiment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 53.
13 V.V. Rozanov, Oboniatel'noe i osiazatel'noe otnoshenie evreev k krovi (Stockholm, 1932),
p. 64.
14 Id.
15 For a recent scholarly discussion of the link between circumcision, sacrifice, and blood,
see Lawrence A. Hoffman, Covenant of Blood: Circumcision and Gender in Rabbinic
Judaism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 96-110.
Hoffman argues that the central moment of circumcision is "the shedding of blood."
16 Hoffman cites a 9th century text that specifies a mixture of circumcision blood, spices,
and water, distributed to certain designated participants, who were to wash their hands
in it.
17 See Rozanov, supra note 13 at 52.

18 Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Searchfor Modernity in Fin-de-Siecle
Russia (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 322-324.
19 See M.M. Prishvin, "1914-i god: Dnevnik," Literaturnaia ucheba, 1 January-February
(1989), p. 129.
20 Fedor Sologub, "Krasnogubaia gost'ia," in Kapli krovi: Izbrannaia proza (Moscow:
Tsenturion Interpraks, 1992), p. 226.
21 Zinaida Gippius, P'esy (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1990), p. 36
262
23 Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 13, (Moscow: 1914), p. 20.
24 Id., at 21.
25 Id., at 81.
26 Id., at 89-90.
27 It should be noted that in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, which contains many
references to the end of time and Jesus's second coming, a young woman asks Alesha
Karamazov, the saintly hero, whether it is true that Jews crucify Christian children, to
which Alesha answers that he does not know. Dostoevsky was a writer of supreme impor-
tance to Merezhkovskii and Rozanov and the writers associated with The New Path.
Heightened Messianic expectations and accusations against Jews of ritual murder had
been linked in the medieval European cases.
28 Merezhkovskii, supra note 23 at 92.
29 Valerii Briusov, Dnevniki 1891-1910 (Moscow: M. and S. Sabashnikov, 1927), p. 54.
The diary entry is for December 11, 1898. In Fallen Leaves (Opavshie list'ia, published
1913-1915), Rozanov described the Jews in Russia as a vast "spider" that had captured
Russians, the "flies," in its net: "the spider sucks the fly." V.V. Rozanov, "Opavshie list'ia,"
in Evgenii Zhiglevich, Izbrannoe (Munich: A. Neimanis, 1970), pp. 301-302.
30 Rozanov, supra note 13 at 142.
31 Avril Pyman, A History of Russian Symbolism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994), p. 273.
32 Z.N. Gippius, in Karl Eimeracher, ed., Zhivye litsa, vol. 2 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink,
1971), p. 62.
33 Rozanov, supra note 13 at 143 (emphasis Razanov's).
34 Evgeniia Ivanova, "Ob iskliuchenii V.V. Rozanova iz Religiozno-Filosofskogo obshchest-
va. Doklad Soveta i preniia po voprosu ob otnoshenii Obshchestva k deiatel'nosti," in
Nash sovremennik, vol. 10 (1990), p. 111.
35 Id., at 112.
36 Id., at 118.
37 For a discussion of sacrifice as foundational, see Peter Goodrich, Languages ofLaw: From
Logics to Memory to Nomadic Masks (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990), pp. 53-
66.
38 0.0. Gruzenberg, "Rechi zashchitnikov Beilisa 0.0. Gruzenberga i A. S. Zarudnogo,"

in A. Kovel'man and M. Grinberg, eds., Tsarskaia Rossiia i delo Beilisa
(Moscow/Jerusalem: Gesharim, 1995), p. 468.
39 Id., p. 482.
263

The Beilis Ritual Murder Trial

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The Beilis Ritual Murder Trial

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Cardozo School of Law

The Beilis Ritual Murder Trial and the Culture of Apocalypse

In March 1911 in Kiev, the body of a thirteen-year-old boy, Andrei

The theme of secrecy and the mystical-redemptive significance

III. Hebrew: A Guilty Language

In a series of articles written and published - during the 1911-1913

IV Writing on the Body

V Blood Fantasies of The Silver Age

Rozanov's erotic representation of the alleged blood rituals of the Jews

only one drop of blood... With my lips, eternally thirsty,

Together with Gorkii and Leonid Andreev, Sologub participated in a vol-

Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, philosopher and poet, husband of Zinaida

VII. Blood Communion

Rozanov saw evidence of a link between ancient rituals and modern

artistic practices at a party he attended in 1903. In the same book in

VIII. The Religious-Philosophical Society

In 1901, Zinaida Gippius and Dmitrii Merezhkovskii founded a jour-

IX. Rozanov on Trial

The proceedings were recorded and published, which indicates that

Ivanov attempts to remove writing altogether from the realm of judicial

7 A.E Koni, Izbrannyeproizvedeniia (Moscow: Iuridicheskaia literatura, 1956), p. 484.

17 See Rozanov, supra note 13 at 52.

38 0.0. Gruzenberg, "Rechi zashchitnikov Beilisa 0.0. Gruzenberga i A. S. Zarudnogo,"

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