A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel Read Online Free Page B

already open, meaning it was a little past eight a.m. (the Russian Empire, brutal in so many ways, indulged its drinkers), and came upon Andrei and Zhenya, who were still standing on the sidewalk and talking, a little farther down the street from where Ulyana saw them. Kazimir noticed that Andrei had a jar about two inches tall with something black inside that he was sure was gunpowder. The boy was excited to see “Lamplighter,” according to Kazimir, though it is not clear why. “He ran up to me and hit me on my shoulder with his hand and asked me where I was going,” the man recalled. “He hit me pretty hard—it hurt, so I got angry … I told him he had no business knowing where I was going.” Turning around, he spat out, “Bastard!”
    If Andrei was hurt by this word, which he must have heard many, many times in his brief life, he did not show it. “Gramps, where are you going? Take me with you,” he pleaded. Kazimir was going out to catch goldfinches to sell live at the market; Andrei, who had a net and liked to catch birds, would have enjoyed that. But Lamplighter pushed ahead to his destination, leaving Andrei behind, the taunt of “bastard” ringing in his ears. He was the last person known to have seen Andrei alive.
    A short time after the body was discovered, MendelBeilis answered a knock at the door of his home on Upper Yurkovskaya Street, which was located in the same two-story building at the entrance to the factory that housed his office. The Beilis household constituted a tiny Jewish outpost in a part of Kiev otherwise off-limits even to those Jews fortunate enough to receive government permits to live in the city.Russia’s Jews were subject to a vast, oppressive, and ever-growing burden of more than a thousand discriminatory statutes and regulations restricting where they could live, where they could worship, which schools they could attend, and what kind of work they could perform. In principle, Jews could only live in the fifteen western provinces known as the “Pale of Settlement,” which did not include Kiev. The Beilis family was only granted permission to live in Kiev, and the special privilege of living in this neighborhood, thanks to the intervention of thebrick factory owner,Jonah Zaitsev, with the authorities.
    Beilis found a Russian neighbor was paying him a call. He knew the man was a proud member of the “Black Hundreds,” Russia’s anti-Semitic movement of right-wing nationalists, but that was not a barrier to social interaction between them. Beilis got along well with his Christian neighbors and had a friendly relationship with at least one other Black Hundred member. A man could hate Jews as a group and get on perfectly well with them individually.
    The neighbor delivered an odd piece of news, telling Beilis that “my paper”—the organ of his local Black Hundred group—was declaring that the boy Andrei Yushchinsky had been murdered by Jews for “ritual” purposes. Beilis would not recall perceiving this report as a threat to him or even to other Jews, and in fact the man may well have just been sharing the local news or even trying to convey to Beilis a friendlywarning of possible anti-Jewish reprisals for the boy’s killing. As the days passed, the brick factory clerk gave it little thought.
    During his fifteen yearsin Kiev, Mendel Beilis had only once felt mortal fear as a Jew, during the terrible pogrom of 1905, when the mobs had killed scores of Jews and vandalized nearly every Jewish residence and place of business down to the lowliest stall. But when the violence began, a local priest had a guard put on Beilis’s house. Beilis haddone the priest a number of favors, including arranging to sell him bricks at a discount to build a school for orphans, and allowing his funeral processions to take a shortcut across the factory grounds to the cemetery. (A nearby Christian factory owner refused the request—the priest would often tell people that the Jew had helped