This day occupies pages 388 through 440 of Volume II of the transcript and is the end of the testimony. It is followed by closing arguments.
See the translation of the transcript for day 28.
This is the moment for me to come clean. Some people, from my footnotes, may think I came into this project knowing a tremendous amount about Jewish classics. That’s not so. It took me at least a month, as far as I remember, to translate the 40 pages of Pranaitis’ testimony, because I had to look up pretty much every piece of information in the footnotes. The rest of the translation took 10 months for similar reasons, especially days 27 and 28.
I have to give credit and thanks to people who posted
information free online: Mechon Mamre; Kollel Iyun ha-Daf; the Chabad website;
Yerushalmi Online; and a host of others, even Wikipedia where the external
links sometimes got me where I needed to go.
One of the reasons I did this translation was because I wanted to
participate in the good work of providing free information that would establish
accurate data and references, correct mistakes, and fight ill-intentioned
lies. I benefited from correcting my own
hazy or mistaken notions. I also expanded my personal digital library by about
100x so that I can read all this information myself in my next three or four
lifetimes.
See Crown Rabbi Mazeh’s impassioned declaration in statement
507 about question 16.
Go to statement 600 for the beginning of the “Katz
questions,” the ones Benzion Katz talks about in his memoirs. He gave the defense a list of 5 questions he
knew Pranaitis would not be able to answer.
The other defense scriptural experts added 5 more. A total of 4 were asked. The Baba Bathra question is not in the
transcript. It was not in the indictment
and remember, I said that the defense was prohibited by rules of procedure from
bringing up anything that wasn’t in the indictment. The name of that tractate was not mentioned
by the prosecution, nor by Pranaitis in his day 26 and day 27 testimony. That rules out the defense asking the question. They have operated strictly by the rules of
procedure for 28 days and they’re going to break the rules now?
It’s a great story and it deserves to be true but I’ll give
you another for-instance of missing information. Mr. Eli Rubin has published on the Chabad
website about a newly discovered document about the Kiev Jewish community, with
Arnold Margolin, taking action on the Beilis case months earlier than anybody
thought. Margolin’s 1926 memoirs, are
available on the Harvard website, and if he refers to it there, I didn’t see it
in Part II which is about the Beilis trial; maybe it was such a passing
reference that I didn’t pick up on it.
In looking for the Baba Bathra story, I have researched
other contemporary sources: Beilis; Gruzenberg; Bonch-Bruevich; the American
Jewish Yearbook for 1913 (published in 1914).
None of them refer to this exact incident. Neither does Tager, who really hated
Pranaitis, but Tager was not contemporary and concentrated on the archives, not
the trial transcript. I have not been
able to find copies of the stenographic newspaper records Vipper complained
about on day 3, which ought to settle the question.
Kokovtsov refuses to give an opinion on texts Vipper recites
to him. He knows they are probably
mistranslated; in fact I identified 3 of them and that is true. The prosecution doesn’t want to show him the
actual material because they know he’ll tell them they had it wrong but their
best excuse is that it will drag things out.
But what bugs the prosecution the most is that their witness
made a fool of himself and got laughed at.
Think about it. Pranaitis is
quoted in the indictment; he was Mashkevich’s assistant in formulating this
part of the testimony. If he didn’t
actually know the wording of the questions, he knew the general subjects
because he wrote about them in his thesis and some of the citations come from
his thesis. The problem is that he
translated the thesis from work by Johann Eisenmenger; he never really knew
what he was talking about. For him to
break down on the witness stand embarrasses not only him but the government who
put him there. The prosecution can’t
afford to let the defense witnesses shine any more than they already have.
Crown Rabbi Mazeh is mistreated on the stand. The judge hypocritically says that Judaism is
not on trial, interrupts the rabbi repeatedly, stops him from using Hebrew
(something he didn’t do for any of the Christians), and so on. The object is to keep R. Mazeh from telling
the truth. After Mazeh agreed substantially
with the three Christians testifying before him, the judge doesn’t want proof that the
trial is unjust in trying a whole nation in the person of one man, even though
every last person in the court knows that this is exactly the purpose of the
trial, and not finding out who murdered Andrey.
Everybody knows who murdered Andrey.
The government just wants to kill a Jew.
Prof. Tikhomirov unknowingly underlines one of the things
non-Jews – and many Jews – don’t understand about Talmud. He talks about it being contradictory. But if you dumped all the British lawbooks
from now back to William the Conqueror into one mass, a space alien reading it
would think it was internally contradictory.
She/he/it/they would need an Earthling to separate it all out according
to date and subject and show that some of it has only applied recently while
some no longer applies. The other issue is that Talmud doesn’t bother to go
back and recapitulate Torah law. It
recapitulates Mishnah, which also doesn’t recapitulate Torah law. Without a thorough understanding of the law
as stated in Torah, it’s impossible to understand Mishnah; I know that from
experience.
That doesn’t mean I’m going to apologize for calling out the
errors in the opinions expressed. It’s
important for people to understand that without the comprehensive and careful
study of primary sources, it is next to impossible to avoid developing a
personal or organizational urban legend about what primary sources say. It’s a consequence of the limitations of
human memory, coupled with a reliance on authority which has always led to
urban legends if not to deliberate lies.
One small detail. If
you search today’s testimony, you will not find any questions from
Zamyslovsky. You will find in statement 584
a remark by Boldyrev that one of the civil prosecutors has required medical
aid, making a recess run longer than expected.
After Zamyslovsky’s somewhat hysterical behavior on day 27, I’m afraid
he might have suffered an apoplectic fit due to stress. He will give his closing argument on day 30,
page 58 of the third volume of the transcript.
Judge: Fyodor Boldyrev
Prosecution:
Criminal
Prosecutor, Oscar Vipper
Civil
Prosecutor Georgy Zamyslovsky
Private
Civil Prosecutor Aleksey Shmakov
Defense:
Oscar
Gruzenberg
Nikolay Karabchevsky
Dmitry Grigorevich-Barsky
Alexandr Zarudny
Vasily Maklakov
Page
|
||||
Witness
|
Notes
|
Transcript
|
Translation
|
Statement
|
Pavel Konstantinovich Kokovtsov
|
Imperial Russian Orthodox Palestinian Society
Defense witness
|
388
|
2358
|
1
|
Pavel Vasilevich Tikhomirov
|
chair of philosophy in the Historical-Philological
Institute of Nezhin
|
398
|
2377
|
254
|
Yaaqov Isaievich Mazeh
|
Crown Rabbi of Moscow
|
405
|
2391
|
358
|
Pranaitis
|
Returns
|
433
|
2448
|
586
|
Where the Baba Bathra question ought to be
|
434-
435
|
2450-
2451
|
601-
631
|
|
Kokovtsov
|
Back to translate material that was subject of the debate
between Rohling and Delitsch
|
435
|
2452
|
632
|
© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights
Reserved
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