Mendel Beilis -- the Kievlyanin articles and the Baba Bathra question

I wrote a lot about Pranaitis in a couple of places, one here about the Mendel Beilis trial, and another about his plagiarizing Eisenmenger’s ignorant and bigoted book that falsely claims Talmud has stories about the Christian Jesus. For those of you who haven’t read either one, this post is the short form of Pranaitis’ story. Then I’ll get into Kievlyanin’s revelations about his testimony at the Beilis trial. Then I may or may not apologize to some writers, even though they are all dead.

Pranaitis was a Catholic from Lithuania, from a part of that country where most people knew German. He tried for the priesthood, but his thesis was rejected because it misrepresented scripture. At trial he was called a kzendz, a docent.

Pranaitis’ thesis plagiarized Entdecktes Judentum, published about 1700 by Johann Eisenmenger. Eisenmenger hated Jews, and he falsely claimed that Talmud refers to the Christian Jesus. The citations he gave have been used ever since by people making the same false claim; I know where all of them are, I’ve read them in the source tractates, and that’s how I know it’s false. Eisenmenger did not read Hebrew or Aramaic and there’s no knowing where he got his list – but it wasn’t from Jews because some of the citations don’t exist at all.

Why did the prosecution in the Beilis case call a Catholic as a witness? After all, Pranaitis behaved badly; he proselytized, and in Russia, that was illegal. The Catholic church punished him with an assignment to Tashkent, which was mostly Muslim.

Well, the Beilis prosecutors had a problem. The same month in 1911 that Andrey Yushchinsky’s body was found, the anti-Semitic Black Hundreds started agitating that it was a case of the blood libel, the false claim that Jews have to use Christian blood to make Passover matso. If you know of anybody who uses “blood libel” in any other sense, they are committing the redefinition fallacy to get attention. Bust their chops and move on from any relationship you have with them.

Anyway, the same month, the Russian Orthodox Church pronounced that the murder was NOT a case of the blood libel, and prohibited its clergy from participating in promoting the idea. Well, that’s all the case was about. Why?

My personal opinion is, Justice Minister Shcheglovitov was helping Nikolay II push back the reforms forced on him by the 1905 revolution – which is how the government viewed the events of Bloody Sunday in 1905. Nikolay was forced to form the Duma and give it some responsibilities and some immunities, but every year he took back some of its powers. In 1906, the Duma repealed a law criminalizing “murder out of religious fanaticism”, which means that a murder could be prosecuted on the blood libel. A prosecutor could also use it if one of the Skoptsy sect died under the operations they performed, but in my opinion, it primarily had the blood libel in mind.

If Beilis were convicted of the blood libel, the Duma would have grounds for restoring the law. But prosecuting Beilis for the blood libel violates the principle that you cannot try somebody as a criminal if what they did is not covered in the criminal code. Nullum crimen sine praevia lege poenali has been part of western legal systems since 1813 and Japan adopted it when they westernized their legal system. During the Beilis trial, the defense tried several times to point out that there was no statute that applied to the case. At the last moment, the justice ministry gave in and broke the single charge into two: one about the fact of the murder with no responsibility assigned; and the blood libel charge, which had no statute on it.

So anyway, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church prevented its clergy from testifying in this trial for the prosecution which endorsed the blood libel charge. Three defense witnesses did come from various parts of the church hierarchy, including its educational system.

So the prosecution in the Beilis case was stuck with a plagiarizing Catholic. Civil prosecutor Shmakov, who was trying to get punitive damages for Andrey’s mother, hated Jews, had read lots of the anti-Semitic material that floated among the Black Hundreds, and knew that Pranaitis worked with Forensic Investigator Mashkevich on materials involving the blood libel for the trial. But that happened a year before the trial, and Pranaitis was stupid as well as a liar. The transcript shows that Shmakov and the other prosecution attorneys had to lead him through his testimony, and he kept saying “I don’t know” or sitting silent about things he and Mashkevich discussed in 1912.

The account in Kievlyanin agrees with the transcript. On day 27 (21 October Julian/3 November Gregorian calendar), defense attorney Zarudny verified with Pranaitis that the copy of Talmud Pranaitis claimed was hard to get, was the Amsterdam Talmud. Then Zarudny left the court for a while, during which questioning proceeded. When he returned, he showed the book and got the court to verify that it was the Amsterdam Talmud – and somebody in the court laughed.

This might have been Benzion Katz, who attended the trial. People give him credit for making up a list of questions Pranaitis would never be able to answer. Supposedly one of them asked “Who was Mrs. Baba Bathra?” I discuss this on my blog.

https://pajheil.blogspot.com/2013/11/mendel-beilis-baba-bathra-question.html

Issue 293 of Kievlyanin, for 24 October (Julian), reports on the end of Crown Rabbi Mazeh’s testimony. At this point, the trial transcript shows that Pranaitis takes the stand again. After a while, the defense starts asking questions that prove he knows nothing about Talmud. This is where Katz’ Baba Bathra question should have been asked. The newspaper ignores the entire line of questioning and goes straight to closing arguments.

That means I have nothing to apologize for. From 2012 when I found the transcript online and translated Pranaitis’ testimony, to this point when I have read what Kievlyanin had to say about his testimony, I have argued that the Baba Bathra question was never asked, contrary to what Katz supposedly said.

When none of the contemporary reports give it, and none of the people present in court record it in their memoirs, it’s easy to conclude that while Katz may have contributed some of the questions the defense team did ask, that one question was not among the ones asked in court. I talk on my blog about why or why not.

So it’s nice not to have to apologize. And, one more time for those who didn’t read my blog, while the jury voted yes on the charge that a crime had been committed, six of them voted NO, Beilis had no responsibility for the murder. This being the second charge that included blood libel language, Beilis was NOT convicted of the blood libel. Later history endorses this.

One of the people who was supposed to be on Beilis’ defense team was Arnold Margolin, who worked on the case from April 1911 on (as Mr. Eli Rubin learned). But since he turned out to have important evidence to testify about, Oscar Gruzenberg replaced him. Why Gruzenberg? In 1900 when he was still apprenticing, having been kicked out of law school under the “May Laws”, he wrote an appeal in a blood libel case from Poland and got the conviction reversed. If Beilis had been convicted, the best expert in the world was handy to appeal the case. No such thing happened. Beilis went home after the case closed, later moved to the Holy Land, and then to New York, where he passed and was buried.

In 2009 in the magazine Tradition, Shnayer Leiman published the information that the Baba Bathra question was asked. I did not find the transcript until 2012, though it might have been posted years earlier. The issues of Kievlyanin were not posted until 2016 and I did not find them until 2024. This kind of thing happens all the time; you can only write about the evidence you found. But it’s out there now so make the most of it.

Why Fallacies are False 003 -- Meet Linda, the Conjunction Fallacy

I love Linda. You will, too, if you pay attention, because Linda is why conspiracy theories are fallacies.

You may have heard of the Linda problem.

You create a dataset describing Linda. You can say anything you want about her. It doesn’t even have to be true.

Then you try to decide which of two statements is more likely to be true:

1.     Linda is X.

2.     Linda is X and Y.

There is no relationship between X and your dataset about Linda. There is also no relationship between Y and your dataset, or between Y and X. Based on the dataset, you have no idea about how likely it is that X is true about Linda, or Y is true about Linda.

Linda’s formal name is the Conjunction Fallacy. “X and Y” is a conjunction. That will ring a bell if you know anything about Boolean algebra, which you should if you have a degree in computers. The rest of us not so much. I met Boole decades ago when I got into a computer internship program where I worked, because my old boss declared my skill area non-essential so I couldn’t get advancement or CEUs any more. (Eleven people jumped his ship and he had a shreck and tried to stop them, and his bosses said they’re non-essential now, so you can’t do that. It’s called hoist with your own petard.)

Anyway, for one thing, Boolean algebra tells you the results of combining two bits of data, where each bit can have one of two values. I’m going to call the possible values zero and one to make the relationship to math clear.

Boolean algebra has operations, the two most important of which right now are conjunction and disjunction. Conjunction means that our two bits, A and B, have to both be 1 for the answer to be one. Disjunction means that A and B have to both be zero for the answer to be zero.

In words, a conjunction is AND while a disjunction is OR. Yes, I know it’s more complicated than that, but people can go get into the other details if they want. For now, look at statement 2 above. It’s a conjunction, right? So what’s the answer?

We can’t tell.

Since neither X nor Y has any relationship to Linda’s dataset, we don’t know their values.

What we do know is that, since there is no proof for or against their truth, the probability that they are true can’t be either 100% or 0%. It’s between 100% and 0%. And if you know percentages, you know that 100% is 1.0. If the answer has to be between 1 and 0, it’s a fraction less than 1. You can express it as 0.50, 0.167, whatever. Its value is not the issue; the issue is the fact that it’s a fraction less than one.

What’s the algebra for a conjunction?

A	B	A OR B		A	B	A AND B
1	1	1		1	1	1
1	0	1		1	0	0
0	1	1		0	1	0
0	0	0		0	0	0

 

If you changed the words to arithmetic operators, you would have to use a plus sign for the OR and a multiplication sign for the AND. (You can’t go above a probability of 1 and that’s why adding 1 and 1 is still 1.)

Do you remember your grade school arithmetic? If X is 0.50 and Y is also 0.50, what’s the answer for a conjunction?

So for statement one, the answer is X or 0.50. But for statement 2, the answer is the product of X and Y, which is 0.25. It’s smaller.

Whichever of X or Y is smaller, the product will be smaller than that. 0.25 AND 0.50 is 0.125.

So statement 2 cannot be more probable.

When you meet up with a conspiracy theory, break it down.

·       Identify the dataset. If it contains false data, you’re done. The theory is false.

·       If the dataset is true, examine the statements about it. Do they have a natural organic relationship to the dataset such that it supports their truth or undercuts it? If the latter, the probability for statement 1 is higher, but it still may not reach 100%.

·       If any of the statements are conjunctions, then if the dataset does not support them or there’s no relationship to the dataset, those statements are LESS LIKELY TO BE TRUE.

You’re not trying to prove that they’re not true, which would be a value of zero. You’re proving that they are not likely to be true, with a value below 100%, below 50%, below 25%, or worse. The least likely term of the conjunction, is the top limit.

The problem with the Conjunction Fallacy is that most people will pick the conjunction as more likely. You basically have to give them a quick course in probability math to show them why that’s not true. And then, when they meet another conjunction fallacy, they are STILL likely to pick the wrong answer. There could be a number of reasons: normal forgetfulness; not realizing that a new problem could be a conjunction fallacy; or it says something they want to believe and they throw logic out the window. They STILL pick the wrong statement.

Mendel Beilis -- March 22 1911 Kyevlyanin article

Andrey's parents were not married when he was born. His last name is his mother's maiden name at that time. Her name changed upon her re-marriage but Andrey's did not. This is important for the investigation.

К убийству мальчика на Кирилловской ул. Вчера, 21 марта, место, где найден был труп убитого Андрея Ющинского, мальчика 13 лет, в усадьбе кырпышного завода Бернера по Кирилловской улице, посетило много народа. Осмотр местности, прилегающей к пещере, где лежал убитый, в поверхностный осмотр самого трупа не дали определенных указаний на обстоятельства, при которых совершенно было обнаруженное преступление. Возможно, что мальчика убили где-нибудь пососедству, а затем труп его оставили в пещере. С этой отдаленной от квартиры его матери и училища  окранной города  Андрей Ющинский был хорошо знаком, так как раньше его мать жила в этой местности и только после выхода вторично  замужъ переселилась в Никольскую слободку. Возможно, что убитый имел здесь знакомых сверстников, к которым иногда заходил и здесь около пещеры дети играли. В настоящее время чины полиции и следственной власти заинтерсованы семейным положением  убитого. пока в этом отношении выяснено, что он внебрачный сын солдата, погибшего в последнюю войну. Об этом Ющинский знал и иногда сетовал на свое тяжелое положение, особенно когда его мать вышла замуж. Её удалось разыскать только вчера утром и объявить о находке трупа сына, об исчезновании которого она заявила 12 марта в училище. На многих случайныйх свидетелей, толпившихся вчера около пещеры, Ющинская произвела странное впечатление. Она как-то безралично отнеслась к трупу бедного мальчика. Вчера труп доставлен в анатомический театр, где будет произведено судебномедицинское вскрытие; быть может, оно даст нужный материал для судебного следствия .

 

On the murder of a boy on Kirillovskaya Street. Yesterday, March 21, many people visited the place where the body of the murdered Andrei Yushchinsky, a boy of 13, was found in the estate of the Berner kurpyshny factory on Kirillovskaya Street. An inspection of the area adjacent to the cave where the murdered man lay, and a superficial examination of the body itself did not give any definite indication of the circumstances under which the crime was committed. It is possible that the boy was killed somewhere nearby, and then his body was left in the cave. Andrei Yushchinsky was well acquainted with this outlying area of ​​the city, far from his mother's apartment and school, since his mother had previously lived in this area and only after remarrying moved to Nikolskaya Slobodka. It is possible that the murdered boy had acquaintances of his age here, whom he sometimes visited, and that children played here near the cave. At present, the police and investigative authorities are interested in the family status of the murdered boy. So far, it has been established that he is the illegitimate son of a soldier who died in the last war. Yushchinsky knew this and sometimes complained about his difficult situation, especially when his mother got married. She was only found yesterday morning and had announced to her the discovery of her son's body, whose disappearance she had reported on March 12 at the school. Yushchinskaya made a strange impression on many of the random witnesses who crowded around the cave yesterday. She was somehow indifferent to the poor boy's body. Yesterday, the body was taken to the anatomical theater, where a forensic autopsy will be performed; perhaps it will provide the necessary material for the trial.

Mendel Beilis -- latest news

A few days ago I found on Internet Archive, three years of copies of the Kievlyanin newspaper, from 1911 to 1913 inclusive. 

I'm starting to explore this treasure chest, starting here.

https://archive.org/details/kievl1911/01/

File number 80 is for March 21, the first date to publish about Yushchinsky's death. 

It's a short squib on page 2, column 4, about the middle. 

It will take me a long time to go through all three years of newspapers, saving them off one by one. The ZIP download function won't do it.

Once a month I'll report on my progress. Be patient.

Here is the first article in transcription and translation. Please forgive the transcription errors; my active knowledge of Russian is a little rusty now but I'm sure it will improve. Also, the original is in the pre-Soviet orthography. Notice that the newspaper initially attributes the death to blunt-force trauma, likely an accident at play. The first autopsy was completed the day after this article appeared.

Вчера, 20 марта, около 1 часа дня, гимназист Борис Веломитский и Пётр эланский, играя в рощь , находящейся при усадьбе кирпичного завода Бернера по Кирилловской улице, в районе Плоского участка, случайно нашли в небольшой пещере труп мальчика, по виду 10-12 лет, около которого лежал кожаный ученический пояс, несколько тетрадок, фуражка, и куртка. Труп в одном нижнем бельё , в неестественном полусогнутом полусидячем положение, был прислонен к стенке пещеры. На голове увитого ясно видна рана, нанесенная, по-видимому, каким-то тупым предметом, возможно, что камнем. Руки скручены и связаны на спине. Пещера, в которой найден труп, имеет в диаметре более аршина. На глубине её около сажени, где был труп, она разделяется на два хода. Вчера же установлена личность убитого. Он оказался учеником Киево-Софийного духовного училища Андреем Ющинским, жившим при матери в одной из слободов за Днепром По словам матери, утром 12 марта сын её ушел в училищу и более домой не возвращался. Пока совершенно не выяснены обстоятельства, при которых Ющинский мог быть убить. Возможно, что он был смертельно ранен камнем во время какой-нибудь игры. По словам матери, на убитом было новое пальто и сапоги, которых пока не нашли.

yesterday, March 20, at about 1 o'clock in the afternoon, high school student Boris Belomitsky and Pyotr Ehlansky, playing in the grove located at the estate of the Berner brick factory on Kirillovskaya Street, in the area of ​​the Plosky plot, accidentally found in a small cave the body of a boy, apparently 10-12 years old, near whom lay a leather student belt, several notebooks, a cap, and a jacket. The corpse, in only underwear, in an unnatural half-bent, half-sitting position, was leaning against the wall of the cave. On the head of the corpse, a wound is clearly visible, apparently inflicted by some blunt object, possibly a stone. The hands are twisted and tied behind the back. The cave in which the body was found is more than an arshin in diameter. At a depth of about a fathom, where the body was, it divides into two passages. Yesterday, the identity of the murdered man was established. He turned out to be a student of the Kiev-Sophia Theological School, Andrei Yushchinsky, who lived with his mother in one of the settlements beyond the Dnieper. According to the mother, on the morning of March 12, her son left for school and never returned home. The circumstances under which Yushchinsky could have been killed have not yet been completely clarified. It is possible that he was fatally wounded by a stone during some game. According to the mother, the murdered man was wearing a new coat and boots, which have not yet been found.

Why Fallacies are False -- the Math

Fallacies are errors in logic. Logic is not “a wreath of pretty flowers that smells bad.” Nor is it wordplay.

Logic connects up with two fields of mathematics and I’m going to use both of them so settle back.

Symbolic logic is one way of representing set theory in math. You define a set of elements (which may have nothing in it) and then you can do actual math: add, subtract, multiply, and so on. One part of this field is the stratospheric issue of infinite sets, some of which are bigger than others. If that blows your mind, dig around and find work on it.

You can say things with set theory that are not even wrong but you can also estimate the probability that you are right. I have used probability calculations and identification of fallacies to argue against Documentary Hypothesis, which I first heard about in the 1970s from one of my favorite science authors. I also used the Test of Occam’s Razor, which DH fails in many ways.  I have about 50 posts with the details.

http://pajheil.blogspot.com/2017/07/fact-checking-torah-structure-of-torah.html

When you talk fallacies, you also have to talk formal epistemology. How do we know what we know? What sources of data do we use to get elements for our sets? This is the hill on which so many conspiracy theories die. They fail the Test of Occam’s Razor because they don’t address all the available data, or they use sources that misrepresent the data. Conspiracy theories and DH have this in common.

By the way, the other way of representing set theory is Venn diagrams, those colored circles that intersect or not. Gary Curtis has some Venn diagrams on his site. Here’s an example.

https://www.fallacyfiles.org/somernot.html

The math shows that logic is not just wordplay. It’s also an example of why some mathematicians say, we don’t invent math, we discover it. The oldest description of logic that we know of is in Aristotle’s Organon, comprising his Categories, On Interpretation, Prior and Posterior Analytics, Topics, and On Sophistical Refutations. You can find these works free online and can download them for free.

https://archive.org/details/AristotleOrganon

But probability math is rooted in gambling and the first calculations come from the 1600s CE, while set theory is the work of the late 1800s CE and in that century, Venn adapted Euler diagrams to help with studies of Boolean logic.

As with any good STEM field, it all fits together around the edges – and it helps show objectively why a fallacy is wrong.

This is the end....

I am deactivating my Twitter account. If you have not bookmarked this page, it's time to do that, and check back on Sundays for the rest of my fallacy posts.

Why Fallacies are False 001 -- Introduction

I wish I didn’t feel compelled to do this, but people with the best and worst intentions in the world both promulgate fallacies.

It’s partly because nobody taught them about it. Even people who get through college – even people who teach college as I show on another thread – write fallacies.

So how can you expect people who didn’t get to college to do any better?

And it’s partly because so few people pull their education up by the bootstraps. One of my favorite actors, Burt Lancaster, grew up in the New York slums, but he had access to libraries run by the Settlement House program – and he used them. He read everything he could get hold of and got good grades at a challenging high school – but he went to college as a jock and got treated like one. That was no challenge, so he and his best friend ran away and joined the circus – and the rest is history, except that he never stopped reading. One reason he annoyed people in Hollywood so much, is that they expected him to play lover boys, cowboys and athletes, and leave the intellectual roles to people like Orson Welles. Burt was having none of that and turned in one of the most impressive histories of films in the history of films.

I have read obsessively since I taught myself at the age of four. I studied four languages, two in high school and two in college – but I learned five outside college because they were the gateway to things I wanted to know. Rene Descartes agreed that languages are the beginning of knowledge, but he went on to say that academe keeps chewing over the same old fat and there are new things on the horizon, that they will never have anything to do with. This is in his Discours sur la Method and boy was he right.

He was talking about the liberal arts, and that’s where I find the fallacies. When you come to STEM, the method promulgated by Descartes has two important features. One is, following the method means you will usually pass the Test of Occam’s Razor. The other, which Descartes might not have expected, is that STEM fits together around the edges.

But people whose concentration is run out of the Liberal Arts department at a university are, like their forebears, pipelined. So you have archaeologists who ignore radiocarbon testing, hard evidence about how old material at their site is, or historians who ignore the DNA results of the Human Genome Project in discussing the origin and movements of populations.

And especially in two fields you have people with zero cross-fertilization. The professor whose dissertation showed me that Biblical Hebrew does not work the way everybody else teaches it, never heard of Axel Olrik until I told him in an email. So he was not capable of realizing that some of his grammar has the same functions as Olrik identified structures for in oral narratives. I have a thread on that.

What’s more, in Classical Greek studies, people are just starting to realize that there’s an aspectual sense in its verb system that applies, not just to usage, but to the features of conjugation. Their problem is, they fail to understand the Test of Occam’s Razor. They have built a terribly complex structure including both versions, which is the opposite of the Test. Worse yet, they do not use examples of surviving text to support their claims, which fails the other side of the Test – and some of the surviving data contradicts their claims. I have a thread about that.

So scholars of Classical Greek not only are pipelined to ignore anything outside their field, they can’t support themselves from within their field.

People in the 21^st century have the world’s greatest library and learning tool at their fingertips, and they don’t use it. The third reason why I should not have to write this thread is that there are two great resources on fallacies, Gary Curtis’ Fallacy Files website, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is peer-reviewed. But since people don’t know what fallacies are to begin with, they don’t do their homework.

So here I am, about to put up a third site. While hits on my blog pages are approaching 400,000, the number of daily hits probably reflects people ripping down posts from the blog onto storage, not people actually reading the posts. But I’m going to do this anyway. I feel obligated.

Next, I'll talk about why fallacies are not just word games.