Mendel Beilis -- it's always something

One of the things I learned when I was translating the 1913 trial transcript, was something I brought up in my "murder mystery" version of the trial, The Anvil. Some of the things that came out at trial appeared to rely on forgeries in 1912, that failed to take into account calendar variations from 1911.

This would be understandable if the people creating the forgeries weren't literate. The illiterate witnesses who testified up to about day 10 lived in a subculture that didn't buy newspapers, which put the date on the front page. They didn't have bank accounts, although they might have postal accounts like the British. So they didn't get those nice checkbook calendar inserts to help date a check. 

They mostly associated events with seasons -- "it was still cold", "that was in the summer" -- or with religious feasts. But in the Russian Orthodox calendar there are a lot of movable feasts and at one point the judge had to verify that the Feast of the Forty Martyrs was March 9. 

So whenever the prosecution wanted to nail down a date, they were in trouble. They had to ask leading questions and you can almost see the witness shrug when he or she says "I don't know."

You can't forge trial documents if you're illiterate. You can, however, do it despite your ignorance.

So, for example, on Day 2, Alexey's teacher testifies sbout a register of his absences. It turns out that the dates given for the register a) are copied from February or b) only make sense for the same months in 1912. One example is reporting Andrey absent on March 27. There are two problems with that. One is that it was a Sunday in 1911; he didn't go to school on February 27, which was also a Sunday, but was reported absent on February 28, a Monday. The other is that of course Andrey was absent on March 27; that was the date of his funeral. In 1912, March 27 was a Tuesday. Looking up from his writing, the forger might see this, but obviously he never thought to look at the 1911 dates -- or the history of the case which would have showed it was the funeral date. I talk about this in my "murder mystery" version of my translation, The Anvil.

Last week I was looking over a posting about the Day 8 testimony of Lyuda Cheberyak, which was cooked up by the government to try to get a conviction. And I stopped and stared at the part where I showed that Passover was weeks after Andrey's murder. 

In 1911, Passover was April 12, one month after Andrey's death. There was no way to keep blood liquid for a month, let alone the fact that the blood libel is exactly that, a lie. In fact blood won't stay liquid for more than a few hours. Jewish law knows this perfectly well; Mishnah Yoma 4:2 discusses the actions taken to keep blood from congealing during the Yom Kippur service. 

But in cooking up the murder case, the government never stopped to think about whether the blood should be liquid or not. The blood libel doesn't say. It was cooked up hundreds of years ago by Christians with slander on their minds, not by people interested in dotting i's and crossing t's.

The government never produced evidence of catching Andrey's blood. They had no receptacle for capturing it as evidence. The Christian medical experts showed that only the head wounds produced a flow of blood, which was caught in the boy's hair and shirt. And in fact most of Andrey's blood remained in his body; the liver was not exsanguinated and the positions of the wounds on his body would not have allowed a heavy flow of blood. The heart was not autopsied but turned into a preserved specimen and no conclusion could be drawn from it.

Nobody has commented on this that I know of, but then hardly anybody has read the entire transcript, let alone associated documentation like the work of Tager. The point is that the government started with a theory of the case and forged or planted or suborned the evidence they thought would make twelve muzhiks vote to convict. They never stopped to examine whether their theory COULD be proven; they weren't competent to do that. This ought to sound familiar after the dozens of US lawyers who have filed court cases without evidence and even without logic as a basis -- and been caught, and been sanctioned. And maybe watching these lawyers get sanctioned over the last two years is what made the timing on the Beilis case leap out at me.