So apparently everything old is new again, and the blood libel is being trotted out for a new phase of the current anti-Semitism now that the pro-Palestinian demonstrations have been exposed as a/ anti-Semitic and b/ paid for by various US companies, which may in fact be cutouts for the real instigators if they are not being used to launder money for those instigators. (b happened yesterday.)
And somebody tweeted that the blood libel was a thing of the 1200s CE.
Well, it wasn't. It was started by Christians in the 400s CE.
And the last manifestation that I know of was the 1913 trial in Kyiv, which at the time was part of the Russian empire, of Mendel Beilis. I have an entire blog thread about the trial. It has ten sections on the trial that will tell you what happened if you don't have time for the larger part of the work.
That larger part consists of 34 PDFs with the first and only English translation of the entire trial transcript, with footnotes, attached to a description of each days' material with other metadata. The transcript was 1430 double-column pages long in the pre-Soviet orthography. With the notes, the PDFs add up to over 3000 pages.
Since I finished posting the translation (2014), various new information or epiphanies have come up, and I added links for them to the original page.
The transcript and other information are here. I just checked and the website is still there. I downloaded things to my laptop since you never can tell when a link will rot. Let me know if anything has disappeared that I link to.
The trial was a fraud from beginning to end. The government knew that Vera Cheberyak and her gang of violent robbers committed the murder. When she was arrested in July 1911 by honest cops, a tsarist lackey had her released and began forging evidence against Beilis. He had depositions forged over the signatures of people who lived near the site of the murder; he had Vera's husband perjure himself -- Vera and their sole surviving child also committed perjury -- testifying to a story the government invented. He had items planted that supposedly related to the murder but had nothing to do with it. He had an incriminating letter forged over Beilis' signature.
The government's medical examiners signed an autopsy report that the government wrote in St. Petersburg. The information in it did not prove the blood libel because there was no way to do that. The three government witnesses who spoke or signed depositions about the blood libel, each had a different description of how you knew if a murder was the ritual murder involved in the blood libel.
The government's witnesses were mostly illiterate and none of them knew anything incriminating. The defense consisted of five lawyers who worked themselves into exhaustion in sessions that lasted up to 14 hours a day, 34 days straight including closing arguments, without a day off.
In the end, despite what anti-Semites will tell you, the jury voted on two charges. One charge was about the fact that a murder had been committed, without assigning guilt to any party. The jury voted yes on this.
The other charge was about whether Mendel Beilis was guilty of the murder out of "motives of religious fanaticism", the blood libel. Six of the twelve men on the jury voted no, which was enough to acquit.
The single most important thing about this trial was that it violated a century-old principle in law. There should be no crime charged if there is no existing law about it in the penal code. Russia repealed a law about murder due to "motives of religious fanaticism" in 1906, during the reforms forced on Nikolay II by the 1905 revolution. It was illegal to try Beilis or anybody else on this charge.
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