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.