MJH | The History of Antisemitism: Mendel Beilis

On Sunday, March 20, 1911, children playing in a cave near Kiev made a gruesome discovery: the blood-soaked body of a partially clad boy. After right-wing groups asserted that the killing was a ritual murder, the police, with no direct evidence, arrested Menachem Mendel Beilis, a 39-year-old Jewish manager at a factory near the site of the crime. Beilis’s trial in 1913 quickly became an international cause célèbre. The jury ultimately acquitted Beilis but held that the crime had the hallmarks of a ritual murder. Robert Weinberg’s book Blood Libel in Late Imperial Russia: The Ritual Murder Trial of Mendel Beilis explores the reasons why the tsarist government framed Beilis, shedding light on the excesses of antisemitism in late Imperial Russia.

Robert Weinberg is the Isaac Clothier Professor of History and International Relations at Swarthmore, where he has taught for thirty-five years. His research has focused on the revolution of 1905 in Odessa; pogroms; antisemitism; Birobidzhan; anti-Judaism campaigns; and the Jewish Question.

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