A little more than 100 years ago, an innocent man was about to go on trial. His alleged crime: the murder of a 13-year-old boy two years earlier, found dead of multiple stab wounds in a Kiev cave. The man was Jewish. The boy was not. The crime, as portrayed by many with a larger, cynical agenda, carried echoes of the Middle Ages, when Crusaders accused Jews of blood libels on a disturbingly regular basis. Those who protested publicly, and the many more who did so privately, knew full well the man had not killed the boy. But the fix seemed in. And even the not guilty verdict brought with it a permanent, anti-Semitic sting.
So goes the rough outline of the case of Menachem Mendel Beilis, a 30-something, unassuming father of five charged with the murder and ritual blood draining of Andrei Yuchinsky, even though there was no direct or circumstantial evidence linking Beilis to the murder. The obvious injustice attracted international attention akin to the Dreyfus case, and when Beilis died in 1934, a free but poor man in America, more than 4,000 people attended his funeral.
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