Paul Goble
Staunton, Dec. 3 – Almost everyone is familiar with the notorious Beilis case in which the tsarist authorities charged a Jew with carrying out the ritual murder of a Christian child, an absurd accusation that the jury rejected but a case that is remembered exclusively as an example of the anti-Semitism characteristic of the upper reaches of the Russian government.
What far fewer people are aware of is that the Russian Empire brought similar and equally absurd charges of ritual murder against other subjects of its empire, including various Finno-Ugric and Muslim peoples, as part and parcel of its imperial policy of denigrating its non-Russian and non-Orthodox subjects.
To recall this in no way lessens the horrific anti-Semitism that lay behind the Beilis case, but it is a reminder that that action in addition was part of a broader imperial policy that also deserves to be recalled and condemned, especially at a time when the Putin regime is celebrating so many aspects of the imperial past.
Mariya Vyatchina, a St. Petersburg scholar, provides detailed and heavily annotated studies of these other blood libel cases and highlights the way in which they, along with attacks on Jews as in the Beilis case, were “an instrument of colonial policy” in three new articles (beda.media/posts/krovavyy-navet, beda.media/special/multanskoe-delo and beda.media/posts/beylis-krov-musulman-i-krasnaya-smert).
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