On October 28, 1913, a trial ended in Kiev, then in imperial Russia and today capital of Ukraine. Mendel Menahem Beilis, a 39-year-old secular Jew and father of five children, a Russian military veteran, and manager of a brick factory, had been accused of murder for alleged ritual purposes—the infamous “blood libel.” His purported victim was a Ukrainian boy, Andriy Yushchinskiy, aged 12. The child’s corpse was found near the Zaitsev brickworks, where Beilis was employed.
The centennial of the Beilis trial was commemorated on November 4 in New York by YIVO, the distinguished Institute for Jewish Research founded in Poland in 1925 and relocated to America in 1940. The case may be remembered most widely as the subject of Bernard Malamud’s 1966 novel The Fixer, in which Beilis was given the fictional name Yakov Bok. Yet the Beilis case is not a literary curiosity—it remains perilously relevant.
