"The Case of the Sachkhere Jews"

About forty years ago I got a book - a collection of court speeches by famous Russian lawyers, delivered by them in the last third of the 19th century.

Boris Akunin had not yet appeared on the horizon, or perhaps even been born at all. Soviet literature somehow bypassed this dynamic period in the life of Russian society. The classics, with the possible exception of the frivolous Antoshi Chekhonte, who focused on world problems and spiritual quests, who even wrote detective stories like “Crime and Punishment” in a boring, ponderous and edifying manner, got tired of them even at school.

And, having found a lot of cool detective stories from real Russian life in the colossal volume, no less exciting than those that Sherlock Holmes, the great virtual contemporary of Russian lawyers, spun, I repeatedly re-read the collection over the following years. The brightest of the cases that have fascinated me in my youth have not faded in consciousness until now.

One of them is the so-called “case of Sarra Modebadze,” heard in the Kutaisi court in March 1879. Everyone knows the “case” of the Kyiv Jew Beilis, accused of murdering a Christian child for ritual purposes, but in fact slandered and found not guilty by a jury. However, it was the “case of Sarra Modebadze” that was the first public trial in Russia on charges of this kind, and it is a pity that it, heard more than three decades earlier than the “Beilis case”, is practically unknown to our contemporaries, although, unfortunately, it has not lost this day of its relevance. Therefore, I would like to talk about him, as far as possible within the framework of a newspaper publication.

In short, the intrigue is this: in April, 1878, on a cold foggy day, a six-year-old girl, a peasant daughter, Sarah Modebadze, a weak, sickly, poorly dressed, lame child, disappeared in the village of Pervisi. The last Sarah was seen by her elder sister and relatives, who went into the forest for brushwood and punished the girl to return home, which was a few hundred meters away. Soon a thick fog descended, and the elder sister, who had returned from the forest in the evening, found out that Sarah had not returned.

The night searches undertaken by the relatives did not yield any results, and rumors spread throughout the village that Sarah might have been stolen by Jews, residents of the village of Sachkhere, who drove through Pervisi along a road that wound under the mountain, on the slope of which Sarah and her relatives were at that time . The Jews rode from the market in two horse groups and carried various livestock: a bird, a kid - it was on the eve of Passover, and the riders were hurrying home to organize a seder. The Jews rode quickly, were noisy and excited. When Sarah's aunt called out to them with an offer to sell her a goose, they only sped up the horses' running. Subsequently, witnesses also testified that these Jews, having arrived in Sachkhere, for some reason chose a roundabout route, and did not drive to the Jewish quarter by the usual, shorter route.

Rumors about the theft of a girl by Jews instantly spread through the gorges, and the situation in the district quickly heated up: the Caucasus is the Caucasus. The next day, the elder gabay of the Jewish Sachkhere community came to the district head and asked to send a guard to the village out of fear of pogroms ...

On the third day, a few hundred meters from the parental house, higher up the mountain, near the vineyard, Sarah was finally found... The crooked corpse of the unfortunate child lay pressed against the fence... The village detective, bailiff Abashidze, in accordance with the circulars, examined the deceased and, without finding There were no traces or signs of violent death, he declared an accident - death from hypothermia, and gave permission for burial. The next day, a frantic Jewish guy burst into the courtyard of the local leader of the nobility, Prince Tsereteli, demanding to be taken to the prince and, according to witnesses, yelling about his desire to tell him a “heart secret.” It ended with the servants, deciding that the guy was drunk, and drove him out of the yard, never allowing him to meet the prince...

Meanwhile, the father of the deceased, Joseph Modebadze, and her entire family are beginning to spread rumors about the cuts allegedly seen by them under Sarah’s knees.

A week after the funeral, the police are forced to exhume the corpse, which involves quite high ranks from medicine and law enforcement. No damage was found except for minor punctures or pricks on the fingers. But the situation in the district continued to heat up, and nine Jews were arrested, whom they saw on the eve of Pesach on the road. Subsequently, three of them, passing in the second group, were released, because the investigation decided that they could not commit the abduction ...

The case begins to cause a wide public outcry, the Russian press writes about it, and the best lawyers are attracted to it. In the summer, a commission from senior medical officials and the prosecutor's office of the Transcaucasian region carried out a second exhumation of the corpse - practically no new data...

In the end, the investigation prepares an indictment based entirely on the testimony of the residents of the county. The trial took place on March 5 of the year 12-1879 (coinciding, for surprising reasons, with Purim). The defendants were defended by the well-known St. Petersburg lawyer Pavel Alexandrov, who a year earlier had obtained the justification for the revolutionary terrorist Vera Zasulich, who had shot at the St. Petersburg Governor-General.

Aleksandrov’s most interesting speech in defense of the Sachkhere Jews occupies almost fifty pages in the book. The lawyer, based on investigative data (and to the credit of the local police, it must be said that they carefully prepared quite a lot of factual materials for the trial, although misinterpreted), was able to prove the physical impossibility of Sarah’s kidnapping by the Jews. Having questioned the witnesses individually and during cross-examination, he broke the mutual responsibility of the testimony, proving to the court that most of them were obvious perjury... Very interesting reading, no worse than Conan Doyle!..

The case in court, as they say, fell apart, the Jews were acquitted by the jury and released in the courtroom.

Having decided to write this material, just in case, I looked into the omniscient Internet: is there anything on the topic that interests me? And in response to the request “Sarah Modebadze” the computer came to a Russian site with the playful name “Devil’s Easter Eggs”, where, to my surprise, I found a statement of the case known to me.

This story, written, if I’m not mistaken, by an author named Eugene, was started at the beginning of this year, and when I first entered the site, I read only the first few pages of the long-familiar plot. Despite the fact that Eugene’s presentation, in my opinion, is somewhat literary and grammatically sloppy, the author had a much larger amount of information than what was previously available to me. I, in fact, knew about this case from a brief summary of its essence that preceded P.A. Aleksandrov’s speech, and from the transcript of the speech itself. Evgeniy, apparently, in addition to this, had the materials of the investigation and prosecution, and he gives a more detailed factual picture. True, sometimes I had the assumption that I was reading “a story based on...”, but even if Evgeniy fantasized something, then, I will say right away, not a single fact he cited contradicts the speech of P.A. Alexandrova.

Finally, at the end of February, Eugene “finished his permitted speeches,” and it became clear where he was going. It seems to me that this author is one of the subverters, many of whom surfaced in Gorbachev’s times, when various information flows poured into the breaches of the rusty “Iron Curtain”, most of which, to put it mildly, came from the sewer...

The pathos of “The Case of Sarra Modebadze” from “Devil’s Little East Side” is directed against P.A. Aleksandrov, who turned out to be guilty of the fact that, in the bygone century, including in Stalin’s times, this lawyer, who had iron logic, enormous erudition and artistry , was held in high esteem by new generations of lawyers, and his speech in the 50s of the XNUMXth century was published in a book with a preface that abundantly quoted the odious USSR Prosecutor General Vyshinsky, who was not yet born at the time of the “Sarah Modebadze Case.” For me, this is the same stupidity as denying, say, the scientific achievements of the great physicist S.I. Vavilov, on the grounds that he was published in the same fifties in the collection “Philosophical Problems of Modern Physics”, where the preface begins with an extensive quote from Beria, and most of the articles defame quantum mechanics and Albert Einstein personally.

But along with the general denial of the talent of P.A. Alexandrov, who outright won the case and achieved the acquittal of the arrested Jews, Evgeniy hints that Alexandrov, as in the fairly clear case of Vera Zasulich, only “took it by the throat”, and the court’s decision was erroneous, and therefore, something did take place...

And this is where, in my opinion, the most interesting thing is. After all, the Jews were tried on charges of kidnapping and murder of a child, but nowhere in the case was there an official accusation that the murder was ritual - the investigation and the prosecutor's office carefully avoided investigating the purpose of the alleged murder. This was a kind of “political correctness” of that time.

Perhaps no one, except ordinary peasants - Sarra Modebadze's father and her other closest relatives, said in court, and even then not openly, that the girl was kidnapped and killed by Jews with the aim of using her blood in some mysterious Passover rituals. And so, having smashed the accusation with his harsh logic, breaking the heaps of lies on which it was based, in fact already the winner of the trial, P.A. Alexandrov in the last quarter of his speech on the principle of Roman law “Qui prodest?” - “Who benefits?” proposes to analyze and discuss: why, in fact, did the Jews kidnap and kill a child? He does this deliberately, provocatively, he knows that his words will be read by all thinking Russia.

He, a liberal, a devotee of the new post-reform Russia, wants to expose the centuries-old blood libel on the Jewish people. And this final cadence of his speech, unfortunately, has not lost its relevance. It is not surprising, therefore, that even today, more than a century after the death of a famous lawyer, they try to throw mud at him under the guise of neutral objectivity.

From the speech of P.A. Alexandrova

“...It remains for me to talk about the internal side of the crime attributed to the accused, about the motives and purposes of the kidnapping of Sarra Modebadze. The purpose of the incentive always plays a significant or at least an important role not only in determining the nature of the crime, the internal guilt of the criminal, but also in the system of evidence and evidence when a person commits an act. Not always, of course, this goal and motivation can be proven or determined with precision, but at least they should be assumed as possible and probable...

The purpose of Sarra Modebadze's abduction and detention, the prosecutor says, has not been discovered by the investigation. Full, right? The goal was not discoverable, it was not always named, it was not provable, but there was no need to discover it, because it was always clear to the accusers. When, having compared the disappearance of Sarah with the passage of Jews, suspicion of the kidnapping of a child was declared on the Jews, what was the basis of this suspicion - in the traveler or in the Jew? Of course, in a Jew. Neither a Georgian, nor an Armenian, nor a Christian in general would be suspected of abducting a child under the circumstances under which Sarah disappeared, because the abduction would seem pointless. Suspicion, and then the investigation, would be directed to other threads of revealing the truth. As for the Jew, the purpose of the abduction seemed clear and the motive undeniable. The purpose of the abduction has not been fully discovered by the investigation, the prosecutor says. But did […] they undertake anything in this direction? […] meanwhile, twice in the same indictment he dates different circumstances to the eve of Passover.

What kind of date is this? If common people sometimes mean holidays and fasting, then this has its own reasons that are not applicable to the enlightened compiler of the indictment. Why is there a Jewish calendar in a Russian indictment if, as in the present case, it is not associated with an indication of the purpose of the crime, its meaning and significance? The Jewish Passover does not speak, it nods to the purpose of kidnapping Sarah Modebadze, and this nod is no less intelligible than words. No, there’s no need to hide the sewing in the bag. It is necessary to directly raise the question of the use of Christian blood by Jews for religious and mystical purposes. Don't be alarmed, gentlemen, judges. It is not my task to give a detailed analysis of this question [...] I want only to present a few considerations to provide some counterbalance to the suspicion that the accusation in this case involuntarily leads to - a suspicion that you will not be able to forget or erase from your thoughts and which dangerous in the sense that, despite your desire, it can have an inevitable impact on the assessment of the external facts of the case, evidence and evidence of guilt.

You, without doubt, know at least the closest part of the literature relating to the question I am raising. In 1876, an essay of Lyutostansky appeared in Russian literature.

Born a Jew, a former rabbi, who exchanged the clothes of a rabbi for the cassock of a Catholic priest, the cassock for the cassock of an Orthodox hieromonk, and the latter for the frock coat of a layman, Lutostansky drew up a long, I don’t want to say, evidentiary act against the Jews, sinning in it at the same time against the integrity of an honest man and writer , because he did not indicate the main source of his work - a note by the director of the department of foreign confessions, Skripitsyn, compiled in 1844 and published last year in the newspaper "Citizen" (Note: According to Evgeny, the true author of the note is the famous Russian philologist V. Dal, author of the “Explanatory Dictionary”, which has been documented by the modern American researcher Semyon Reznik), - a note regarding which the work of Lyutostansky in a significant part is only a confused and distorted reprint; sinning against the seriousness and impartiality of the literary researcher, because in his biased advertising Lyutostansky seems to be ignorant of such a serious work on the issue examined by Lyutostansky, which appeared back in 1861, as the work of Professor Khvolson, a deeply learned Hebraist who devoted his entire long academic life to Jewish literature, seems to be and history, a man who adopted Christianity out of sincere conviction, a man of honest life and impeccable morality, a veteran professor of two higher educational institutions - secular and religious.

Deeply and seriously, like a true conscientious scientist, using all the extensive literature on the issue, Khvolson in his essay examines the question of the use of Christian blood by Jews, subjecting it to a comprehensive discussion, analyzes step by step all the arguments of his opponents and bases his refutations on direct acquaintance with the most distant historical and literary sources. This work of Khvolson, which our accusers should consult more often and which I am ashamed to call a counterweight to the work of Lyutostansky - they are so incommensurable in nature, I ask permission to use to present my thoughts on the issue that concerns us.

The ancient Christians never accused the Jews of using Christian blood. On the contrary, the Christians of the first centuries themselves were accused of consuming blood, so that the ancient apologists of Christianity, like Tertullian, Augustine and others, were forced to justify the Christians in the accusations being made on them. The accusation against them, silenced with the victory of Christianity, was resumed by Christians against Jews not earlier than the twelfth century and became more widespread only in the thirteenth century. From then until the end of the sixteenth century, the persecution of Jews in various cases of the murder of Christian children in order to obtain blood for various religious, mystical and medical purposes has been going on in history. The period of particular vitality of such accusations was a period of extreme mental stagnation and ignorance, superstition and religious fanaticism.

Infanticide in the Middle Ages was very common; To get rid of the punishment for a crime, the infanticide first spread the rumor that the child found killed was the work of hated Jews. On the other hand, the Middle Ages were for centuries predominantly concocting pious deceptions, miracles and persuasion of people through superstition. Every locality needed miraculous images, a local shrine, local miraculous relics, or even any means of awe-inspiring. The dead child, whose murder could be erected on the Jews, was a good opportunity to have his local faith martyr, his local shrine, attracting his own and others, and becoming a profitable article not only for clerical establishments, but also for the whole locality, where the mass of people who were in a hurry was attracted trustingly express your awe to the proclaimed martyr.

Thousands of innocently executed, burned, and tortured Jews and thousands more driven out and persecuted were the fruit of medieval superstition, ignorance, and fanaticism. But already before the Reformation, pastors of the church had weight and significance in Christianity and no fearful suspicions from the learned and unlearned crowd, and after the Reformation, many laypeople who zealously stood up for the Jews and bravely opposed the absurd accusation. Many popes, like Gregory IX, Clement VI, Sixt IV and others, after careful consideration of the grounds on which the opinion is based that the Jews use human blood and that for this purpose they are supposedly capable of killing Christian children, recognized and proclaimed solemnly that there is no no evidence sufficiently clear and true to recognize the prejudice against the Jews as fair and to declare them guilty of such crimes. Under the influence of the opposition, which came from the depths of Christianity itself, under the influence of the Reformation, the successes of civilization and rationalistic criticism, the medieval accusation against Jews collapsed, and since half of the seventeenth century Western Europe has not known the processes of accusing Jews of using Christian blood. Even simple rumors about the cases of Jews obtaining martyred Christian blood disappeared ...

Since then, such accusations against Jews have remained only in Poland, in our western provinces and in the East - in Turkey, Syria and here in the Caucasus. But in Russia, in 1817, a statement was made against the accusation leveled against the Jews. Under the pressure of this statement, under the influence of those simple considerations that murder and the use of blood are prohibited by the fundamental dogmas of the Old Testament religion and Talmudic teachings, the accusation against the Jews had to be limited, narrowed to the form and limits in which it could still drag out its existence among gullible people. a miserable existence in its last shameful gasps.

Now an ardent prosecutor of Jewry, who wished to pretend to be a preserver of Christian children from savage fury, having encroached, by unsuitable means, however, to erect a medieval ignorant fable to a degree of historical theological research, Lyutostansky says:

“The custom of drinking blood, while not at all constituting a religious affiliation of the whole Jewry, constitutes a religious peculiarity of ignorant fanatical Talmudist sectarians.”

"This ritual

- says Skripitsyn in his note,

- not only does not belong to all Jews in general, but even without any doubt it is known to very few. It exists only in the Hasidim sect, but even here it constitutes a great secret, perhaps not known to all of them and, at least, of course, not by all Hasidim and is not always fulfilled. Poland and our western provinces, which have served since the Middle Ages as a refuge for inveterate and ignorant Judaism, still represent the largest number of examples of such fanaticism, especially the province of Vitebsk, where the Hasidic sect has spread significantly.”

Regarding Skripitsyn’s opinion, I must first of all note that the late director of the Department of Foreign Confessions, in charge of Jewish affairs, should know that the Hasidic sect appeared between Jews only about half of the last century and spread gradually in Lithuania, Poland and Galicia, and the accusation of Jews The use of Christian blood has arisen in Western Europe since the twelfth century.

Further, if Poland and our western provinces serve as a haven for ignorant Judaism, as Skripitsyn puts it, and represents most of the savage killing of Christian children, then we should not forget that these same areas are inhabited by other tribes: Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, in the lower social strata, they also do not represent a high degree of education and culture, and who, like the Jews, expect enlightenment from their intellectuals. If an ignorant mass of Jewry is capable, according to Skripitsyn, to represent an example of ignorant barbarism, then another, equally ignorant mass of the population is able to believe such examples with a fabulous character and, in their naive faith, give superstitious interpretations of events, arouse suspicions and accusations that reject common sense and an enlightened gaze as ignorant and unjustifiable by a critically verified reality.

"In the murder of Christian children,

- says Lyutostansky,

- more than one popular voice accuses the Jews: they have been repeatedly accused of this before the courts. In most of these cases there was no consciousness of their own, despite any evidence; but there were, however, also examples where Jews confessed themselves, denounced their parents and relatives, and then, realizing their religious errors, were baptized.”

As for the reference to the accusatory voice of the people, it does not prevent to remember that it is necessary to use this voice with analysis, distinguishing in it a truly popular, rational, fruit of common sense and understanding, from someone else's, inspired, prejudicial and superstitious. Otherwise, many superstitions and inconsistencies would have to be learned from the voice of the people. As for instructions on court proceedings, first of all I would like to draw attention to the following.

The terrible, bloody glow of campfires with many thousands of dead on them illuminated the history of the processes of witches, sorcerers, sorcerers, wizards who confessed and convicted of sorcery, in relations with evil spirits, in spoiling people with supernatural means, in black war and other mystical crimes. Where are these crimes now? They died away along with the fires that lit them, along with the courts that tried them. But these were the courts of the Holy Inquisition, who performed the judgment in the name and glory of God, who, by their sentences, brought judgment to serve God. Judicial sentences did not raise superstition on the degree of truth; they only proved that superstition produced and fed these very sentences.

I cannot enter into the analysis of all cases of court sentences cited as evidence of the use of Christian blood by Jews. But to the credit of Russian legal proceedings, even before the reform, it should be said that our accusers can only indicate a single case of conviction, in which, however, the issue of blood consumption is eliminated. Other cases of suspicion against the Jews or did not go out of the sphere of gossip, without reaching the court, and often being even categorically refuted, or ended in acquittals ...

[Further, PA Aleksandrov analyzes the Velizh and Saratov cases on charges of Jews for the murder of Christian children, obeyed in the middle of the 19th century, collapsed in court and ended with an excuse of the slandered defendants.]

... The State Council acknowledged that the testimony of the scammers, embodying many contradictions and inconsistencies, without any positive evidence or undoubted arguments, cannot be accepted as judicial evidence against the Jews and constitute nothing in the least confirmed for which the scammers were punished.

... From where, they say (the accusers of the Jews), are these identical and deliberately distorted corpses of young children? Why find them there only where there are Jews? Why are they always Christian children? And, finally, why have these cases always happened only during or near Easter? How to explain what could have prompted anyone else to a meaningless brutal act, if this is not some mysterious kabalistic or religiously savage purpose?

Why, I ask again, what happens is that the scammers and accuser of the Jews, being in such a quality voluntarily, stating sincerely the desire to discover the truth, sometimes even showing repentance of their complicity in the crime they condemn, give rise to contradictory results. sometimes directly contradictory testimony?

Why the mass of details in their testimony is obvious and categorically refuted by a lie? From where, in their explanations, along with, at least, with the possible and possible, is the mass of the incredible and unacceptable, obviously invented and false? Why is it usually only after many reprimands and confrontations, after many efforts and clarifications, smoothing out contradictions and eliminating obvious inconsistencies, is it possible to dwell on something significant?

Why are these informers and incriminators always people who have nothing to lose, people of the worst reputation? Why are these numerous, constantly changing reservations - now affirmed, now denied and explained either by forgetting or by mistake?

These questions suggest themselves when reading cases [...] and it is not difficult to find a clue. There were benefits in the accusations of Jews in the Middle Ages, there are they in our days. A child who kills and denounces kills and mutilates a child. When mutilated, usually keep those classic external signs, the concept of which is kept in folk tales.

The informer, apparently, brings himself to justice, but this is only apparently. In essence, he gives himself a very modest share of participation: he is usually an accidental witness to a crime, under the influence of threats and fear, he agreed to take out and hide the corpse […] but now, under the influence of remorse, he decides to reveal everything to justice and clarify the matter. Once he finds himself in the role of explaining the matter, his goal is achieved and his career is made. Now he is a force, a man of great importance. The fate of many now depends on his word. Now his unscrupulous, in-your-face slander can make a strong man, who until now considered him a nonentity, tremble. Now this person will slavishly look into his eyes, ingratiate himself, please him, please him. The informer himself is in prison. But what is prison to him? For some it’s a prison, but for him it’s a home. He, perhaps, has seen life since he went to prison as an informer on an important case. And the prison warden treats him with respect: after all, this is not a simple thief - he is a general in crime. And the investigator values ​​him as a person needed for the case, which inflamed the investigator with its grandeur. And in the future, for your own moderately dissociated participation in the crime, you will receive a reduced punishment, in view of the services rendered in solving the crime...

Excuse me, gentlemen of the judge, I may be abusing your attention. But in view of the high social significance that this process should have, the first public process on charges of this kind, I would like to fulfill my duty not only as a defender, but also as a citizen, because there is no doubt that we, as public figures, there is a duty not only to serve as protected by us, but also to contribute to, if possible, in matters of public interest. I, however, will not be verbose and I want to say only a few words about the viability of other evidence of the accusation against the Jews in the use of Christian blood.

People familiar with Jewish literature, even those who are hostile to Judaism, reviewed all sorts of Jewish books, weighed the most insignificant sayings in them in order to denounce the Jews, and yet did not find the slightest hint that Jews are allowed consuming blood for any religious or medical purpose. The testimony of witnesses on which they rely is refuted by many baptized Jews, who call the accusation of using Christian blood slander and arrogant fiction. Among the latter are those who held high positions in the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, and people with high scientific education after receiving holy baptism. I am not saying this; this says Professor Chwolson; This speaks in his review of the book of the Lyutostansky Russian Archpriest Protopopov, who, of course, cannot be suspected of civility in Jewry.

On what, however, literary and scientific authorities rests in his accusation Lyutostansky? Monk Neophyte, Serafimovich and his replicator Tsikulsky, non-commissioned officer Savitsky, Fedorov, baptized Jew Grudinsky, Midge from Medzerzhinets, worker Nastasya, soldier Terentyeva, Maximov. That seems to be all his authorities.

Regarding the monk Neophyte, it is difficult to decide, Chvolson says, whether he really was a baptized rabbi or called himself a baptized rabbi and monk in order to give more weight to his work.

Serafimovich was in a lunatic asylum, made a fable about his miraculous healing and, finding himself, thanks to this fable, a hospitable corner within the walls of a monastic cloister, wrote an essay against the Jews, referring to the Talmud, so little known to him [...] that he gives his treatises imaginary titles and quotes paragraphs, while the Talmud is not at all divided into paragraphs. With shameless brazenness, Serafimovich assures that some Lithuanian Jews use 120 blood shtofs every year and that he himself, while still a rabbi, stabbed one Christian child with a blow to the side, from where octagus blood, white as milk, flowed. If you compare the testimony of one witness in the Saratov case with these 120 shtofs of the annual need for blood, saying that six million Jews from Volyn province were sent to a bottle of blood, you will understand how much Jewish religion should cost Lithuanian Jews ...

[Next P.A. Aleksandrov comments in detail on the personal characteristics of the informers according to the certification of Lyutostansky himself. These are entirely criminal elements, prostitutes and drunkards, “faithful servants for money and vodka.”]

... Few add to these authorities and various testimonies of those Jews who converted to Christianity, who changed their religion not because of sincere belief in the correctness of Christianity, but for the sake of getting rid of the upcoming punishment, these or other benefits, or simply because they all remained united to be rascals and idlers, both in Jewry and in Christianity, in which absolutely nothing has lost Jewry and has not acquired Christianity.

And on such authorities they want to confirm the existence of a bloody affair. Such authorities are opposed to people of science and religion. Moreover, they want to establish dogmas based on such authorities. When those discussing the killing of children by Jews were faced with a very natural question, why the Jews, killing a child and leaving obvious signs of their fanaticism on him, such as circumcision, bleeding wounds, etc., do not hide such corpses, for which they have every means, being in solidarity with each other , but on the contrary, as if they were deliberately being displayed in places where they were immediately found, then one of the authorities, Moshka from Medzerzhinets, explained that this was contrary to their faith and that, according to the requirement of religion, the murdered baby should be thrown out or floated, and not to bury, but Nastasya added, says Lutostansky, that the Jewish woman - her mistress - told her that if the corpse were buried, then all the Jews would die.

If Moshka and Nastasya are considered the guardians of dogmas, even sectarian ones, then one can compose such a dogma, before which, perhaps, even the most shameless accusers of Jewry will be embarrassed. The medieval superstitious prejudice, generated and supported by barbarity and ignorance, which cost many sacrifices and hardships for the Jewish tribe, ended its existence in Western Europe in the light of truth, enlightenment, civilization and publicity. It still lives, we hope it will live out its life with us. It is kept in the recesses of the same ignorance that gave birth to it and good-natured gullibility, accessible to everything fantastic, strange, extraordinary; it is supported by selfish deception, it feeds on unverified rumors that do not know and do not want to know their reasons; it still exists thanks to the archival and clerical secrecy of court proceedings […] it is repeated from time to time by those who do not want to know criticism, verification, and for whom creating an accusation means already proving it...

Superstition lives, thanks only to stupidity and insolent deception, but it must cease to live.

The hard time had to endure nine unfortunate defendants, fathers and children, who together endured long months of imprisonment, serious accusation, an unbearable dispute over their innocence, the struggle for the right to remain what they were born with. A badly endured misfortune, but it is not in doubt that it will be an atoning sacrifice, full of good consequences. A few days, and the case that has passed before you in real life, will become the property of all reading Russia. It will present much instructive to Russian public opinion.

These prison sufferers will stand in their prison robes, this shadow of a 60-year-old man will emerge, sharing a grave misfortune with his son, these “fanatical” followers of a legally free and illegally despised religion will be etched in the memory. “People of freedom” will also pass, not discredited by the court, not suspected by the prosecutor, not involved in the investigation - people of Christianity - religions of peace and love; The procession will be opened by a father who brought here to court the grave grief of the death of his child, but the father, who decided to make decent profit from the death of this child and, looking at a 6-year-old child as an aid in the household, valued him at 1000 rubles. They will see this old woman, with sighs, clutching the rags of her dead granddaughter to her chest and without a sigh, without regret, without compassion for the fate of others, telling a blatant lie about the cuts she allegedly saw on the legs of the corpse. Both the mother and sister of the deceased will pass by, repeating the same lie without conscience, just to help their father and husband get the desired benefit at the cost of condemning people whose innocence they themselves have no reason to doubt. There will also be a series of the most reliable false witnesses, ready to help their fellow man, to rob the unfortunate man with good luck, and who, by misfortune, turned out to be very stupid so as not to discover the falsity of their testimony.

Russian public opinion will see the consequences of a frivolous attitude to fables that feed tribal strife and contempt for the religion that once took precedence and gave juices to Christianity itself ... With a retrospective light this real public matter will be blamed on this kind of property and previous judicial tacit processes. It will trap unscrupulous mouths to many who have seen bribes and the machinations of Jews in former excuses. It will explain why the best representatives of Jewry did not remain deaf and dumb about serious accusations. It will remind Russian people of justice, one justice, which is just necessary, so that such sad deeds will not be repeated ... It will tell the Russian investigators that they should not be carried away by superstition, but rather dominate him, not give in to false perjury and false agreement, but be critical of to the facts and to perceive them after a thorough comprehensive examination, for which all means are given to them by law. It will tell Russian prosecutors that they are dear and courteous to society, not only as guardians of society from criminal encroachment, but especially as guardians of it from unjustified suspicion and false accusations [...] that for the correctness of judicial conviction, hard work of finding the real truth is needed, but not a flight of imagination from an artistically truthful playwright ...

I graduated; I don’t really need to ask you, gentlemen, judges. What constitutes the ultimate goal of defense, you will give us not because of our request, but because of your conviction and justice. It remains for me to thank you for the attention with which you patiently listened to me and with which even earlier you gave us full opportunity to fulfill our duty. With complete peace of mind for the fate of those I defend, unshaken by any fears, I entrust them to your wisdom and justice. And may this case be the last case of this nature in the annals of the Russian trial.”

So, having made this pathetic speech, P.A. Alexandrov won the trial, the Jews received freedom. But around the same days, in a neighboring district, a resident of the city of Gori, Ekaterina Dzhugashvili, gave birth to a son, who was yet to play a terrible role in the history of Russian Jews, and ten years after the trial of the Sachkhere Jews, another boy, Adolf Schicklgruber, was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, through for several decades, intent on finding the “final solution to the Jewish question,” called the Holocaust in modern historiography... There were fifteen years left before the “Dreyfus Affair”, and thirty-four years before the “Beilis Affair”...

In the summer of 1976, my family and I spent a vacation in a wonderful place - the village of Novomelkovo, 130 kilometers north of Moscow, where we rented the veranda of her large hut from a sweet granny with a completely tanakhic first name and patronymic, Anna Semyonovna. During the day, we used the services of the Verkhnevolzhskaya tourist center, which was across the road: we ate food, went on excursions, and rode on tourist center boats between the protected islands of the Ivankovo ​​Reservoir. It was an idyll, in a word. We had the best relationship with our granny - in the morning I brought her several buckets of water from the well, and she secretly threw fresh cucumbers from the garden into the bosom of our youngest in order to diversify the catering food... One evening we sat with her like a village at the gate, and the conversation naturally turned to our Uzbekistan. Anna Semyonovna remembered the times of construction of the Moscow Canal and the Uzbeks who worked there - in dressing gowns, dirty, smelly (as I now understand - prisoners).

- But the worst of all

- she continued unexpectedly for no reason,

- these are Jews. They are bloodsuckers. They drink Christian blood.

Well, what can we do about it if a Russian woman, a peasant woman, who, apparently, has never seen a living Jew (I judge this by my appearance, it’s impossible to make a mistake), is a priori convinced that we are bloodsuckers?!

After this, we began jokingly calling our five-year-old youngest, at that time a curly, thin blonde, a bloodsucker!

...It’s not for me, of course, to judge Pyotr Akimovich Alexandrov for naivety - after a century and a quarter, the fallacy of his liberal faith in reason and progress is clearly visible. I don’t know if he would undertake to save a terrorist today if there was undoubtedly evidence of a crime?

I know only one thing, the world is much tougher and more conservative than we want, and the more everything changes, the more everything remains the same. There is no need to go far for examples.

Only in February-March 2002, in the Syria mentioned by Alexandrov and in the activist of the Middle East “settlement” - Saudi Arabia, publications appeared about the ritual killings of children of other faiths by Jews to provide them with blood for the rites of Purim and Passover.

And in democratic Poland, eager to join the beau monde of civilization - the EEC and NATO, a picture was hung in one of the churches depicting the technological process of Jews extracting blood from a living Christian baby. In response to the diplomatic demarche of our Foreign Ministry, the Polish government reasonably said that they have a democracy and do not interfere in the affairs of the church. An appeal to the Vatican, which supposedly renounced the “blood libel” about forty years ago and is so far headed by the most, so to speak, “Sudeophile” Pope in the entire history of Christianity, also yielded nothing...

C'est la vie! - as they say in Dreyfus's homeland.

Author - Reuven MILLER

Jerusalem. 2002