The American Jewish Yearbook The Beilis Affair Jewish Education – American Jewish Yearbook edited by Herman Bernstein, published by The Jewish Publication Society of America – Philadelphia 1914. One of the earliest detailed records of the infamous blood libel known as the Beilis Affair.
The 1914 American Jewish Yearbook primarily deals with the Beilis Affair, which concluded shortly before the volume’s publication: “The Beilis Affair was the darkest tragedy for the Jews in recent years. The forces of evil in the Russian Empire conspired against them; an innocent Jew was tortured in prison for two and a half years, and the entire Jewish population in Russia was threatened with the panic of pogroms. A political conspiracy. The Beilis Affair marked the culmination of the Russian government’s cruel and militant antisemitism. Just as the civilized world was horrified by the massacres in Kishinev, it was equally appalled when the Russian government revived the notorious blood libel to defame the Jewish people and justify new massacres.” (From the introduction). The volume provides a detailed account of the sequence of events in the Beilis Affair from its inception, as well as the chain of events that occurred during it, including the persecution of Jews in Russia – the suffering, expulsion, pogroms, and oppression, starting from Beilis’s arrest on the night of July 21-22, 1911, at his home by 15 gendarme officers on suspicion of murdering Andrei Yushchinsky. Among other things, it presents the testimonies of witnesses (some of them false testimonies) given in court, the questions posed by the court to the witnesses, the course of the investigation, the shameful event of reading passages from ancient books about the use of Gentile blood by Jews for baking Passover matzos, the cracks in the testimonies, and the trial’s impact on those involved. The second part of the yearbook deals with the problem of Jewish education in the United States and includes statistical data about the number of Jews in the United States, Jews in Yemen. At the beginning of the yearbook, there is a calendar for 1914 with a Hebrew calendar that includes Jewish holidays.
Menahem Mendel Beilis [1874-1934], a Russian Jew, was falsely accused in 1911 of blood libel for the murder of a Gentile child in Kyiv. Beilis was imprisoned for two years after the accusation, spread by the extreme right-wing “Black Hundreds” organizations, claimed that the murder of a Ukrainian Christian boy was part of a religious ritual performed by Jews to prepare Passover matzos with the victim’s blood. This blood libel is considered the most famous of the 20th century. Four months after the body was discovered, Beilis was arrested on suspicion of murder based on false testimony. After two years, during which antisemitism surged across Russia and Ukraine, his trial was held in Kyiv, where a jury acquitted him of all charges.
Extremely rare. Not listed in the WorldCat global library catalog.
VII, 581 pages. Very good condition.
