November 3, 2013

Anti-Semitism in the Ukraine and Elsewhere in Europe

By Michael Curtis
On the centenary of the infamous Beilis trial, an international conference on anti-Semitism was held on October 15-16, 2013 in Kiev, Ukraine, the city where the trial took place.  The trial is probably the best known of those based on blood libel charges against Jews.  Menachem Mendel Beilis, a 39-year-old Jew was accused on March 20, 1911 of murdering a 13-year-old Christian boy whose body was found in a cave near a Jewish owned brick factory outside Kiev.  Beilis was accused of taking the boy's blood in an act of ritual murder to make matzos for Passover. After spending two years in prison, Beilis was exonerated and acquitted in 1913.  The case was not only important in itself, but was also influential in indicating the intense anti-Semitism in the Russian Empire, already the source of the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  It led to increased Jewish emigration from Russia; ironically, in light of the Nazi Holocaust, this...(Read Full Article)