Menahem Mendel Beilis

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Menahem Mendel Beilis (sometimes spelled Beiliss; 1874 - 1934) was a Russian Jew accused of Jewish ritual murder of Andrei Yushchinsky, a thirteen-year old boy in Kiev (modern Ukraine).

Beilis was acquitted in a 1913 trial in the Russian Empire, known as the "Beilis trial" or "Beilis affair". The trial was widely publicized worldwide by mass media (possibly related to high Jewish influence) and the stated anti-Semitic policies of the Russian Empire were severely criticized. After his acquittal, Beilis became an enormous hero and celebrity. He and his family left Russia for a farm purchased by Baron Rothschild in Palestine. However, he later moved to the United States. Though Beilis’s fame had faded since the trial in 1913, it returned at his death. His funeral was attended by over 4,000 people. The New York Times noted that Beilis’s fellow Jews “always believed that his conduct [in resisting all pressure to implicate himself or other Jews] saved his countrymen from a pogrom.”

In the March 2006 issue (No. 9/160) of the Ukrainian Personnel Plus magazine by the Interregional Academy of Personnel Management, an article - Murder Is Unveiled, the Murderer Is Unknown? - revived accusations from the Beilis Trial, stating that the jury had recognized the case as ritual murder by persons unknown, even though it had found Beilis himself not guilty.

The Fixer, a 1966 novel, has been criticized for supposedly presenting the protagonist in ways Beilis' descendants found degrading. The author denied his protagonist was based on Beilis. However, the historian Albert Lindemann lamented: “By the late twentieth century, memory of the Beilis case came to be inextricably fused (and confused) with... The Fixer.”

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