OBSERVATION
VLADIMIR JABOTINSKY, BRIAN HOROWITZ AND CONOR DALY
Introduction
Slanders of Israel and Jews are rife on today’s university campuses, in the media, and from the rostrums of international institutions. How to respond? Many try to reason with their accusers on the grounds of countervailing facts and figures. Facing a similar situation over a century ago, a great Zionist leader cautioned otherwise. Rather than assuming the posture of a defendant trying vainly to win the good will of one’s antagonist, it was far better to carry the battle to the other side.
The occasion was this. On July 21, 1911, police in Kiev arrested Mendel Beilis, a Jewish factory foreman, for the murder of an eleven-year-old Christian boy named Andrei Yushchinsky who had been found dead four months earlier. Beilis was charged with having killed the boy in order to use his blood to bake matzah, a practice allegedly required by Jewish tradition. Such libels, especially common in medieval Europe, had largely gone out of fashion by the 20th century—but not completely so.
The trial lasted nearly two years, with the press playing a major role in turning the “Beilis affair” into a cause célèbre that attracted global attention. The defense, led by a brilliant Jewish lawyer named Osip Gruzenberg, included prominent Russian liberals, both Jewish and Gentile. On the prosecution’s side, the case against Beilis was aided from without by propagandists—some likely hired by the government, others connected with the monarchist, anti-Semitic organization known as the Black Hundreds—who spread anti-Semitic canards among the Russian populace.
In 1913, the trial came to an end as the jury, made up of uneducated Ukrainians, delivered a mixed verdict: Mendel Beilis was not guilty of ritual murder, but a ritual murder had indeed taken place. Beilis immigrated to the United States in 1921.
Historians havepersuasively argued that the accusations against Mendel Beilis were concocted by high-ranking Russian officials at the behest of Tsar Nicholas II, in an effort to divert public anger from the regime’s incompetence and onto a Jewish scapegoat. Indeed, for the tsar, Beilis’s acquittal was a major embarrassment both at home and internationally.
But the Beilis affair had many other repercussions as well, not least among Russian Jewish intellectuals. Vladimir Jabotinsky was one of them. Born in 1880, he had pursued a successful career as a Russian-language journalist, playwright, and literary critic. By 1903, however, the year of an infamous pogrom in Kishinev—itself sparked by similar accusations of child murder and evidently condoned and abetted by local officialdom—he had embraced Zionism and would quickly distinguish himself within the nascent movement as a powerful spokesman and leader.
Jabotinsky’s maturing ideas—especially about the need for Jewish self-defense and national self-respect—is amply evident in the article below, published in Russian in 1911. “Instead of an Apology,” presented below, reflects at once an important trend in Zionist thought and Jabotinsky’s own growing alienation from Russia. Still very much on display in the piece is his effortless command of the Russian language and Russian literary culture. At the same time, the underlying message is one of escape from his birthplace. Ultimately, Jews needed a homeland, and a state, of their own.
—Brian Horowitz
