The book examines the trial of Mendel Beilis, a Jewish manager of a brick factory in Kyiv, who was arrested in 1911 for the ritual murder (popularly known as blood libel) of Andrei Iushchinskii, a Christian teenager. Beilis languished in jail for over two years as government officials conspired to frame him. By the time a jury exonerated Beilis in 1913, his trial had become a cause célèbre around the world. Weinberg has assembled a set of documents taken from the trial transcript, government reports, and newspapers that lays bare the government conspiracy and reveals the likely murderers. The book illuminates the nature of official and popular antisemitism in tsarist Russia on the eve of World War I.
