No Apologies: How to Respond to Slander of Israel and Jews

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.

After Beilis’s arrest, the press played 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 Oskar 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.