THE GREAT DELUSION.

THE acquittal of the Jew Beiliss, who was tried at Kieff on the ancient charge of " ritual murder," will help to bring to an end, we trust, the monstrous traditional slander under which the Jewish race has suffered for.

Centuries in many countries. The belief that Jews murder Christian children in order to use their blood for certain rites is nothing but a gross and cruel superstition which women used to be burnt on the evidence of neighbours

that they had been seen riding on broomsticks, but we do not expect to hear evidence of that sort admitted in a

modern court of law. Yet in the court at Kieff for many days some of the ablest Russian lawyers, under the aegis of the Procurator, solemnly discussed evidence which seems to us no less preposterous and futile. It should be said that sober and intelligent men all over Russia have expressed their indignation at the folly of the trial. We cannot believe that such a trial will ever be undertaken again. We doubt not anti-Semitism will express itself again and again in a country where the excuse is that rapacious Jews have too often brought peasants completely into their power, just as the simple back-veld Boer, believing that he was providing for the education of his children, has often found himself mortgaged up to the eyes and in the grasp of a clever money-lender from Johannesburg. We need not deny that local authorities in Russia, in their curious independence of central control, may be capable of bringing in the future such a charge as that which has hopelessly broken down at Kieff, nor need we deny that there may be isolated Jews who would be capable of punishing their persecutors by the secret forms of base and cunning crime. But we do not expect ever again to see the Russian Procurator lending the weight of his office to sanction a belief in one of the most absurd of mediaeval superstitions. That is a point to the good. Something is gained even by such a humiliating spectacle of gullibility and muddle-headedness as has just drawn the attention of the whole world to Kieff, and stirred Russians into intense excitement from St. Petersburg to

Vladivostok. The jurymen who acquitted Beiliss are to be congratulated on having done their duty like brave men.

What they meant by their apparently irrelevant finding

that the murdered Christian boy was killed in the Zaitseff works—a factory owned by Jews—we do not pretend to

know. The evidence does not appear to justify the finding, and the jury, having proved their independence in the greater matter, were under no obvious compulsion of fear

to play into the hands of anti-Semites in a minor respect. Possibly they desired to save the face of the Procurator and his department. Nothing, however, could save that.

The contrast between the municipal and commercial perfections of the city of Kieff and the benighted and obsolete nature of the superstition which was the basis of the trial was well brought out in a remarkably able article published in the Times on Tuesday. The population of Kieff is as great as that of Manchester; the city is planned on a model that might provoke the envy of Mr. Burns ; the streets are wide, the shops splendid, the hotels vast, the electric trams excellent, and there is an opera such as is nowhere to be found in England outside London. The writer in the Times pays a tribute to the fairness with which the President of the Court conducted the trial. We may quote his summary of the facts upon which Beiliss was tried, since we could not put them more briefly or clearly.

"On April 2nd, 1911, the body of Andrusha Yushchinsky, a boy of 12, was found in a cave in a piece of waste land adjoining the Nagornaya-street in Kieff. It was covered with 47 wounds, some deep and ghastly, some slight, and the hands were bound behind the back. The boy's coat and trousers were missing, he was dressed only in under-garments ; his cap, belt, vest, and one sock lay close by; and some of his school exercise-books, rolled up in tube form, were stuck in a hollow in the wall of the cave. The garments wore soaked in blood in parts, and there were many bloodstains, but it was clear that the murder had been committed elsewhere and that the body had ceased to bleed before being removed to the cave. The case for ritual murder rests on the fact that the main effusion of blood was never found, and that there were a number of wounds, resembling holes made by blows from some round-pointed or knobbed instrument on the right temple, which might be counted as 13, though it is clear from the photograph that, as some of the wounds overlap, the precise number is a matter of choice. It should be said that as a doubt was cast upon the photograph it was not shown to the jury in the trial, but they are probably the only people who have not seen it, as it has been freely published. According to the testimony of Father Pranaitis, it is the custom of the Jews, in ritual murder, to inflict 13 wounds on the temple of their victim."

The popular belief is that when a Christian child is killed for ritual purposes the body is marked by cabalistic signs and that the blood is eaten in Passover cakes. The number 13 mentioned in the extract above is, of course, supposed to be cabalistic. But so far as we know, the number 13 (in spite of the various other superstitions which are connected with it, and with which we are all familiar) was never a cabalistic number. Three and seven, we believe, are the numbers which recur in cabalistic literature. As for the writings of the monk Neofitu, with which the prosecution made great play, his circumstantial account of the alleged ritual murders practised by Jews is not unknown in many parts of Europe to those interested in such literature. One exposition of ritual murder which he published is dated 1803, and seems to those who have read it to bear traces of something like insanity. At all events there is in it a very curious idea which recurs so often as to suggest a morbid mental obsession. This is the idea that by eating the blood of Christians Jews would save themselves from eternal damnation if after all it should turn out that Jesus was really the Jewish Messiah. Apparently the blood of Christians who bad received the sacrament was to have a sacramental and saving power when incorporated in the blood of Jews. Neofitu was a Jew converted to Christianity, who, apart from his mental instability, betrayed in his writings all the rancour which is sometimes characteristic of the convert.

The boy Yushchinsky was intimate with a gang of thieves and receivers of stolen goods. Prominent in this gang was a woman named Vera Cheberyak. It was on her accusation that Beiliss was accused and subsequently languished two years in prison. She said that she had seen the boy go into the Zaitseff works to play on the waste ground there; that he was seized by a man with a black beard, and that he was never seen alive again. Beiliss has a black beard. There appears to be no other clue to connect him with the murder. Vera Cheberyak's evidence was a mass of contradictions. Nor does the description of her in the Times invite even a preliminary confidence :— " A certain Mifleh, whose name figured frequently in the case, had the melancholy distinction of having his eyes put out by vitriol thrown on him by Vera, whose courage in doing evil has earned her fame. An evil and wonderful figure she looked in Court, cynically admitting misdeeds, cool-mannered, thick-lipped, sallow-faced, with jet-black hair and great smouldering black eyas. She wore a large black velvet hat with gaudy yellow plumes fastened by a huge gleaming pin whereon rows of seeming diamonds alternated with layers of pink paste, and a long black cloak opened to reveal a red frock crossed with gold chains."

Evidence for the defence showed that Yushchinsky had visited Vera's house on the day of the murder, and that screams and noises were heard. A piece of blood-stained rag found by the body afterwards was identified as a pillow slip belonging to Vera. The theory of one Krasovsky—a Russian detective who has the fame of a Sherlock Holmes— was that the boy had (1,i:covered the secrets of the receivers of stolen goods, and that he was therefore put out of the

way. But we need not make a longer tour of this picture- gallery of personalities in the Russian court. Strange Silures passing under such nicknames as the Frog, the Wolf, and the Lamplighter (reminding one of Peter the Painter and other principals in the Houndsditch crime in London) crop up at every turn and intensify the impression that one is in the middle of a nightmare.

The belief in ritual murder by the Jews is, and always has been, a gigantic delusion. But it may be said, " Surely there cannot be so much smoke without fire. There must be something that has given rise to this age-long and persistent belief." People who use that argument have forgotten their history, which proves that in delusions and superstitions there may very easily be smoke without fire. For example, there was the great delusion of "Prester John." This mythical Christian potentate, holding sway over a vast empire and innumerable feudatory kings, all hidden away in some unexplored part of the world, was firmly believed in throughout Christendom for a long period of the Middle Ages. One cannot really explain the delusion. Sometimes Prester John would be in India, sometimes in Abyssinia, but wherever he was placed this wonderful personage, waited on by kings, but himself bearing the lowly title of presbyter, was believed in with- out question. Envoys who professed to come from him were actually received by the Pope at Rome, yet Prester John never existed. Similarly there was the great delusion about the atheistical writing, De Tribus Impos- toribus, which disposed of Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed. Men were tried on the charge of having written this wicked book. Men were convicted and executed. Yet the book never existed. " Ritual murder " is a third great delusion. We earnestly hope that it is now descending the slope to the limbo where it will abide harmlessly with Prester John and De Tribus Impostoribus.