Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1 Fedor Goes for a Walk
Chapter 2 Small-Town Life
Chapter 3 Tsar Alexander Pays a Visit
Chapter 4 The Confrontations
Chapter 5 Grievances
Chapter 6 The Investigation Widens
Chapter 7 Boundaries of the Law
Epilogue
Appendix: Jewish prisoners held in the town of Velizh
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Eugene M. Avrutin is Associate Professor of History and Tobor Family Scholar in the Program in Jewish Culture and Society at the University of Illinois. He is the author of Jews and the Imperial State: Identification Politics in Tsarist Russia and the coeditor of Ritual Murder in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Beyond: New Histories of an Old Accusation.
"The Velizh case undoubtedly deserves this rich and detailed
analysis. Avrutin inte-grates this Russian instance of a blood
libel in the long trajectory of such accusations and defines its
specific character with great expertise. The reader will gratefully
acknowledge the outstanding amount of research that went into this
volume. It will be of interest to an academic audience interested
in Russian, legal, and administrative history and to those members
of the
general public with a keen interest in Jewish history in eastern
Europe, and in the history of anti-Jewish prejudice." -- François
Guesnet, Journal of Modern History
"The Velizh Affair is a noteworthy example of microhistory that
sheds light onto broader issues of the history of Nicholaevan
Russia and its Jewish past, paradoxically both reinforcing and
challenging common stereotypes about this expansive state, its
bureaucracy, and its culture." -- Magda Teter, Fordham University,
Slavic Review's
"Avrutin carefully and systematically relates Russian criminal
investigations to those practiced in contemporary Europe,
specifically, on the centrality of interrogations, including
'enhanced interrogations,' confrontations between those accused and
their accusers and ultimately the particulars of incarceration
while the inquiry was in process. He makes excellent use of a
wide-range of recent scholarly publications on each of these points
as he delineates the
official boundaries placed upon the prosecutor and those accused in
a system in which there were neither lawyers nor juries....Avrutin
opens a window not only into the practice of Russian justice
under
Nicholas I, he also documents the regime's approach to what it saw
as deviant religious practices as it affirmed the widely held
popular belief in the reality of Jewish ritual murder. Avrutin is
to be commended for his careful, insightful, and truly impressive
work."--Alexander Orbach, The Russian Review
"[A] devastating and evocative tale of magic and everyday life in
small town Russia....To conjure up this belief system and the power
it exerted as vividly and persuasively as Eugene Avrutin does is no
mean feat of historical imagination."--Abigail Green, Times
Literary Supplement
"[A] scholarly work that reads as a riveting novel"--Southern
Jewish Life
"Meticulously researched, fluently written, and thoughtfully
argued. The Velizh Affair explores one of Imperial Russia's most
fascinating, troubling, indeed infuriating legal cases: an
accusation of Jewish 'ritual murder' that seemed to have been
adjudicated in a year but, instead, dragged on for another eleven,
during which time more than forty Jews were imprisoned and the deep
fissures in the Russian-Jewish relationship laid bare."--Hillel J.
Kieval,
Washington University in St. Louis
"A refreshingly original work of scholarship that draws on
previously inaccessible Russian archival material in the telling of
a gripping, gruesome story. Avrutin shows himself to be among the
finest modern Jewish social historians of his generation."--Steven
J. Zipperstein, Stanford University
"During the reign of Tsar Nicholas I, just a decade after
Napoleon's ill-starred march on Moscow, the grisly murder of a boy
in the Russian town of Velizh brought forth portentous accusations
that the Jews had committed blood libel. Based on a remarkably
rich, long-ignored source, Eugene Avrutin reconstructs the murder
case with great sensitivity, erudition, and a feel for the temper
of the time. Piecing together the everyday life of the town, the
belief
systems that fueled the accusations, and the dynamic between local
rivalries and outside politics that made the Velizh Affair
history's longest running blood libel accusation, Avrutin offers a
compelling
explanation, rendered in clear, elegant prose, for how such
allegations--otherwise so similar to witchcraft
accusations--survived and even flourished in the modern
world."--Helmut Walser Smith, author of The Butcher's Tale: Murder
and Anti-Semitism in a German Town
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