The Velizh Affair

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 accusationssurvived and even flourished in the modern world.Helmut Walser Smith, author of The Butcher's Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town *