[60] It was edited by the writer of the present work, S. M. Dubnow. RUSSIAN JEWRY SINCE 1911 Being loath to cross the threshold of the present, we shall stop at the year 1911, terminating the first decade of the Thirty Years' War waged by Russian Tzardom against Jewry since 1881. The more recent phases of this war are still fresh in our memory. To put the new campaign of Jew-hatred in its proper light, it will suffice to point out its most conspicuous landmarks which stand out by their extraordinarily sinister features. In 1911, the organizations of the Black Hundred, with the help of their accomplices in the Duma and in the Government circles, manufactured the monstrous "Beilis case." The murder of a Russian boy in Kiev, of a family belonging to a band of thieves, and the discovery of the body in the neighborhood of a brickkiln owned by a Jew provided the anti-Semites with an opportunity to bring forward the old charge of ritual murder. In the beginning the Government was somewhat uncertain as to the attitude it should adopt towards the mysterious Kiev murder. But a political occurrence which took place at the time put an end to its vacillation. In September, 1911, Premier Stolypin was assassinated in a Kiev theatre in the presence of the Tzar and the dignitaries of State. The assassin, by the name of Bogrov, proved to be the son of a lawyer who was of Jewish extraction, though he had long before turned his back upon his people--a semi-anarchist, who at one time had been active as police agent for some mysterious revolutionary purposes. The Jewish extraction of the father of the assassin was enough to produce a paroxysm of fury in the camp of the anti-Semitic reactionaries who had lost in the person of Stolypin an exalted patron. In Kiev preparations were openly made for a Jewish massacre, but the Government was afraid that the proposed wholesale execution of Jews would mar the festive solemnity of the Tzar's visit to Kiev. The authorities made it known that the Tzar was not in favor of riots, and a bloody street pogrom was averted. In its place, however, a bloodless pogrom, extending over two years, was arranged in the form of the Beilis case. Minister of Justice Shcheglovitov, a former Liberal, who had become a fanatical partisan of the Black Hundred, made up his mind to impart to the trial a glaring ritual coloring. The original Judicial inquiry having failed to uncover any traces of Jewish complicity, the Minister of Justice ordered a new special inquiry and constantly changed the personnel of the investigating and prosecuting officials, until he finally secured a bill of indictment in which the whole case was represented as a ritual crime, committed by the Jew Beilis with the participation of "undiscovered persons."