Book Review 
The Beilis Transcripts 
4/5 stars
"Truth is stranger than fiction." 

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For the record, this is a book about a trial that just happened a little over a century ago where a Russian Jewish man is accused of murdering a child in order to use his blood in matzah. 

He was acquitted after sitting in jail for 2 years. The trial lasted 34 days and called over 200 witnesses. 

The upshot is that the boy's mother was a criminal and her criminal connections ended up getting her son killed, and the Jews of that time were a scapegoat. 

It's also set in the context of a Russia that was soon to fall to the Bolsheviks, and it was the government of the Catastrophically Stupid Emperor of Russia, Nicholas II. (We spent almost an entire undergraduate semester with the Robert K Massie book "Nicholas and Alexandra." The description of Nicholas II is accurate.)

Lots of African levels of corruption here: the government beats fabricated testimony out of witnesses, testimony changes three and four times during a trial, etc. 
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Tons of second order thoughts: 

1. This trial was set in 1911, but the mental architecture of the people was probably more appropriate for the 9th century. It really is amazing to me the people who knew how to use indoor toilets to be convinced of the blood libel. 

2.  It was unintentional, but the deadpan humor of the witnesses reminds me of a combination episode of "Newhart" and "Cinemasins." 

3. Then, as now, most Jewish people were not interested in the ritual aspects of Judaism and were secular. (The subject of the book worked on Shabbat.)

4. Then, as now, it seems like the Jews catch it from both sides. The Loyalists and defenders of the Russian throne (the "right") were vicious anti-semites, and when the Bolsheviks ("the left") took over, they and the later Soviets were just as anti-Semitic as the government that they replaced. 

5. Even today, a century after the Russian events and in a country several thousand miles away from Russia it seems that the (Orthodox) Jewish conceptual space is extremely secretive and paranoid. As I read the improbable (but true) events of this book, I don't wonder why anymore.

6. Jewish people live around Some Other People who refuse to realize that they have plenty of good people among them, and they don't want to cooperate with them. (Einstein fled Germany to the benefit of the United states. And he wasn't the first. Plenty of Russian billionaires are Jewish.)

7. This specific events had sunk down the memory hole probably even by the 1950s. (Remember that the Rosenbergs were executed because of spying on behalf of Russia--which despised Jews.)

8. I know that American academics are obsessed with Europe because they think it's just so "sophisticated."  

But, these blood libels and pogroms were very common throughout that exact region and for something like over a thousand years.  

"Sophisticated"  is not a word that I would use to apply to people like this.

9. There is no rational explanation for the Jewish obsession with left wing causes, given that they don't find any love and affection there, either. (Think about Jewish Voice for Peace. Or their saying kaddish for dead terrorists. Or Jewish involvement in the ACLU. And did I mention the Rosenbergs)

10. Many examples of the famed (Ashkenazi) Jewish verbal virtuosity are here. These are real conversations and not scripted, believe it or not. (Some of these dialogues were as good as anything off of "BoJack Horseman.")

11. When people try to set up conspiracies, trying to explain them to a jury / future readers is nowhere near as easy as it is in the movies.

Verdict: Recommended at the price of about $5. 

This book is not worth rereading for further benefit. It is a bit difficult to follow in places, and so it loses one star on account thereof. 

226 pages, about 3-4 hours worth of reading.