Hello and thank you for downloading witness on the BBC World Service with me

Dina Newman. Today I'm taking you back to 1911 and a blood libel trial in

Imperial Russia which became a focus for anti-Semitic rhetoric and attracted attention around the world.

It was the case of a Kyiv Jew called Mandel-Beelis, who was falsely accused of a horrendous murder. It's the early morning of July the 22nd, 1911, and Mendel Bayes, the Jewish manager of

a key of brickworks, is woken up by a loud bang on the door.

Alarmed, he rushes to the window window and in the dark he can just about make out the uniforms of

the feared armed police. Years later he would remember that fateful Friday morning in his

memoir.

Everything turned dark before my eyes.

My head swam.

I nearly fainted with fright, but now was not the time for reflection, and I rushed

to open the door.

Within minutes, Bayliss was under arrest, and he had no idea why. He was a quiet, respectable family man.

He seemed to be a meticulous manager, not hostile but indifferent to Jewish ritual.

He worked on the Sabbath. He worked on most Jewish festivals.

Stephen Zippastein is professor of Jewish studies at Stanford University.

And he ended up falling into the net that he fell into because he was simply the only Jew in the neighborhood close to the dead body.

The dead body was that of a Christian boy Andrei

Eushinsky who had been murdered in March that year in the brickworks which

Bayless managed. Bayless fell under suspicion because Russia's leading far-right organization of the time, called the Black

Hundreds, was spreading the rumor that Jews murdered Christian children and used their blood

in secret rituals.

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