In the meantime, Alexander II. had ascended the throne of the Tzars, and the dawn of Russian renascence began to disperse the nightmares of the past era.  Yet so deeply ingrained were the old prejudices in many bureaucratic minds that when the conclusion reached by the judicial commission was submitted to the Senate the votes were divided.  The case was transferred to the Council of State, and there the high dignitaries managed to effect a compromise between their medieval prejudices and their involuntary concessions to the spirit of the age.  They refused to enter into a discussion of “the still unsolved question as to the use of Christian blood by the Jews,” but they “unhesitatingly recognized the existence of the crime itself,” which had been perpetrated at Saratov—­this in spite of the fact that the only ground on which the crime was ascribed to alleged fanatical practices and laid at the door of the Jews were the traces of circumcision on the dead bodies.  Ignoring this inner contradiction and setting aside the weighty objections of the liberal Minister of Justice Zamyatin, the Council of State brought in a verdict of guilty against the impeached Jews, the soldier Shlieferman and the two Yushkevichers, senior and junior, sentencing them to penal servitude.

The sentence was confirmed by Alexander II. in May, 1860.  The representatives of the St. Petersburg community, Baron Joseph Guenzburg and others, petitioned the Tzar to postpone the verdict until the scholarly commission of experts should have rendered its decision with regard to the compatibility of ritual murder with the teachings of Judaism.  But the president of the Council of State, Count Orlov, presented the matter to the Tzar in a different light, asserting that all that the Jews intended by their petition was “to keep off for an indefinite period the decision on a case in which their coreligionists are involved.”  He, therefore, insisted on the immediate execution of the sentence, and the Tzar yielded.

After eight long years of incarceration, in the course of which two of the impeached Jews committed suicide, the principal “perpetrators” were found to be physical wrecks and no longer able to discharge their penal servitude.  The innocent sufferer, old Yushkevicher, languished in prison for seven more years, and was finally liberated in 1867 by order of Alexander II., who had been petitioned by Adolph Cremieux, the president of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, to pardon the unhappy man.  In this way the heritage of the dark past protruded into the increasing brightness of the new Russia, which in the beginning of the sixties was passing through the era of “Great Reforms.”

CHAPTER XVIII

THE ERA OF REFORMS UNDER ALEXANDER II.

1.  THE ABOLITION OF JUVENILE CONSCRIPTION