[7]: pp.90–91 [10] One prosecution witness, presented as an expert in Judaic rituals, was a Lithuanian Catholic priest, Justinas Pranaitis from Tashkent, well known for his antisemitic 1892 work Talmud Unmasked.

One police department official is quoted as saying: Pranaitis' credibility rapidly dissipated when the defense demonstrated his ignorance of basic Talmudic concepts and definitions, such as hullin,[7]: p.215  to the point where "many in the audience occasionally laughed out loud when he clearly became confused and couldn't even intelligibly answer some of the questions asked by my lawyer.

"[2] A Tsarist secret police agent is quoted, reporting on Pranaitis' testimony, as saying: A Beilis Defense Committee advisor, a writer named Ben-Zion Katz, suggested countering Father Pranaitis with questions like "When did Baba Bathra live and what was her activity" which he described as the equivalent of asking an American "Who lived at the Gettysburg Address?

[7]: pp.214–216 Beilis was represented by the most able attorneys of the Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kiev bars: Vasily Maklakov, Oscar Gruzenberg, N. Karabchevsky, A. Zarudny, and D. Grigorovitch-Barsky.

Two prominent Russian professors, Troitsky and Kokovtzov, spoke on behalf of the defense in praise of Jewish values and exposed the falsehood of the accusations, while Aleksandr Glagolev, philosopher and professor of the Kiev Theological Academy of the Orthodox Christian, affirmed that "the Law of Moses forbids spilling human blood and using any blood in general in food."

There are conflicting accounts of the twelve Christian jurors: seven were members of the notorious Union of the Russian People, part of the movement known as the Black Hundreds.

He wrote on 13 October 1913:[14] We said in the previous issue and repeat that their accusing the Jews of shedding blood to perform religious ritual is a fabrication with regard to those who believe it; an abomination with regard to those who spread it; and a disgrace to the twentieth century, during which, if minds are not liberated from the shackles of ignorance, God will never liberate them.The Beilis case was compared with the Leo Frank case, in which an American Jew, manager of a pencil factory in Atlanta, Georgia, was convicted of raping and murdering 13-year-old Mary Phagan.

Spurning all such offers,[5][18] he and his family left Russia for a farm purchased by Baron Rothschild[19] in Palestine, then a province of the Ottoman Empire.

When friends and well-wishers pleaded with him to go to America, he would respond: “Before, in Russia, when the word ‘Palestine’ conjured up a waste and barren land, even then I chose to come here in preference to other countries.

Beilis died unexpectedly at a hotel in Saratoga Springs, New York[23] on July 7, 1934[24] and was buried two days later at the Mount Carmel Cemetery, Glendale, Queens, which is the burial place of Leo Frank and Sholem Aleichem.

The New York Times noted that Beilis's fellow Jews “always believed that his conduct [in resisting all pressure to implicate himself or other Jews] saved his countrymen from a pogrom.”[26] A history of the Eldridge Street Synagogue, where Beilis's funeral was held, describes the scene at his funeral as follows: “The crowd could not be contained in the sanctuary.

As many as a dozen policemen failed to establish order in the streets.”[27] Around six months before his death, Beilis was interviewed by the English-language Jewish Daily Bulletin.

Yakov and Raisl Bok, I am sure you will agree, in no way resemble your parents.” The historian Albert Lindemann lamented: “By the late twentieth century, memory of the Beilis case came to be inextricably fused (and confused) with...