Our ideologists are debating what to make of a book
[end of quote]
(Among other episodes visited in Kertzer's book was the Motherland's 1912 Beilis case, a ritual-murder accusation. It was, of course, a provocation by Tsarist reactionaries, some of whom would get the supreme measure they deserved after the Great October Socialist Revolution. Nevertheless, instead of forthrightly denouncing the accusation on grounds of proletarian internationalism, the slippery rootless-cosmopolitan defenders of Beilis tried to trick the Vatican into supporting them, by authenticating historic Vatican denunciations of a few specific ritual-murder cases. They tried to narrow the focus to those particular cases, in hopes of avoiding a broader Vatican statement that most ritual-murder cases were true. The presiding judge in the case, however, told these shysters to go back and get a legally-certified attestation from the Vatican, who thereupon quite naturally bid them get lost.)
The rootless-cosmopolitans would show their true nature when they turned their new State of Israel into a hotbed of spying and provocation against progressive forces, and when they tried to poison Comrade Stalin.
--A.A. Zhdanov