Like the book, the film has for its main character Yakov Bok, a Jew living in the Russian Empire, who was unjustly imprisoned based on prejudice and the charge of having committing blood libel. It was based on the incidents of the Beilis Trial in 1913, in which Menahem Mendel Beilis was wrongly accused of having murdered a Ukrainian boy named Andrei Yushchinsky, with blood libel being presented as the alleged motivation.