ABSTRACT
The very notion must strike most of us as ridiculous. Surely, “Jewish blood” is a fiction, akin to the idea of “Negro blood,” “Oriental blood,” or “Aryan blood” – fabrications of the anti-Semitic or racist imagination. Biologists and geneticists now tell us that “race” does not actually exist; they concur that it is a social construct rather than a valid descriptor of genuine physical difference. How, then, can we speak of “Jewish blood,” as if collective identity is carried and transmitted in or through this substance, or one’s group identity gives shape to or infuses the blood?1 (Since it is now the gene rather than the blood that is the focus of research into the transmission of traits and conditions,2 we are more likely to hear about “Jewish DNA” than Jewish blood).3
