Blood – Uniting and Dividing

In Victorian culture, the octoroon (a person with one-eighth black blood) was a kind of vanishing point, a focus of anxiety about detecting the taint of ‘bad’ blood. While in the twentieth century, the Nazis sought to protect ‘pure’ German blood from becoming tainted by the blood of Jews. Professor Luckhurst explores literary and cultural representations of mixed bloods.

Drawing on documents ranging from a late story by Grace Paley, to recent ethnography of Yiddish philanthropy as fictive kinship, to artistic re-imaginings of a lost family album, Professor Boyarin will begin to articulate the hopes and anxieties underlying the tenuous image of the future in which our records of the past take shape. 

This lecture will deal with notions of racial purity, racial origins and the desire of pioneer anthropologists to “sort out” different racial groups. Professor Stone will conclude by connecting the discussion with today’s attempts to discover “Jewish genes” and to develop ethnically-directed medicine.

In this lecture the renowned scholar Sander Gilman asks what happens when religion and medicine compete or are allied; what happens when these two aspects of the public sphere overlap? In what contexts does circumcision occur as a health practice or as a risk? What are the implications of health-related circumcision for religious practice?

This workshop will explore how blood, in its regulation and its representation, has been interpreted and traded as a symbol between Jews and non-Jews, and in particular between Christians and Jews, through the centuries – from the biblical past to the present day.

When trials against Jews for the “ritual murder”of Christians reappeared in Central Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century they seemed to be a throwback to the Middle Ages.